Clare Flanagan
POETRY BY CLARE FLANAGAN
I wake up with your hands around my neck
like frost silvering a lawn
in early fall, cold pouring in
from nowhere, swift as red-
winged blackbirds scattering
south, where clay capillaries
stain the asphalt, netted under
crumbling tollways, through
potholes the shade of a burst
vein, brimming with rose-gold
runoff, glinting like tasteful
jewelry, like thin crosses
at the throats of present and
future wives, who walk double-
time around the man-made
lake, past McMansions built
just above the flood line, swollen
with petroleum money, driveways
yawning a mile long, room enough
for everyone to be lonely, like
your father on the offshore rig,
breathing brine, thumbing copies
of Playboy, watching the sun
plunge beneath the horizon, then
gasp back up again, the sea
a sheet of hammered metal, his
desire glancing off the surface,
searing the eye, steadying the
hand, pulling ribbons of crude
from somewhere uninhabitable,
somewhere hotter than Jackson
in August, where the air hangs
visible over the river, straining
at its banks like a tied dog
at passerby, poised to crush
the city’s rotten snarl of pipes,
to thunder silt-laden through
bespoke sink fixtures, where
your mother rinses her face
before applying retinol, retiring
to the guest room, murmuring
prayers that her own children
might marry, that the pastor
she hired to bless the house
might dissipate its rage –
the mile-high plume still
blooming from the drawer
of shattered phones, the chord
forever thrumming from that
busted guitar, the one swung
by her husband, your father, who
prefers to sleep alone now, after
late hours hunched over hand-
drawn charts, tracing patterns
in the Dow, predicting crashes
with frightening foresight, which
he could never train on you,
only hanging photographs
of you as a smiling child, soft
you, quiet you, recognizable you,
the you I saw glowing like
a distant planet, awash in swamp-
thick atmosphere, emitting
garbled transmissions, like love
me, do you even? I had no choice
but to attempt understanding,
to draw closer until I tasted
nothing but clay, face-
down in a landscape I
can’t describe, eyelids shut
to this other world bleeding
through, a world with no features
I can identify, no air I can breathe.