Joshua Marie Wilkinson
from Meadow Slasher (I)

Raccoons out—invisible—crunching past.

White heat of late traffic.

I go to the store to buy 150 pillows.

I carry them out to my car, six at a time, three under each arm.

I go from laughing to crying & back

like some stoned, child-weary sitter.

Wearing my quilt as a cape, I'm locked out & it's spring, but freezing.

Just my underwear, slippers, & my dog in the street.

I want to get under the empty tables of the sorority house dining room

& huff on some sterno cans till my head throbs like a stream.

A christian camp counselor, showing me chapter & verse, dead.

 

 

Tickertape firecrackers, a mayor's bald allusion to teenaged trysting.

I want now to get stabbed by the wind.

But it's a city with no dependable way out or back in.

So, how bad—you ask yourself—

do you need to leave?

I want what I carried with me

to be enough for over a week.

If in my Sithe I looked right;

roamed rooms, quarter moon.

Wet little blockheaded pigeonheart

inside me thudding.