Evening Song | Three weeks after Halloween

TIMBER 2018

Emma Hyche

Emma Hyche is a poet and essayist currently based in Denver, Colorado. A winner of the 2016 AWP Intro Journals Prize and a recent MFA graduate, her work appears in Apartment Poetry, Dreginald, Entropy, and elsewhere. Follow her @missemmacate

Evening Song

 

Love set you up

with a tight hot fist

Boy-love soured quickly

as they always do

but doesn’t the thought 

of pineapple cull the same

spit as the real thing

You’ve got a mouthful

of want you’ve got to drip

Listen you’re by a window

and you’re looking at the glass

Spiderweb cracks the corpse

of a medium that gave up

Don’t you take this to your head

Ghost in the glass and what

matters what beyond

A clean bisection a pleasing

symmetry and listen

there are no other words

by which I mean this

Two mouths can touch cool pane

can cover splendor

of wet white teeth

Three weeks after Halloween 

It’s still hot, and there’s no wind. The head

on the porch is rotting from the inside out.

Like most objects we don’t know what to do with

we eschew the woods and decide instead to destroy.

No baseball bats in the garage 

but a two by four will do, your hands clasped

awkwardly around the base and you

raise it up, the plank stark against the trees.

When you cave the head in I feel a knife made of ice

slide neatly between all of my ribs.

Orange  and candles litter the ground like viscera.

The imposition of crisis upon neutrality is in itself

a crisis, or at least its daughter. This man could kill

me. You could kill me. The act would not be difficult 

for you. The splitting takes three blows. You rise, breathing

heavy with effort. Put your hand on my shoulder.

Put your hand on the back of my head. I cannot help

but conjure the allegory. You kiss me. I feel 

your sweat on my cheek. Disavowal of panic only

increases the panic, becomes an object

I don’t know what to do with. It lives in a small cave

at the back of my skull. My head is empty of everything now,

so I cannot hear the music crescendoing

in the trees.  Light spills out my open mouth.