Three Poems
Cat Dixon
What Happens in Nebraska
I.
Perhaps he will let me stay, I thought while I shoved clothes, shoes and make-up into two suitcases. My car seats removed from the back. Forget I have children. Forget I have friends. Let me stay.
Across the state, six hours, I raced leaving my kids, my ex-husband, my house to visit a Podunk town. We shopped at Wal-Mart at midnight. I wanted to cry, but he insisted on buying supplies for my five-day summer stay: shaving gel, razors, vodka, deodorant, sunscreen, a hat, string cheese, yogurt, Aquafina, and a new shirt.
Under the stars, 30 miles from the Wyoming border, I arched my back, felt dizzy from the stars, itchy from the chiggers. His weight pressed me into dirt. Those fingers worked magic in the field, in the car, in his bed. Saturday night, tying me up with the vacuum cleaner cord, he was sober. Intoxicated, I said yes to everything, but I would have said yes in any state. My arms and legs bound like meat hanging at the slaughter house. I moaned for hours and somehow his hands never stopped. Fully clothed, he sliced me open—the man on the assembly line—performing the same motion, no breaks, no rest and this hunk of meat shivered and staled. The next day at church, I sported the red cuts on my wrists; to distract myself from the hymns, I traced and massaged the lines. After the sermon, after the car ride to his house, he removed his gray tie, hung it with care on the rack and pouted for hours. I wouldn’t tie him up. The dominatrix role I was to play didn’t fit. I like the little girl—no no no, white tight panties, hair pulled, fingers thrusting, rubbing. Give me a whip and I freeze. Then, it was over. He had his God. I had none.
II.
Once at a hotel, when we met in the middle, he pulled up our song on YouTube—laptop resting on the bed. No lyrics on the screen and he sang every word, without hesitation. “If you leave… if you leave…if you leave…” he crooned. Years later, I sit at my computer vaping an e-cigarette to read the song lyrics from a video and every word is like a foreign language. Why sing that song to me? Was that goodbye?He has forgotten that I have every letter, every email, every text, every poem. What would his department colleagues say about these poemsabout the moon, the pumpkins, the dogs—all metaphors for my wet gaping mouth? This is a jigsaw—not a puzzle—for taking things apart, from stout oak to dismantled lumber, and nailing it all back together.
“Kiss me!” I’d drool into the pillow; my hand between my thighs; he’d be perched on my back. The hotel room was handicap accessible with a bathtub seat, a handrail, and I begged to shower with him. He wouldn’t. Seven years have passed and today he sends me an email from Arizona. My black fan oscillates like my moods—the whisper of its blade sing and I speak his name, play with the sounds and have titles for newpoems: tent, twenty, tenacity, trench, truth, trudge, titillating, truancy, trend, rent, vent, fret. In Nebraska, I live alone. He squats in the desert waiting for a reply.
The Years with Adam
1.
We spent our Saturday nights renting movies
we never watched (Saving Private Ryan, Amadeus,
and Gone with the Wind). My mother at her
boyfriend’s house for weeks at a time.
The films, an excuse for his parents
as to why he stayed so late, flickered
as we explored each other in my room
and as the credits rolled up
the screen, we listed our woes, shared our dreams.
Later, we made love over and over and over until
we ran out of movies and he, exhausted,
could no longer keep his blue eyes open.
I would watch him sleep and cuddle
his head in my lap—those eyelashes, long
and black, that skin smooth and unblemished.
I thought of our future, our babies.
2.
Adam, with his Newport cig hanging from his mouth,
stood on my front porch at 1am with his face
lit up by the porch light and the burning
cigarette he always smoked—part of him.
His older brother supplied the cigarettes
and weed. Eventually Adam would move on
to meth, but that was later—after I
graduated, after I moved away, after I married,
after he had modeled, then stripped, then prostituted
himself as the illness set in. That winter night
on my porch, dressed in his long black leather coat,
naked underneath it, he held out a Taco Bell bag,
asking me to eat the burrito please.
He said he wouldn't leave until I ate. He knew
my hunger and the purge and pull of every meal.
Sit with it, Catharine. I will sit with you.
3.
Adam, after taking a 10-minute walk around the block
to smoke, returned to bandage my cuts,
kiss my forehead, and he never did ask why. Instead,
he cried with me and brushed my hair. He did
not make a promise. I did not want one. No one else
handled the blood, the scars, the root that weaves
to the seed—the black dirt childhood—
like the neighbor's young, big-nosed,
elephant-eared, Coke bottle glasses boy, did.
To most, he was the well-mannered boy
who had a newspaper route at the age of eight.
Back then, Adam had played with me in the empty
back lot. He, on his bike, and I, unable to ride,
pretending to be a red light, a drive-through window,
a hitchhiker, a wall—anything to make him stop.
4.
Adam is the blue-eyed boy who carried pieces of me
in his warm hands, and then gently placed them
on my cracked coffee table. He glued each where
it belonged. When he found a part missing,
he tore off a corner of a love letter he had
scribbled on notebook paper and fashioned it
to fill in the gap. Other times he told stories
and each sentence covered the scars
on my arms, thighs and back. Adam,
who almost didn't pass high school English,
who never did go to college, spoke
words that kept me alive. His eyes burned
like torches and he lead me to safety—away
from that trailer court, away from
the high school dropouts who would
knock on my door at all hours of the night,
away from the men who got me drunk and
raped me leaving me crying in his arms.
He carried me here and now I write: Let's begin
at the beginning with Adam. Adam and Catharine.
When I Find the Miracle
For Leonard Cohen
Like a cough that interrupts a laugh,
Like a balloon popping in your hand,
Like a burn scarring skin pink and raw,
I leave a mark that fades.
Like an apple sliced in half,
Like an earthquake cracks the land,
Like a mirror steamed and fogged,
Show how you were made.
Like a cow nudges her new calf,
Like a diary makes no demands,
Like a razor dirty and dull,
If I have cut you, throw me away.
Like the current carries the raft,
Like the wind erodes the large dam,
Like a house with only three walls,
If I have disappointed, you must say.
Like a street with no streetlight,
Like a mean guitar with no strings,
Like a novel with its torn cover,
This is all you have paid.
Like a boxer with no fight,
Like a bird with a broken wing,
Like a mover with a frozen shoulder,
Our skin loosens and we age.
Like a tree clasping a lost kite,
Like a doorbell with a silent ding,
Like the aviary filled with feathers,
I simulate the better way.
Like a left-handed boy forced to write right,
Like the indentation from a lost ring,
Like the hip that predicts the weather,
If I whisper now what will you say?
