Allison Titus holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College. A chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhal, is out from Bateau Press. She lives in Richmond, VA, with her husband, the poet Joshua Poteat. Her book Sum of Every Lost Ship was recently published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010.
FETISH
Unzippered, such gape. Your hands
there. And cold.
Ransacking the meadow, the moon harvests
what light there is.
Once your hands were another's.
I was in a borrowed dress,
all peplum and sheath and unrecited.
He was tremble and corsage,
gathered
then unfathomed.
It is easier to understand
the history a muscle can hold
if you picture the heart as a mechanism
of spool and hinge. A box like
you'd find in the shed.
BARTER, FASTEN
Tell me this is a passing season.
Here, I am going to say, take this.
Handing over the flask, unbuttoning
a button. It is a long winter
that explains and explains its frost
in sweeps of blue. Eaves of ice
crowd the bucket of rotted apples.
And long the sip that warms throat
and knees, unfetters. What we need
is a schooner. You say nothing in return,
resigned in the mossy armchair,
stamping cigarettes on its velvet
fist. The afternoon sky steadies
itself against black wires, tallies
its aluminum cans. Not much to do
with loose change. Nothing grand: no train
to the city, no wool coat.
What we need is an outpost. The rat
ate the coffee beans out of the cupboard
and nothing feels safe any longer.
The trees stiffen; when night comes,
crack open. What we need
is a surefire way to strap the bed
onto the trembling boat.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE TRAIN PASSES
Goats roamed the hill like an apology.
Grey shrifts of beard, hammer knees.
January iced the hay bales and fences,
the barbed wire groaned against the wind.
I remember deciding the night felt ruined
as dark set in, gaped cold shadows
around every sturdy thing.
The house, dovecote orphan, its stove
burning corn so a thin light flickered
over the bed. We left off with the whiskey
and turned in, a way of parting.
I gave you that sleep, a pale
asylum from the hours I did not love
you and did not say.