Emily Brochin

Your father has the blue heart of a sailor adrift for too long,

Has carved the stone bearings and sent them down-current,

And in turn, his children beat red, soft, red. I choose one of them.

I lie alongside your sleeping hands–

you become the rock, the horse-headed post to which I hitch my slumbering shell.

If I were alone in a country of knives,

I would pray on the points.

Let’s say, on

an overheated Saturday afternoon,

that you opened your bathroom cabinet

to find a 2-inch long cockroach,

perched atop your new toothbrush,

antenna held aloft like twin scepters,

testing the breeze.

What would you do?

I suspect the gallant would have gotten a glass

and scrap of paper

and carried it to safer shores,

but I took my last copy of the New Yorker, rolled it into a baton,

and followed the shocked scramble into the depths

of the bathtub, where I crushed the delicate

clockwork of its prehistoric brain

and scattered nimble limbs across the porcelain.

It is always shocking how easy killing can be,

especially faced with an unexpected enemy.

A toothbrush becomes a battleground,

a bathroom, a russet-tiled graveyard. I find myself

defending odd corners of my life with the temerity

of a freedom fighter, cutting a bloody swath across what

I consider to be mine.

Grieve

Nothing bad can happen in Alaska–

It’s a known fact.

The cold burns it all out,

Whatever’s left, the dogs take to their little corners.

If there are people in Alaska,

I don’t know about them.

If there were,

I’d make no guarantees.

I am told I will remember nothing;

All I see inside the vision is a sunless bright.

It will take awhile to float to shore.

And between mooring and unmooring,

Every eye that has ever laid upon me,

Will be shut.

One-at        a-time,

By a blessed hand.

Mechanical Birds

At the base of your pant-leg is a little machine

Which makes you able to touch me.

Below it is the cerulean paste board,

Jade-flowered bowl and glass insect eyes.

I say, the flesh is not hard.

It is the living dust you swept out of the room

In which there is nothing but smooth silence,

White and harsh

And big, dark stains.

The First to Hold the Dead

Last night I became a tomorrow woman,
There was nothing I could do.

The morning sun offered itself early,
And I saw the swallows coming down.

The men in their identical beds chew a thick breath and struggle for
what used to pass as meaning.

A glass of juice is a beautiful thing.

And still—
Tomorrowland is caught in the meat of yesternight.

When the hands that reached out for comfort
Were hot with the fever of thoughtless life.

The End of Things
A tree is a memory of seed,
the shadow of music is sighing.
War makes all sound now.
The only time you hear song is in the dark when you’ve wandered drunk from the pack,
howling at the moon like a runt cub forbidden milk.
Wondering why, of all instants the notes should squeeze themselves from tin noisemakers
and pursed lips. At moments, when the fire pops,
you can feel the actual beings; you can hear the actual tune;
you can see a bomb as it falls.