Audrey Walls
Mercury
My body is a
lightbulb. I shake my
head and hear the soft
singing of a filament
broken.
*
A hundred clear beads
reach my nape and
run south. Disconnect,
I say. Unfurl. The
clouded air. The
stones of my eyes.
*
The moon is high and
my knees are bee-
stung, swollen in the
yellow light. I have
come here to
apologize. I wanted
too much, I disturbed
the nest.
*
This is the word for
glass. These are the
words for ghost. Even
though you are still a
child, you must know.
How many rooms will
you enter before you
finally sleep?
*
Shape-shifter, I
cannot offer you
safety. I, too, am only
a thief. Half-water,
half-silver, we reel
against each other.
Our touch has always
been poison.
Cyanosis I
How the machinist’s hands become one callus after gear and cog, after years of wire. The holly trees so dark, waxed night in every leaf. The air caught in a mason jar. This is how it happens: my ears are dead, my hands are dead, then my feet, my face. I could say I am dead. I would cut off my fingers. Let me disconnect, but nothing. This body, this machinery. My veins a winter creek. Every vessel left empty and cold.
Cyanosis II
Nobody teaches you how to be your own keeper. How to create insulation, the layering of synthetics and wool. The wind doesn’t care. The wind is just the wind. You fall asleep to the sound of electronic rain in your hotel room while the snowdrifts pile inch upon inch. The trucks here never shed their ploughs. You must bury yourself in a hole to keep warm. You must bury yourself to keep alive.
Cyanosis III
It was the first year we didn’t want winter. The cold was no longer mystery, but fact: how we turn blue, a cyanosis of forgetting. We walk the dog to the lake, her black paws dripping. Below the ice, layers of waste sent off from the town. First the salt sheds, now the factories’ heavy metals: mercury, cobalt, lead. On the shore, the dog prods at a dead fish tangled in line and hook. I pull her away from the carcass.
Audrey Walls’ poetry has recently found homes in Meridian and Mississippi Review. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she serves as a poetry editor of failbetter.