four poems

by E. G. Ware

I mean her and she means me

I say I and I mean her and she means me and can she see me, can she hear me, under the lies (under the lullabies, under the whys), a suffering tears her, torns her, apart, she’s got that sad-face / guilty-mind shine, a good girl grown round a parasite, polite as a knife, begging for her pity-life, please-life, half-price life, she’s got a poor guy with a broken heart (or I do? do I?) and until this day it cuts me up, cups me up, keeps me upright in the night where the stars bite bright and she asks for a better-shaped life? a better-sized life? something lung-sized, seam-wide, not splitting, under the falling sky (black and white, wrong and right) she sits alone like a photograph learning to blur, all her thoughts black-dyed, back-tied, backed into corners, stacked like crows, her eyes made me petrified (terrified, verified stone), and I whisper she deserves, she deserves, she deserves better, bettor than this tether, this weather that won’t let her feel her own light, can she see me if I am her? can she free me if I prefer her sorrow to mine? she was a good girl with a parasite (I for an eye), a tender heart in a tightened jar, and I say she deserves better, I swear she deserves better, I swear: swear, I.

good baby

black ichor, nursery static, heartbreak bruise, it beads from my eyelids and rucks the light, a tar-filament threading tongue and pore, viscous and tight; the air around me velcros to grief and simmers, low, obtuse, though winter squats at the sill, breath held in white; and black ichor, black ichor (thick as a swallowed screw) it burrows behind the teeth, it salts the root, it slicks-s-s the ribs from the inside, lacquer-black, acute; leaves a pit where the sternum once grew, a gravity well drinking smoke = its fruit; like fruit gone grey in the chest. “she’s such a good baby,” my mother says, present and bright, carseat stashed ’neath cold tables while cutlery storms overhead; “she never cries,” my father says, as the wine climbs red, “we forget she is there, she’s feather and light,” no crying, only the soft unscroll of a ribcage instead, instead, and black ichor again, rookery in the throat, it laminates the name I am given: good girl, buffs it to gloss, a showroom pearl; “she talks well with the adults,” they brag, gloat, no children in sight, only leather belts that unfurl, I can still see, and “she never complains, she’s easy, she’s mild,” she shakes hands with the men, she laughs at the jokes; “she’s older than others,” they toast with their smokes, such a good kid (so perfectly styled) my small mouth bridled, my vowels in yokes, and absence blossoms wrongwise under bone, a bud of soot chewing its stem; I keep my gaze stapled to glass and phlegm, paroxysm-tamed, overgrown, overthrown, I vanish mid-sentence; they speak over them, over, over them, so who will staunch this seepage of pitch, who will cauterize the void as it spreads, a black sun in the cavity under my threads, who leans to the hollow and gives it a stitch, names it love, names it worth, names it what it dreads, who exhales the poison I harbor inside, calls the vapors salvation, attention, grace, presses hot syllables into my face, coins for the furnace I cannot abide, alms for the crater I cannot replace. “we leave her a minute, she’s fine,” they insist, when the father turns luminous, hungry for eyes; “we leave her, she’s fine,” as the mother unties her mind from the rafters in chemical mist; she sits under tables while glitter replies, she sits under tables, under laughter, under men, ichor glossing her wrists like oil on a hinge; no tears, only the drunk man’s nose in a tinge of red that throbs in the chandelier-then, in the dim gold hush of her trained cringe, and I think I lose something over the years, I lose my body; it will not report, I set it down somewhere in the noise of a sort of applause and polite, well-mannered cheers; it does not return to its original port, now the sky stands wide as an emptied hall, the land without fence, without seam; my pulse makes copies of copies of dream, carboning absence along the wall, a document stamped: not mine, not me, not at all, black ichor, attachment engine, grind, void with your furnace-heart, hydrogen pale, who teaches this mouth not to curtail its own name, not to forfeit the spine, I am unmoored, un-orbited, off the rail, and I do not know where I go, I do not know where I go, I do not know. I do not know.

just love that about you

a tincture of release, I swear to make amends,

there’s strangeness in the water we cannot comprehend.

the tap unfrays my thinking; it salts my blood with tin.

I drink and something orphaned starts rehearsing in my skin.

missing my prepubescent lines, their unlit splay of bone,

the ten-year dreams that buttered bread & (never) slept alone.

now I bed down with a knife: it hums, keeps me tight.

baptized in the afterhour, slick-lipped with night.

wanting to be faithless, antiseptic as glass,

to cauterize my wanting, let the wanting fucking pass.

to be quiet as a bruise before it rooms,

sober as a hospital chair bolted to its doom.

but you,

you trail me home like static; married to my coat,

a song that swallows gravel & forgets how to float.

you take the little cleanliness I hoard inside my throat

and spend it. you spend it. you slit it open, note by note.

it feels like climbing mountains that keep misplacing ground,

like fusing my pulse to a rumor of your sound.

god, you’re so tortured it stutters in your grin,

a beautiful malfunction with the safety taken in.

chemically unsorted, trauma’s sterile chart,

as if my brain were furniture assembled: far apart.

(maybe it is) maybe I am wires asking skin

to hold a voltage steady. long enough to let you in.

pink, pink, tiny pink

pink-clear, clear-pink, a seep that will not sleep, weeks of it, wicking into cotton, into sheets, into the soft crease of my fingers when I wake and check again (still), a blush that will not hush, a stain that will not wane, and I keep thinking who would you have been, bone-bean, hush-thing, thumbprint of a maybe, who would you have leaned toward in the light, would you have had his stare, the way he looks and looks and looks as if my body were a window left unshuttered, get your filthy fucking eyeballs on me, go on, catalogue the leak, the streak (ing), the weak pink speak of it, what else am I wasting for, what else is pouring out in this slow unspooling sore, feed me all your woes, pity, shit, ladle it thick, lay it on gritty, I am nothing anymore (don’t trip), I’m at the bottom it’s a long way down the gown the drain the sound of it (don’t slip), I’m on the bend and it’s a long way round the ground won’t hold, the hold won’t ground (I’m sick), of who I am and what I’m talking about, mouth full of doubt, clot-cloud, not-loud-enough shout, so lock me up I cannot take it, lock me up I’ve already lost, the cost is crossed and crossed again, stab my heart and hope to die, why does the body try and try to rinse itself of what it cannot keep, this pink-clear plea that will not end, this almost-child, this almost-friend, lock me up I cannot take it, lock me up I’ve already lost, and still it sticks, smears, repeats, sheet to skin to hand to heart: apart, apart, apart.

Photo of E. G. Ware

BIO: Drawn to the lingering afterlife of women's voices, E. G. Ware aims to trace the seams between memory, myth, and female embodiment. A writer and artist residing in St. Louis, Missouri, she works in historic preservation, celebrating history through art and architecture. An avid lover of storytelling, she holds a degree in Theater Studies and is at work on her first novel. Her flash fiction has been longlisted for the Fractured Lit Prize.