Thursday Mar 28

April-Manteris.jpg April Manteris is originally from Slidell, Louisiana.  She currently works and writes in Tallahassee, FL.
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How We Love
 
 
Sunny capital of oversexed flies
            and homeless motherfuckers,
                        depression of porn shops
 
and pine, gulf-hugging armpit—baby,
this is where you built a bridge
                       to your assassin,
 
determined as the moth stuck
between two screens,
willing as pink hibiscus
 
flowering every day in a burnt yard,
I have been in this house
where, you say,
 
you have coddled him, where light,
like cockroaches,
shifts and scurries,
 
I imagine you in his kitchen, stuffing
yourself on grits and drop
biscuits, a desperate
 
Gretel loving him more each time
he stews your heart.
                        I have overeaten
 
at love’s table, scraped against boarded
            up windows and locksmithed
                        locks. I know
 
the shape of your puncture and I can
            show you how
                        to celebrate grief:
 
think how all the teeth in a little girl’s
mouth will leave her,
how the woman
 
on Monroe slackens her jaw every day
below birds who sit fat
and buzzing
 
on power-lines, how mothers rarely abandon
their children—here
            the closest river
 
will always be the Mississippi. These nights
are nothing. The moon’s
a smart beggar,
 
but collapsible as a salt-lick on fire. 
Tomorrow may come
without him,
 
but after that, I swear, it’ll just keep coming.