Two Poems
by Sue Miller
Waitress, College Town
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
—Sharon Olds
Or not tell. At least for years:
that's the contract
we make. I will not tell and
you will not come back,
when your run in this town ends,
to find me
swollen with unsaids.
Confess
your transgressions,
desires, jealousies, dreams.
I am paid to feed you urge
to drown these things
too True for night.
Tell
me about your girlfriend,
her secret abortion
and how she makes you sleep
in the Nova, how she won't
pick up the phone,
let you in
Swear
that I'm a good listener
as you touch my face and
look around to see who saw it,
in this bar filled with classmates
and rivals
Ask
if I'll keep you warm tonight
in the subterranean garage
while she bleeds and cries,
eight floors up
Don't
you think I can hear her,
don't you think I've been her
don't you think that the five
you left me last night
greased the wheels,
will pry my knees apart
Like
I don't have a heart.
It's that smile, you say,
and I flinch, inside
Keep
your backseat promises,
your Navajo blanket,
your STDs
Take
their vellum
and
Go.
Practicing the way they feel, again
Tonight I need beer more than wine:
wrack my mind for the wellspring,
a point to hold focus I can follow.
My candle will not take flame. The wick,
overburnt, has obscured itself under stuff it'd meant
to spend and sealed itself softly, seamlessly
away—denying my descrying. Out Side is the place
to be, with Night bowing myriad melodies, cacophonically
layering place with sound, in time to a song ever weaving
that leads me through new grass that won't meet blade
til May, down to the edge of water, moon high, and me,
ostensibly for the diving-but I have no breath
to hold, I'm so long gone from this lake, from the ritual
pulling out of words, stroke by stroke, from depths.
Declarations, affirmations: they lap my limbs. I want
to leave the shore, to wade deep, to push
off the silty bottom away from the algaeic palpations
of morphemes nipping at my flesh like sunnies,
their eyes invisibly red, cooled to shadows felt
more than seen; beyond them, thrill, weightless
in all that sublimation, and, metaphoric pen in hand,
stream through lined channels of someone else's
ruling: height and width and depth cannot constrain
while whetted, silvered lips lave
away the restlessness of then, release me
to this, now.
Sue Miller lives in Connecticut with an assortment of goldfish. She is one of the founding editors of GUD—Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine and has been an editor for multiple issues of SCRAWL’s Story Garden. Publication credits include Night Train, elimae, FRiGG, Right Hand Pointing, Thieves Jargon, etc.