True Confessions of Anne Bonney
by Phoebe Nicole North
back when you were dead-
eye we built castles out of bottles,
drove their green throats into
sand and watched our reflections
ripple backlit by the seasick sunshine. You
smoked parliaments in pantomime,
crawled in through all the wrong
windows left open and gasping
to stand in stranger kitchens
and leave your mark with a pen-
knife on the surface of the fading
formica in those days I chose
vodka and you slugged down cases
of micro-brews, left your skin all
stippled and me grasping the edge
of the queen-sized, sobbing, sobbing
it's only together that we've come
to drink dark rum and ginger beer,
to sleep still and sweet with our spines
stuck together as we memorize the groans
of rotting beams and now I'll say it: this
is a poem and not fiction; time recedes
so that we can see the detail of the paper
tablecloth, your hands folded up before your
face and the half-eaten monkfish growing sinister
in the circumference of the trembling tea light
like your former figure extended across rolling rock
walls when we pressed our backs to the glass
and tried to keep the ocean from rushing
through the cracks.
Phoebe North is currently attending the MFA program at University of Florida in Gainesville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2river, Stirring, elimae, Death Metal Poetry, and Taiga. She blogs infrequently at www.phoebeeating.com.