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I still count deaths I've known, watch
the longest nights of our lives shatter
into wine-red slivers, ticking seconds of hope
when no one but us could stay clean.
Those parched-earth days. All the unseen dangers,
secret enemies living only in our minds,
nameless fears hanging from a single light bulb
above the meeting room table. I think of
general delivery, or that place atheists go
when they're lost, our tree trunk backs as broken
as any of the martyrs', the old ones' eyes
darting under 10-gallon hats, Mad Joe comatose
in the corner. I still feel the thirst of those who
vanished so we would not. We could never gather
enough of our rusty weapons to protect us
from those altitudes, from the God we never knew
except in the bottles we finally smashed on
the desert floor, wet eyes watching shards scatter
high as the iced moon. Everyone was a witness
then. Who could stop their palsied hands, who
could possibly be still with all that
silent keening, hot grief steaming over Goodwill tables
in the little house where three roads met.
Jails, insanity, death, they said. We turned to
each other then. But your leaving still looms
in people's eyes, Dan, that longing huge
as our ruined lives, and we waited like saints
to be cut into perfect gems by the world
we finally entered. Willingly, some would say.
Right where you are, the old ones still chant
each night over the hallowed book, their faces
shadows of ancient battles and stale air.
Their yellow-tipped fingers grip mine
for the closing prayer, as if it were still
our last chance.
Liza Porter’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Cimarron Review, Hotel Amerika, Slipstream, Diner, and Pebble Lake Review, among others. She is director of the monthly Other Voices Women’s Reading Series in Tucson, Arizona, and owner of last house press.
(Photo by Susan Cummins Miller)
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