Where’s the bathroom?
The final drops of courage
Evaporate from the bottom of the glass.
Calculating a short walk
And an uncomfortable drive
Can I make it home?
It’s throbbing.
But I smile my way through
And wrap my feet tightly around each other.
Soon my inner thighs tire-
it’s too much.
I stammer to find my legs
My awkward feet and bowed legs of a younger me
Expose themselves in full
I take a wide turn pass the corner of the bar
Bumping into laughs,
And syrupy strangers.
Darting the stares
And chasing crowded corners
I’m looking for relief from-
My body,
My mind,
My biology.
Small bladders prove shallow
And cleaner
Than my dive bar gene pool.
No, I was looking for relief from It.
The sense of absolute,
and infinite doubt.
The slow crash of failure
The quiet abandonment
Of a previous self.
The kind that shows up in a room
thick with people,
sweating through superfluous questions.
The clinched jaws and concrete postures-
Trying to navigate through
some sort of
grand human interview.
It’s the kind that you watch
As your mother curls her body away
And takes refuge in a sea of blankets
The eyes that shut when you ask what’s for breakfast,
The cold stare of loss.
That simply warm into a muddy life
Of desperate decisions.
It found a home in her mother too.
Even before the poison got her lungs.
I would see her-
Standing in kitchens,
And doorways,
And parking lots.
Dizzy by fear
Tossing the intestines of a purse
on bank floors
Just to feel the smoke rise in her chest one last time.
This was theirs
And now it is mine too.
It is as much me
As the dark eyes they gave me
As the slight dip in our backs
The flat feet
And small hands.
Is it as much me
As the late night sermons
And early morning tears
The empty dinner tables
And frozen peas.
It is as much me
As the nerves that directed me on this journey to rusted porcelain
To catch a glimpse of closure-
From my insides.
But when did it happen?
I used to be the girl so carelessly
And recklessly
Sure.
Committed just as much to her own rise
As she was to her own fall.
I used to be the girl that skipped across, broken railroad tracks
Above the Tennessee river.
Blindfolded by a gut full of ignorance
And faith in the lie.
Now,
I’m so far from that river
And the fog of that summer.
I’m here.
Stuck in the prints of old boots
On a snowy December night.
In a new sleepy town
Straightened legs,
But old worry.
The bar creatures won’t know
If I dropped my pants outside.
They’re half soaked on whiskey,
Drunk on screens-
Swallowing their own mother’s worry.
How would I be different?
But before I could ask
Or take the cold plunge
The bartender looks
And tells me without speaking,
shoulders aligned,
“The last door on your left”