BLUEBEARD’S CLOSET
87 PERCENT CHANCE
WHAT WE ARE
PAYING THE ELF TRIBUTE
THE ANSWER TO YOUR RHETORICAL QUESTION
POCKETWATCH, c. 1905
The man upstairs has murdered his wife.
I’m sure of it.
Blood dripped down this morning
through the shower nozzle and the toilet
flushed red. A terrible thumping this afternoon
consumed the stairs and followed his dragging
from the building. The second
set of steps I have always heard
are silenced.
He’ll probably get away with it.
He seems nice enough: aging hair,
a courteous manner. Sort of like the boy
journalist who shares my office:
he is always running off to Boston
with a new girl. I’m not sure if he ever
even gets to second base—and they say
sexual frustration is the sure sign
of a serial killer.
Jeanine and I both dated the boy
journalist—but we were smart and cut it off
after a couple dates, but some women haven’t
and then who knows
he seems so innocent
except that he always wants
to move into the vacant
apartment upstairs because he knows he can’t move
in with you, yet. But he’s always pushing to
and he’s always wanting it so badly and thinking
that you are the Perfect One,
that he’s finally met her and she’s
encased in your body,
and when you say “no,” you spill celery
tonic on his romance movie still, and I’m afraid
of what will happen in a few years
if he never gets a “yes.”
Then again, I could be wrong.
That’s the problem, isn’t it?
How is one to know if the next date,
the next day, the next one, the one who seems like
the nice boy next door isn’t living
with his hated mother in a small Long Island house
on a street where there’s a row of small
Long Island houses near a mall
and the high school that humiliated him and then
tomorrow, it’s you in the paper,
dismembered,
your severed head and bloodless toes
wrapped in individual pieces of the New York Times
sports and business sections—
which you don’t even read—and left in
dumpsters along the thruway for the highway
authority to gather and flush out to sea.
Published Poet Lore, 2002; Snake Nation Review, 2007.
87 PERCENT CHANCE
Total mastectomy. Hysterectomy.
Hyster--hysterical to trade sexuality for life?
This one mutates into ovarian.
Another friend, only one attacked,
took them both.
No reconstruction.
Baggie sweaters, loose blouses,
says so little difference
now and before.
But the scars?
What does it mean
to look in the mirror?
Breastless.
Breathless.
Soul in the breath.
Sexuality in the soul.
Sexuality in the breath.
Breath in the breast.
Can one breathe without them?
Finally, only, live in the mind,
abandon the body?
Mine are small.
Only one aunt died,
at 87.
It’s that or a heart attack,
my gynecologist
flipped off.
No children, I.
Not that loss.
Even diminutive,
I would still wonder
before the knife
what they meant.
In front of the mirror,
I extend down the corners of my eyes,
stretch out the edges of my nose,
flatten my lips.
Just a little
makes me someone else.
Published SLAB, 2008
THE MUSEUM OF JESUS’ HOUSE
I. Grounds
Pristine like Monticello,
a desert oasis slopes
to a large saltwater pond.
Young women with carts
pulled by donkeys
plant flowering cacti, feed fish.
Inside the house sits the casket
in which water turned to wine,
the whip used to drive moneychangers
from the temple.
Over here, an airplane hanger houses the boat
Peter and his brothers sailed on Galilee.
Suspended in salted humidity,
it swings ever-so-slightly
each time the air-locked doors open.
• Gift Shop
The following items are also available online:
“Mary’s Foot Basin”/Calvin Klein “Anointed” set;
Martha’s recipe for herb bread in a handy prepackaged mix;
Israeli desert sandals and 100 % cotton white robes;
pulsating license plate holder, “This Car Saw Jesus”;
10-inch high replica of Jesus’ jail cell
with a wax cast guard; carpenter’s tool kits;
A Physicist’s Look at Walking on Water;
pair of gold vials holding frankincense and myrrh;
small pieces of the cross (real wood laminate on a pressboard core).
• Events
Long lines of people wait, baking,
for the tour guide in his white robes,
shining chestnut hair, gleaming beard.
Fingerprinting glass cabinets
that hold His rope sash, stepping
on ground where they hope He stepped
hoping for a touch of the divine,
a brush against His robe,
they come to stare, to picnic,
to eat the concession’s
“Feeding the Five Thousand” Fish Sandwich
or plain grape jelly on white bread,
“Protestant Communion.”
Onto the late afternoon hillside,
under a cloud like a boat floating
on the deep blue sky,
strides another bearded docent
to reenact the Sermon on the Mount,
or ten Equity card carriers to render
the betrayal in Gethsemane.
Their mouths droop;
the audience sighs
in all the right places; at twilight,
they pack their plastic
whips and goblets printed with “Holy Grail,”
and climb into the family SUV—
pockets empty, tummies full—
all in all a satisfactory visit to Jesus.
Accepted for publication, Atlanta Review, 2007
They spawn in Vermont’s winters,
choosing a warm, sunny window
to lay eggs, hatch themselves.
When we arrive on weekends,
the floor is always littered
with black bodies.
Every day,
no matter how many we kill,
tomorrow, more have sprung to life.
They cannot come from the bitter outside;
they bubble from within, parasites.
Their days are spent buzzing at the window,
looking for the one
small opening that would loose
them to freedom—
and sure, frozen death.
They squeeze into the window tracks,
head for the lit lamps
of early evening,
bang about the door.
This has been my honeymoon week,
here in Vermont with the flies.
My second new husband and I—
his second new wife—
have banged about,
frightened by ‘til death do us,
the incomprehensible meaning of forever,
the incredible weight of genes and habits.
Instead, we look for the microscopic
place in the glass, the one small opening,
that will set us free
to certain, frozen death.
Published Atlanta Review, 2007
It’s like pulling the dry skin off lips,
irresistible until you taste blood,
and even then,
one last pull and the last
translucent slip is free.
The blood rises, nerve endings
tickling the air like
exposed wires.
More and more, this is how I feel
in our space.
All that’s dead we’re peeling back,
where we can,
the layers of ex-husband,
ex-wife, parents,
the word “sheep” or “click”
or “pie,” perhaps—that brings
another word cracked
like a leather belt,
like a branch in a blizzard.
We try, but then we pull back,
let the scar form, that
toughened bit of leather
that next time will take a knife,
more than plucking at least.
Published Gin Bender Poetry Review, 2006
PAYING THE ELF TRIBUTE
When they bought the summer house,
he found it first:
a hollowed out tree trunk
five feet into the forest
that stretched like a rubber band
around their ring of meadow.
It’s an elf house, he told her,
his only daughter,
his only child.
We must pay tribute
to keep mischief away.
Every year,
when school spilled out its charges,
and father and daughter were both freed
to move into the warm, secret days
and hushed, cool nights of the mountains,
they would make their way
five feet into the forest
to leave a shard of sea-rubbed glass,
a branch of silvered wildflowers,
a petrified charm tied on silk ribbon
at the elf house door.
The year her old cat died,
she left its collar
—to keep the new kitten safe, she told him.
The night she graduated high school,
a boy she loved died;
the highway and alcohol
loved him more than she could.
In college, a friend slid off an icy road.
Later, her grandparents, one by one.
For each, the elves received tribute, memorial.
After each came new love, a child.
Then came her father’s cancer,
the long, slow descent into absence.
He had retired by then
to the summer house made year round.
How was one to know what elves needed
as recompense for this?
She left husband and child to care
for each other, took charge
of swabbing pus from wounds,
washing his sheets of blood and vomit,
prying truth from doctors.
Every so often, she would slip
to the forest’s edge
to leave a talisman
in the small pile of tokens
that represented a life:
a 1945 penny, his Navy wings,
the gold pen she’d given him
when he turned forty, and
in one final desperate act,
as he lay evaporated almost to bone,
his wedding band from the mother
who had died before her daughter could know her.
He slipped away that night.
Perhaps that was the elves’ gift
for the ring. In the morning,
when she went to retrieve it,
angry at their treachery,
in the pile of fading glitter, sheen and decay,
it alone was gone
into the warm, dark heart
of the forest.
Published Prairie Winds, 2004
Also available on Enskyment, www.enskyment.org
THE ANSWER TO YOUR RHETORICAL QUESTION
I think of it every night he drives
the switchback roads home
at twice the speed limit and the day
has rained and pavement is oily
like a thinly coated frying pan:
so easily a curve could slide him
into charred ruin.
I think of it every time
he water-skis:
so easily his neck could snap
on the water's concrete,
leave him floating like a washcloth.
I think of it when I serve steak,
knowing all his male relatives
were dead before fifty,
and I picture his arteries
gummy and choked: so easily
a fatal clot could strangle his heart.
I think of it when the doorbell rings
too late or too early
when I am barring the house
against night
when I plan what I'll wear
to the funeral
and when I think of it
I slip on my high heels
and tango.
Published, The Lullwater Review, 2003-2004
POCKETWATCH, c. 1905
Round, etched rose gold,
too heavy for any modern
Tawainese-sewn pocket,
your gift weights my palm,
a drill-punched circle of heavy heart,
ticking just slower than time.
It arrived after the towers collapsed
and my lover’s wife had died
and I had won him
in a terrible lottery
that left me holding the ticket,
stunned and silent and so afraid
that time had already run through my illicit
fingers, slippery, gelatinous.
Could I lose him twice
to grief?
You watch across the reflective mirage of distance,
wondering, warm like the heavy inevitable tomorrow,
like the parentheses I know
I’ll find under my pillow
when I’m changing the sheets,
the future I won
and can never possess.
My shameful inadequacy to love sufficiently
slopes away in pathetic disorder:
a mountainside littered
with glass and gravel.
The watch ticks—
that’s my life passing.
What do I do with my longing?
Its impractical desires bend
in all directions at once,
a sparkler fizzling in the night air.
Published The Texas Review, 2004
Also available on Enskyment, www.enskyment.org
© All writing is copyrighted to Laurel S. Peterson. No reproduction without permission of the author.