I Call the Prison from the Fire Tower
During her second incarceration, Missie asked for a copy of Bluets.
I sent it by approved vendor, forgot the gift receipt. The book would be incinerated
if I did not call the mailroom and explain myself—provide the tracking number, profuse
apologies, and my identity to the guard. My anger hung on the valley’s mentholated,
groaning air. I slept alone at the mountain’s foot, despite the ghost stories, the unmarked
earth, the directionless wind. I’d driven 750 miles and hiked a mere 20, obliterated
my left knee and still the ceaseless violence of her life lived next door. I woke in the dark
to drink my instant coffee and gain the elevation necessary to be heard.
The Abenaki cairns just off the trail hid the quartz and gneiss’s sparks
beneath moss growths older than white violence to the people and the land. I could afford
my careful privations: toothbrush cut in half, two pairs of panties: one to wear and one to clean
in creeks and dangle, drying, from a strap. Missie’s indigent envelopes arrived back home, smeared
carefully with homemade lipstick kisses in pink, dark blue and red. When my call reaches
the facility I am placed on hold: Pure Michigan, the state’s forty-five million dollar ad campaign—
billowing strings and admonitions not to overlook the beauty of the state—plays from the machine.
In the watchtower the metal ladder screams and whistles, I crouch below the paneless
window to stare into my screen. On the Offender Tracking Information System
I watch new scars populate Missie’s Identifying Marks. I plan to follow the blazes’ patient chain
north to Canada. Pure Michigan loops and loops again, the ad copy’s canned wisdom
begins each time by counting down the mornings in a given life. She calls me Heron, wears
blue every day, I often miss her calls. She mixes her cobalt lipstick from a shattered bic pen
and hand lotion on a steel mirror. On Glastenbury Mountain, where women are illegible as air,
the stones eat men, and hunger walks among the pines, I observe the curdling sky and dictate
Missie’s name and number to the guard. From the tower the only blue is distance, but it is everywhere.
Mrs. Webster Wins Freedom Citing Cruelty
Generations into life behind the Burger King
and the cats are feral still, not wild.
Domestication’s red and ceaseless line—
clawed streak from my elbow to my wrist when I feed them
cold french fries. Last winter I made a yellow linen dress.
The poorly sewn-in zipper puckers
like a long scar over a row of knuckles.
You notice it, if you know it's there.
In 1932 the Courier-Post reported my great-grandfather
visited his wife in the hospital after she gave birth
to tell her I don’t love you anymore.
Lard-crust pie. Strawberry jam. Hemmed pant. I was wifed.
I was gifted a dust ruffle. Was taught to embroider little flowers,
little houses with crosses for eyes. To skin peaches cleanly to shit
in a box to pick up the bird with my soft unpuncturing mouth.
A boyfriend once told me you want me to hit you
but I won’t give you the satisfaction.
My father calls to tell me I understand it now–
I was in fear all my life because my father was in fear.
Noun into verb: Salt. Cup. Verb into noun: Police.
My great-grandfather arrived bandoliered with ducks
shot by the sound. Narwhal tusk, elk rack of antlers, tiger rug.
There, in the microfiche, is my father’s
grandfather calling his wife a silly ass an old wagon.
He wasn’t wrong. It would have been a relief
for him to hit me. Where does the fear
begin? What tarn spawned what river and when will it reach
some sea? While the cruiser circles the parking lot I am sure
to stop crying and he is sure to stop yelling. Don’t want a domestic.
We stand quietly by the dumpster like dolls left in their shoebox overnight,
until the cops pick up their paper bag of burgers. Adjective into noun:
the narrowing gutter between the sphere where he beat her
(and my grandfather, two years old) and the beating itself.
I didn’t ask my father: what about my fear?
The article my father clips says pushed down.
My great-grandfather says knock the sissy out.
Dust from a rug hung over a banister. Ketchup from a bottle
slapped just right. The concrete slab teems
with feral cats. I laugh bitterly at my father’s fear
no one will protect women from men, should my wish
for the end of the police come to pass. Verb into verb into verb.
Where does it end? I do not believe in punishment
but I do want revenge. Adjective into verb: my eyes yellow.
The dress torn open to release my pit’s steam and stink.
In the Burger King bathroom my chin beards with rabid lather.
I hiss and hunker. I want a radical act of grammar. Noun into verb
into the noise I make when I plunge into the scrub pine on all fours.
I do not want the feral cats to love me, or to let me touch them.
I just wanna lay with them on the cement in the house of the sun.
H.R. Webster is the author of What Follows (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Her poems can be found in POETRY, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ecotone, AGNI, and Guernica. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.