Cindy St. John
Map of What Can Cut You
Speak/swallow highways
horizontal your fist on the horizon squint one eye
sink/eat/starve 500 miles in a car you don’t own
with lips that are not your own and a language you have only half-
memorized to get here
bend/lengthen under the sound
of wind of box fans like no sound or white light or distance
tap the glass remember the body
sweat in the sheet of stars soundless
speak/tip toe over orange
faces/names/tequila bottles
swim/drive your field of vision infinitely
multiplying the weight of your arms you lived/died
Break the glass
fade/disappear into the landscape isn’t this
what you wanted?
We’re Having a Party
Slice the length brittle bodies slow
fold open, insides flutter out trash confetti
put the red body bags in the tequila and wait
what else am I supposed to do?
Sometimes I lose my breath sometimes I run
at 4,500 feet it is hard to try
to imagine glossed with oil
how it would feel breathless
he said looks more like bruised
internal organs than the surface
of the ocean, but that’s what it is
to have my lungs winded outside
my body that’s how open I want to be
wait, go to the bar
it’s what we can do
Sam Cooke on the jukebox
she said that Dr. Pepper is the color
of your hair with the light and the girl
blushes and she is open
the bartender Yvonne is open
calls everyone baby
the weather channel shows the whole
damn country orange waiting
just because
I am crying doesn’t mean I am not having a good time.
A Woman of Our Own Fragility
Many Soccurros in this town
beautiful, like safety
a stretched open bird call
tongue taps lightly the roof
Soccurro Soccurro you know
I’ve never met one, just hear her
like a whisper, lulling
slow lazy sex
Soccurro
bent hard as stars.
Shit Just Got Real
The sun is not a simile
not a space
not yellow, some other
horizontal color
here is the putty
shape inside me sealed
one said peanut butter
one said mustard
they both said can-
certain but I do not
slowly slide black
out of me
like the sun’s arms
if the sun had arms
if the sun spoke don’t talk
to me about rays, metaphor
to a body anything
can happen, like a brick.
Be the Heat
Begin in the hip
of Texas
there are places
we go to keep
from going somewhere else
mountains distant layers
blue as if you could
break where
does the light come in?
here is where
America shows its history to itself
water, fig newtons, toothpaste, jeans,
many hand-drawn maps
your lonely honey-colored face
just because there’s a trail
don’t mean you belong here.