Excerpt: Lauren Gordon

From Meaningful Fingers

 You Can’t Eat the Grief 

when grief is eating you
because you are hollowed
like you have been drinking
Drano, but you find yourself
in a checkout lane with a bag boy
who looks lupine in his beard
and those plugs that stretch ear lobes
until they are twin strips of silly putty.

If grief was a sound
it would be the peacock’s lament
shattering the morning fog,
heard for miles; you, too, would roost 
high and hard, molting your shimmering fan 
until you were truly hermetic,
bald and screaming, but your grief
is the eye on a tail feather;
spectacular and unseeing.

You can’t eat the grief
because it doesn’t taste like soy
and you’re not sure if you’re getting enough soy
or if Jesus ate soy
or if the baby’s formula is based on soy
because that’s what grief does:
it drives a railroad spike
between your brain’s hemispheres
until everything is the soy
in your hands, the soy
you are not eating.

Because Your Marriage Is Water

You want to see it be liquid
have the sheen of summer
so wet it bows the branches
of every weeping willow.

I used to wander around like a bruise
throbbing and blue,
restless for rehabilitation.

You used to freeze like the Wapsipinicon
six feet of icy immobility
life teeming and frothing beneath the hull.

You wanted warmth
wanted to curl into the earth 
until your body mulched
in its own heat.  We know divorce, 
now. We know the taste 

of low-hanging fruit, what it feels like 
to boil the ocean.  We had a blueprint 
for a baby long before we bent to fish
a drawer for little socks.

You had to learn
how to use your voice to sing,
how to trust your hands.

I had to know how 
to gentle the rush of noise
so deep in my house.

Mothers Worse Than

A spasm in the air:
My husband and I wonder 
at the pickerel
hooked neatly
through the jaw,
but it could be my brother
or my daughter
leaning next to me
wondering, as well 
if her sticky eggs
are glued to the ground 
below the dock,
abandoned.  Wondering
if the reedy frogs
on shallow pads
are thankful for their lives
today.  She whips like an arrow
presents a mouth of jagged
teeth, duck-billed and violent
caudal fin quivering,
forked as if to pierce 
something solid.
What a shame, we say
what a waste, scale sack
of blue slime, this shit mother
who pops her jaw
lips the air
in rhythm
with her gills
which stretch to reveal
the meaty inside.

In addition to Meaningful Fingers, Lauren Gordon is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks: Keen (Horse Less Press) and Generalizations about Spines (Yellow Flag Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming with Sugar House Review, burntdistrict, Inter|rupture, Smoking Glue Gun, [PANK], MiPOesias, Menacing Hedge and many other wonderful journals and anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net prize and is a Contributing Editor to Radius Lit. She lives outside of Milwaukee.

Meaningful Fingers is available from Finishing Line Press.