St. Peter's
Lucia taught me to turn favors into bread.
Her sister showed me how to eat it: teeth
extracted like bear claws after an avalanche.
For eight months, I held their knowledge
between my knees. I had only my own
rosary and broke that praying for thunder.
I swallowed nothing but meat and hard
confessions. I wove whole dresses
from the guilt of cities.
In between moons He came to me
with round gifts. He touched his hips
to mine, and, speaking in tongues,
promised an end to dead
idols. He left two
sticky psalms on my lips:
In the morning I was immaculate;
Wailing at his wall, naming my
thumbs for sunken saints.
Esther in New York
The planks of this fever are sorrow-bound
I am no longer interested in milkshakes
He touches my neck like a lynching
When I kiss the walls I hear thunder
I do not like bathrobes or the smell of ginger
I do not think winter is a thimble but
Like a thumb-sized prick a globe of red
And when he touches my neck I think
Of lynching how the first night
It rained he shut out the lights
And the dark bloomed like a new
Life But life was thin for a woman then
It promised very little
No wonder I was sad with a name like
Esther Virgin in alligator pumps
Purple hair reaching towards
Ether in the god hour thick
With white heat In the morning
Ester waterlessly bonded
To nothing
Dear Mother I return to you wingless and
mounting This morning I returned
my nightgowns to the wind
Mother New York is terrible
There is too much to love
Buildings sag like tired whores
chrome fish without eyes
I could not Mother
listen I returned my wrists
to the bathtub I returned the doctors
to their bottles and so I return again
to you laughing like a pill
Thirteen
Did I touch him? When I touched him,
how did it feel? When cold, what caused it?
Was it fear? Where did his fear live? How
did it dress? What did it hold? Did I hold it?
When I held it, who was I? Did I sleep?
Did I eat? Did I touch him? What was it,
to touch him?
At first. Like thunder. Fear. Yes.
In a house of dirt and young boys
who treated women unkindly. In black
and leather footfalls. The edge of smoke.
Close. A naked pile of bones. Like a pile
of naked bones. Snow and blood fruit.
Yes. Fearful.
The summer
it got so hot the house buckled and my basement
sank further down into the cool dark earth I let him fuck me
in the ass because I wanted to feel something other than temporary.
I wanted to feel stapled, like a root, like a root without need
for water, I wanted to feel like that root and I wanted to be
that impossible root, so that night, against the TV’s blue hum,
I unstuck my underpants and stood before him like a sweating
branch: awkward, unbreakable; breakable, young.
What he did then is not important. I want you to picture
the pool of cloth at my feet. I want you to see my hips, rising
like a second sun. I want everything and I do not want
everything, I want you to see me there, blinding, and then
I want the world to go black and cold again, like gravity
is nothing, like promise and azalea and halogen are nothing,
like after that the summer quickened, collected, then paused
in its own wake to watch the green muck behind it begin
to bloom. It didn’t.
Anne Marie Rooney recently earned her B.A. in Creative Writing. Her
poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in ,Parthenon West Review, Night
Train, Pebble Lake Review, Slipstream, Gargoyle, and elsewhere.