I don't believe in luck.
Twice you flipped a coin,
and twice you didn't pull the trigger,
but I could make neither heads nor tails of it,
the way a gun refused a favor,
the way a bullet stayed lodged in the chamber,
like the lump imprisoning the little girl tears
inside the throat encircled by your hands.
I wanted you to die.
I wanted you, for once,
to take your anger out on yourself.
I wanted the voice on the other end of the line
to tell me how there was a hole
where your face used to be,
and in that space I could bury anything.
I could cover your corpse with dirt
and grow something new from the decay.

11/23/2011

Author's Note: So, I was inspired by a friend of mine, who's been posting these poems lately with state abbreviations as the titles, and I thought, I could write poems about the different places where I've lived. The thing is, of course, that if you follow my poetry, or you know me, some of this stuff is going to be familiar to you, and I'm not trying to repeat myself, just trying to get a solid picture of what each place means to me in my mind. I lived with my dad and my stepmom for my whole junior year of high school. I'm the only one out of me and my siblings who lived with our dad alone. It was maybe the worst year of my life. At one point, he called 911 and said he was going to shoot himself. This was the second time he did this. He had done it before when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. My stepmom called me at school to tell me, and they put him in the mental hospital but he only stayed for a couple of days. After he got out, it was business as usual. The business being misery.

Posted on 11/23/2011
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