I Eat Poetry

Housefire
Stacie Cassarino

          animals who ride on top of each other
          do not have to see one another's face.
                                                  -Anne Carson

Maybe the girl who owns goats is who I really want
to be. If I tell you there’s a voice in my right ear
telling me to leave, I mean it. In my other ear
in the dark, masked birds are waking from winter.
Call them cedar waxwings. Outside
they gather. The girl is saying something
about selling milk in towns we want to know
the names of, where women burnt out
or burn up or just burn. This place is cold, forgiving.
The road moves beneath us like a frozen river.
Inside, the mouths of fish stuck open,
a shoe you kicked off last summer, a shadow
that won’t go away until you fall.
If I’m alive tomorrow I promise to love
you better, which doesn’t make up for the snow
that keeps falling around my house
or for the lie I told my mother. Maybe the girl
who owns goats doesn’t know the world yet,
or that the boy running across the field
to smell the moon, his clumsy, clumsy body,
will fingerfuck her later while she leans
forward or backward, trying
to make it feel good this time. I never wanted
to be angry at my heart, which keeps letting
me down without warning. Yesterday I threw
a snowball and watched a dog chase nothing
in particular. Things just dissolve like that,
in mid-air, even in February when I imagine
desire is as endless as wind.
There was a man who turned out the lights
and we were expected to come hard
to make it last without seeing each other.
My face must have been animal, threshed open.
But your body- it is kind to me, which won’t
last either, like winter, like this slow fire
I’ve made out of simple things: wood, news of war,
paper, breath. When the girl who owns
goats comes home, she leaves her clothes
by the door, lights a cigarette and walks
until nothing is left to chase her
out from this terrible cold, nothing is left
of her leaning to feel something pure,
something newborn, made-up, hoisted and alive.