This is not a poem about a boilermaker
or the way I cut the chalk of you from snow
nineteen miles from the end of the road in
January. It’s not a poem about handprints on
a window and blur of blizzard through oily
outlines like Vaseline, or the way you like your
eggs. The thrust of you’s churned past that
now, dried your bones til knuckle split with
leather and no rain. Once I said I loved you
the way the ground loves a meteorite, the way
the internet loves both through Chelyabinsk
and lens. I tapped it, coded, to the thickest
rung on your ladder, so I guess it’s not about
that either. It’s about the whales I can’t stop
exploding, about how they mean woman,
mean body, mean back fat, mean what really
happened that night on Lake Loveland. Since
then, I keep a ruler between my teeth to
measure the things I wish were bigger than
me. They almost never are. You call me from
the desert to tell me you still believe. The air is
obese, humid, stammers at suggestion of
thunder. Your voice, a tin can and string.
Jacqueline Boucher is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she studies spoken word poetry and its ties to social justice and community organization. She is the Spoken Word editor for Passages North. She spends her spare time wondering about the banal secret lives of supervillains.
