Reviewing the Victims on FindAGrave.com

Thirty-two thousand, five hundred seven days is what it took
to meet you, to meet
your grainy faces, the one-paragraph clippings 
of your deaths on FindAGrave.com,
your marker-less plots spread across Ohio. 

Sandburg spoke
of this grass as the grass that did the work,
this grass, the carpet which drew blood to its fiber. 

Here I was, walking in circles for years,
looking for poetry like a bright penny,
green wings of a dollar bill,
when you held it in the rigors of your mortis hand:
black hand, white hand, unburned hand, 
hand that’s not a hand
but the webbing of collapsed scaffold.
Not poetry. Not a coin, 
but hair ripped from the skull.

​

Paw Paws

Maroon bells hang from palms
as wide as Rachmaninoff’s reach
on these trees that are clonal, like Dolly, 
so though a patch seems like many
way down yonder, it may be just one,
that onliest number, but must be two
to do its magic, dropping green globes
splotched with black continents, inside
a creamy sweetness as pocked with openings
as an old brain’s lost memories
and pitted with mahogany buttons, big
as the top button on a coat’s cowl-neck
that you undo to scoop this wild native fruit.

​

Rush Hour

Most days 
I bump into boulders 
They shift and tumble 
causing my shoulders 
to crack 

It happens when everything 
is not quite right 
when your footsteps 
fail to find 
the ley lines of the earth 

You become a pariah 
a blocked profile 
Even the breeze 
impartial for the most part 
avoid your gaze 

However there is 
the rare occasion 
when your muscles 
stretch at the right moment 
A god-like cadence 
fill your every breath 

All of a sudden 
your limbs turn into silk 
Greens and whites fill your vision 
And the streets are not as narrow 
as you thought they once were

​

After seven days of intolerable confinement, Izzy decided that this foggy afternoon was the right time to free herself. And, if she could manage, Clara. 

          She had been testing her crippled body since the morning darkness, inundating her extremities with signals to flex, and, with any hard-earned luck, move. Her weak arms appeared up to the task; she guessed her weight to be just shy of one-hundred pounds. Her legs, however, remained stubborn, anchoring her to the bed. For all the training she had subscribed to these counterparts, none was more rigorous, more vital than her breathing regimen. 

          Izzy's relationship with oxygen had always been of a toxic nature. A university athlete who had relied upon her immaculate lungs for victory, it had been an unreliable ankle that decided ten metres from an important finish line was the time to snap, end her career, sink her into the depths of depression, and enroll her in a new, lifelong sport: smoking. Three packs a day, four when she was feeling particularly good (or bad), for fifty years. 

          And now the ghosts of cigarettes’ past were preventing her, in spite of her cooperative arms, from liberating herself, and, more importantly, Clara. 

          Izzy exhaled a laboured breath, painfully inhaled another. She should have been accustomed to it by now, but the air filtering throughout her sanctuary still tasted as artificial as it smelled. She felt the rather stale intake race through her mouth and nostrils, hoping to reach the pair of black bags that kept her going for no real purpose. 

          Save for Clara.

          The clean dose of oxygen reached her ashen lungs, then exited her mouth and nose in another laboured exhalation. Izzy imagined the polluted molecules warning the new wave of respiration about what corruption lay within her. 

          She looked to her right, locked eyes with the never-blinking Clara, and, with a look that said “Don't you dare move now”—she couldn't risk precious breaths on her roommate's deaf ears—began the arduous journey. 

          Izzy watched as she willed her right arm across the centimetres that felt like kilometres of bed. The feeble limb made pitiful progress before stopping entirely so she may regain what energy she could. 
​
          A surge of anger propelled her arm against the plastic sheet dividing her and Clara. Her hand slid down the thick material until it landed in the crevice between the sheet and edge of the bed. Using this newfound leverage, Izzy began pulling her weight with her right arm, while pushing against the mattress with her left. The juicy idea of giving up had crossed her mind, just as it had when her former severely fit self, besieged by physical and psychological cramps, had desired to slow her run to a crawl at the three-thousand-metre mark. Her conditioned lungs had burned then. Now they were volcanic. 

​

​The Weekend Goes by Like a Sigh

Down the cemetery we stroll. Contemplative words about
the transitory nature & physical irrelevance of ourselves as humans
have made me horny. It’s a late winter Sunday afternoon, the birds

cheer away & the dead stay silent, their questions unanswered.
Ancient trees thrive on ancient human matter, roots reaching
madly for carbon. There’s something urgently sexual about death, not in

an 80s goth way, but an ecstatic Jeff Goldblum’s life-finds-a-way. Celebration
of pleasures. I cycle down Karl-Marx-Straße faster than I should,
no helmet, an unlikely death wish of adrenal hormones: I have conquered

the fear of meaninglessness. How sweet - you whisper you’re weird in a
good way, resting your eyes on mine like we might never see each other again. We
take pictures to try & stop time. You hold me in your sleep & we sleep

soundly, unaware of the dead watching us through the window, patiently
​waiting in their jealousy. In the morning, we have sex.​

**********

**********

Our Last Date

In a crowded amusement park, in line for the barnyard bumper cars, we wait an hour, and as soon as the kid working the controls opens the little gate, you change your mind, grab my hand, and we go to the ice queen roller coaster. We’re waiting in line here for two hours. Sweat dribbles down our backs. We don’t talk—hypnotized by the three white carts that chug up the track, fall back down, and then start over. I’m hungry. So, we leave our spot and go to the popcorn stand. Ice cream is listed on the menu, but the worker dressed as a pig says he has none. Now you have a new mission. A parade starts down the mid-way. We flip-flop through strollers and mascots of cartoons I’ve never seen. You must have your ice cream. This is our only day here, tickets so expensive, and we will not return. We have yet to get on one ride. 
 
Finally, two hours later, after we’ve eaten, after we’ve waited in three more lines, we sit in a gondola—its bottom attached to a track. We begin outside—I wave to the people still in line (Look at us! We made it!)—then our boat-for-two glides into a tunnel. A baby in another float down the line cries, hiccups, screams, and then a mother’s shrieks echo—did she fumble? The water is dark green, gears hidden there just a few feet below. Every gondola jolts to a stop. A recorded voice repeats: Mother Goose asks you to please stay in your seat. The emergency lights are on now. The walls are black. Since we just entered, there’s nothing to look at except each other and the murky water. An hour later, the boat jerks back to life and we pass Goldilocks and the three bears, Red Riding Hood discovering the wolf in grandmother’s bed, the smart little pig peeking out the window of his brick house at the wolf slumped in defeat, Jack and Jill on top of a hill of flowers, yet the robots are not moving—frozen in mid-action—and all the yellow beam spotlights blind. 
 
Out of the tunnel, the moon and stars glow, the crowd’s smaller. You take my hand to help me off the boat once we reach the dock, and then we begin the long walk back to the parking lot. We don’t stop to pick up a souvenir or hit the restroom one more time. Once out the gate, among the cars, we can’t remember where we parked and search aimlessly. I asked for love in the boat, but you don’t have it, so I’m off on an abandoned broom I found next to the Dumpster.  I will find that candy house where a witch works with sugar and ovens to make magic.

​

​Cat Dixon (she/her) is the author of Eva and Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016, 2014) and the chapbook, Table for Two (Poet's Haven, 2019). Recent poems have appeared in LandLocked, Anti-Heroine Chic, and Abyss & Apex. She is a poetry editor at The Good Life Review.