Shut Up About the Foxes

by Susan Konz

He talks suicide then rolls an uneven joint against my living room table &
I’m not sure how much of it I believe – hear myself saying maybe you are alone,
maybe you’re not wrong and it’s not bad maybe the trick is to not rail against it
 
after all I’ve already left the pop & crush of anxiety on the drive to the show. I can
turn numb once I’m there it’s been so long, how have you been, it’s been too long, too long &
something else I forget. I came to see her play. Am in love at her lonely & how she hits it
quiet. I don’t think they see when the guitar string snaps and it’s the shaking before almost
 
tears. That day Margaret cut my hair hungover from beer flights without blow & confesses
a love of North American wildlife – arctic wolves and Canadian foxes.
You would never guess right? She’s shaky and sleeved neck down in ink, Roman
numerals down her throat in red counting what I don’t know, no, I wouldn’t have,
but her wife is tired, she says, of hearing about it – the animals – stage left, Britney nods
 
and rolls her eyes – everyday.  I bring my brother salmon and potatoes that ride
in the passenger seat with the music too loud to keep up, and he is every day smaller
and folding into the purple bedsheet he wears. A Roman emperor if not for the internal
hemorrhaging that pools scarlet below the rib God took out like a secret, like the pouch
that holds I don’t want to anymore. I was trying to fly, he says & did
 
he says and wanted that broken when the concrete ascended like a promise.  And Krishna,
I don’t think, said anything about legumes, which to eat, which are sacred – probably all –
but I listen to the man in the parking lot that night go on about how his chakras are just so &
 
On the causeway the flares burn nothing – semicircling grey asphalt – I slow
and swerve for whatever needed protecting before. And now my own voice, I hear it, sounds angry,
rollicks and I want it to shut up, to shut up about the ache & lull, shut up about the beauty & horror
I am justifying alone to a boy I will send home sad & high. I’m not indifferent, but I want to be, bully,
boy, it’s all down when you’re looking down.