The Responsible
In any legal dispute
there are two named parties.
Flat sides on the blade of versus,
stripped open like an impossible
eyelid. But what if the victim
is neither party, if she stands
outside the blade and makes no sound,
taking on all of her small boats?
Because I am thinking of a little girl
I didn’t know, once a girl, but now
a dead woman I knew, just a bit,
and the sweet things about her
being alive: lemon berry shortbread
and the backs of knees, raw dates,
the thickest of milk and rage.
I am still watching her tiny body
gloss away. She the victim of someone
else’s buckshot orbit. Who is responsible,
as in: who answers for this?
Something happens to the sweet things.
Warnings come like parades of geraniums—
indistinguishable from the last,
but beyond beautiful. Thank you
for this warning, we say.
We look down into the violence
of the votive, with its sticky red head.
It’s what you might call a good suit.
It dangles like a vine—no, it looms—
at the end of each sentence.
Nothing is arranged. The day is short
but never ends, only folds in, over.
The rooster’s queasy crow starts early
and sickles, and sickles. It’s not the boot,
but the hands that make the boot.
Jocasta, As I Hope She Wore It
—Martha Graham, presenting her costume for Oedipus Rex
What could she say? You tried to find
her anger here, split her pelvis
for an umbilical thrill. You tried
to remake her, but she
refused, with her black candle eyes,
to look into the dank rot
of your spring. It takes some time to roil,
but when it does, the yard pivots—
foil-green flies scatter
from their happy, dog shit homes.
There must be an aphorism here
about thunder as discipline,
how its roll and hone engraves
from inside. Even Queen Elizabeth
once remade herself a virgin
in this soggy, pink light. Because
this I know: that even evil men die.
It’s constitutional. It’s the law.
These are our days of pardon, but
do not treat them with any delicacy.
There are tufts of beauty on the earth,
but the earth is ugly, and will not last.
Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Helen or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020), Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015), and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Online, The Adroit Journal, jubilat, BOAAT, and Crazyhorse, among others. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She is the founding editor of Jellyfish Poetry and co-host of the arts advice podcast Now That We’re Friends. She lives in the mountains of North Georgia, where she directs the Creative Writing program at Young Harris College.