Figural
I.
The yellow flowers on ashen land, all lit up,
but a day was a figment I could easily let slip
again. I was out of my body, my body sweating
from the night before, so many nights before,
pushed to the limits of sense. A few drinks in,
everyone so boring, even
that stranger I told was beautiful as they danced
in roller skates, shimmering in the Latin bar. It was New York,
I had a boyfriend, playing the part
though I was well and grown,
and had much more than a boyfriend.
We danced and nothing more.
I promised myself this,
but still fell into depths, throwing up
with no one to hold my hair back, too old to be there.
I want something interesting to happen.
But everything always feels wrong.
(I promised myself to look in your eyes for a long time
when I saw you next—
the distance a fistful of hair at the nape.)
And the bottles of wine I left in the apartment
dripping mulberry color as untouched trees I love back home,
too crooked for the logger’s blade,
entangled with yellow warblers at dusk.
What are we here for if not to draw lines from our bodies
to map the spaces of the beyond?
II.
I promised not to believe every encounter
was a mistake against God.
I watched myself being watched,
as is custom in moments of barefoot performance,
but time was broken and large
long ago with the panged gesture of a rose-thin mouth.
The yellow underwear the neighborhood boys begged to see
me pull down and, so young, I wanted to be seen
regardless of the do you shave? question, which was the running joke,
regardless the dim must of the blue tent in someone’s backyard,
summer billowing with katydids and crickets.
I promised not to go there, to play the victim.
I was also in on it then, just not fully, just not every time.
III.
What I didn’t learn, I practiced in the mirror.
So much later, goldenrod in the distance
not yet saturated with pollen, the marrow of earth.
Behind me, a night moth hit the bathroom window,
again, slamming its body, full contact,
to a tortured rhythm all its own.
I was under the scrutiny of a naked eye,
like most days, my own glass curtain I could analyze,
searching for what is believed to be the truest form.
One hip, the other. Sucking in, angular motions.
But the moth wouldn’t let up.
You’re hurting yourself, I said.
Go the other way. Away from the light.
The globe of contained atmospheric pressure controlling
the pathways of flight, constantly.
Never questioning how we stay attached.
The moth beat its wings against the glass—
how much longer could I watch?
I threw a long silk slip over my reflection,
and walked, in this skin, right through the open door.
Nicole Stockburger is the author of Nowhere Beulah (Unicorn Press, 2019) and has published poetry in Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, Cimarron, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.