Beth Gordon: Blood Salt
Hungover Sonnet: Valentine’s Day
It started with $4 martinis,
with the frozen ocean bringing you home,
with a starved realization that Wednesday
is good as any to swaddle my nerve
endings with whiskey, morning will arrive
in my cold mouth one way or another,
it started with the ninth funeral mass,
another baby who slept and awoke
outside his body so new that the skull
bones had not linked and locked, with a phone call,
my son’s voices returned, living shadows
with copper bones, he tells me talk louder,
with vodka in the second glass, April
snowstorm, with hawks that could easily spot
nestling rabbits against the white-wrapped dirt,
with my car dead on the highway as if
to say, this is journey’s ends, with blood salt,
with hibiscus gin in the third glass, with
a swelling in my uterus, the way
I divided once a month into three
better women, the butcher, the baker,
the candlestick maker, a trail of nail
clippings that even the hamster would not
swallow, with the muddy Mississippi
crawling onto dry ground, circumventing
sand bags, slate, steel, it started with the fourth
glass, with honey mescal and lime, waiting
for you to pull the carpet from its roots.
Disguise the dust with particle board, crack
the eggs, boil the soup, leave the key behind.
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in St. Louis, MO. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize; and her chapbook, Particularly Dangerous Situation, is forthcoming from Clare Songbird Publishing House. She is also poetry editor of Gone Lawn.
