Mary Simmons

I Cannot Take Your Call Right Now, I Have Become a Glass Museum

A story? I’m all out of stories,
bodies, too, I’m afraid, because,            you see,
I left mine in the glass museum after I broke
the last Sweeney Punch Bowl, spilled it            like a charade of stars
tunneling into the carpet, or maybe I mean earthworms, sparkling
little earthworms, because stars are lazy bastards,       never dug
in all their lives, never learned how.

That punch bowl could have held sixteen gallons
             of earthworms
             of the cheapest champagne that isn’t really champagne because it’s from Minnesota or somewhere like that
             of unwanted fish baking in the sun
             of my teeth, which keep growing back in dreams, no matter how many gums I lick, no
matter how many times I stick my tongue in the hole & fish for a last bit of marrow, for some way
to stop myself from coughing up so many mirrors.

I know that when I die I will keep bleeding,                     fish just spilling
out of me, dirtying my nightgown, bartering my ghost
for parts. An auction of porcelain birds.            & because I’m generous,
I’ll throw in the house fire that ate a Sweeney Punch Bowl raw,
dipped in cocktail sauce, a paltry serenade
but it did the trick.

             No, I’m not bitter. I’d pawn my soul off for any old dead dear poem.
The white flint of skulls never amused me
much. I went looking for laurel & found, instead,
a valley of annealers, a man-made lake of stained glass laughing
with its floodcolors, serial technicolor the crunch of deveined leaves,
             & it was the worms who did it
             I swear & I never was this clumsy in all my life
             until I held three white stones in my palm
             & I knew glass & paper & smoke that tastes
             like oranges, rotten on the tree
 
& it’s only a spine if it’s a body,              only a body
if it can hold sixteen gallons of dead dragonflies
nothing more                 & nothing less.
 
Let me tell you about glass museums. The signs say DO NOT TOUCH
& the signs say THIS ISN’T THE AFTERLIFE                   & the signs say
SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT.
 
I broke the last Sweeney Punch Bowl & now I am a glass museum
& my carpets won’t be replaced for another sixty-two years
so you’d better get used to my blood squelching in your shoes.
 
             It’s a sound you can’t really scrub from yourself.
             & believe me, I’ve tried.
 
 
 

Mary Simmons is a queer writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she is the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from One Art, Moon City Review, Yalobusha Review, The Shore, Whale Road Review, and others.