The Petrichor Phoenix
I.
Careening around Potomac Crossing
with a Camel Filterless hanging from your lips
just like Tom Waits used to smoke
and besides the slit between your legs
you are just like him
smoking and drinking until conscious
is only a word you were taught once
blends of coffee and whiskey as dark
and deeper than your cunt
soaking their tasters in the
thick juices twanged with something
that reminds you of sweetness
wilder, though, like the ancient A.T.
the green tunnel slinking off the road
as you take a turn too fast in the squat
Honda Civic you feel as if someone has
just punched you in the stomach
because you swallowed all the air around you at once
but you grab the wheel just in time
and yank the machine back into its proper
place between the lines and on your bare
legs you feel a tingle like the memory of an orgasm
remembering the word “conscious”
you realize it’s the cigarette
fallen from the lips of your mouth
burning through your summer skin
without meaning to you think of
Sunflower Sutra and how Brooklyn
industrials must have stood up to the
blazing ball of fire returning to the horizon
but you are soft and sweet like honeysuckle
and you burn
you didn’t mean to, but you burned.
II.
Glass clinks, you remind yourself
when picking out which bottles of
vodka will fit into the hole you cut
into the lining you of your purse and
which labels match the copy of Leaves
of Grass you clutch like the New Testament
pulling out your copy of Howl only when
you’re intending to start a conversation about
Sunflower Sutra screaming to you when
you feel trapped by Helios and all the
myths surrounding education and how you
lament falling in love because
all it ever did was twist your face
towards a never motionless Sun
If it’s all the same, you tell the nurse,
I’ll just wear this and you can throw away
the clothes you cut off me but if you
could find me a pair of shoes that
would really help
Bells tinkle against the glass door
to the WinCo Foods and you remember
not to steal the glass bottles because
they clink but it probably doesn’t matter
without a purse to hide them in
you grab what you came for
and run.
III.
The scar on your ankle is still
purplish-prasine which you suppose
means that it’s healing because at least
it’s not the crimsonish-black of dried blood
the body tried to heal the gape with–
and without alcohol for 13 entire days
the skin wrapping your bones all
looks prasine and plucked of lines
as you struggle to stand from the wheelchair
new flesh stretched tight around where the holes once were—
places that you leaked out of in droplets and
then streams of warm fluid that made you
cry and cry and cry until it felt like you were a
waterfall pouring gossamer threads from clouds
like some kind of god exhausted by omnipotence–
IV.
Wishing you required only water to grow
you envy the plants making their food from
one element and inspiration to follow the rising
star that stares at you through drawn eyelids
demanding a walking waking consciousness that
you are learning to use and know rather than
just refer to
pausing to read a Shelley poem and lapping
up drips of water from a plastic container
that goes in and goes out of you and
everyday feels like this drain of water from
your body and you wonder if the drain
will ever Empty
the customer buys a cup of coffee from you
and slurps it hot and you’re grateful in that
moment that the monied exchange is for
consumption of the water strained over beans
and not of your pussy juices leaking
over mouths
falling into a bus seat you are soaked
by the May rain and the used smell of wetness
and sweat collecting on pressed collared
business folk plugged in separately to their
own private worlds electrifying their ear drums
With songs of ourselves.
V.
East facing windows are Aeolian lyres to
the sunrise in a place you carry the keys
for which, every now and again, is so surprising
to notice because they are your keys and
they unlock your door and no one fears you’ll
burn it all down
but perhaps they should, you think, perhaps
they should worry about me in the ashes
of my past lives lived one-thousand miles per hour
at a time and uncollectable in poetry and too
plainly tragic and non-unique for prose, you think
of the fire in this way
pulling the portable space heater close to
exposed legs under a twenty dollar dress
from Old Navy you turn back to check your
email and start to panic at all the expectations
they have for you, you the little bird still spitting
ash from its mouth
Little bird, you call me, and I blush because
you love birds and that must mean you love me
and the hollows of my bones fearing not even
the entrancement of the sun but remembering
The Ichorus story, wondering if they had you
In mind
your phone rings and the caller ID shows
a woman you met last night at a meeting someone
still burning and the fantasy of the flame
calls to you as you answer the phone and
in that instant you see the span of Phoenix’s
wings and are safe in knowing you will always be in love
with the burn.
Sara Marron is a writer from New York City currently living in Washington, D.C., studying to become a lawyer. She believes in the power of words in every application, with imagination adjudicating as the great equalizer. She has two cats and uses a chess table for meals. Read more of her work here: https://sites.google.com/view/saracmarron