Drop it Like a Bitch

You once asked if I had more courage than fear?

I asked you for more time to answer.

 

You didn’t insist on

who you thought I was, and that—

was fresh. But isn’t each lover a mirror?

 

You taught me fear was a weapon

I turned on myself, and true friends are like whiskey

without the hangover.

 

I used to gather smiles like dead suns, or rather,

I had a small habit of collecting expensive

friends with thin linings—

 

A friend like an inside-out banana

A friend like a ball of wool

A friend like a used needle

 

This is how you sage a spackled past: drop the hand

only one is holding. Trust me, fear inflates the

value of what we clasp.

 

So I was alone on an old stone bridge when a van

slowed in a crackle of gravel

and blocked my path. He had a knife

 

and a mask. Sanity is the surety of courage,

or so we begin. I left fear with the other fripperies

for water lush as bathtub gin.

 

 

---

 

Shari Crane’s poetry appears in The Light Ekphrastic, bottle rockets press, and Beechwood Review, among other places. She lives on Coronado Island.