after Broken Social Scene
by Olivia Treynor
The deer with one antler lives
tonight. In the green studded dusk
I ask the fog for oxygen. I’ve never
been to a trailer park. I think god is a round thing
I can fit in my mouth. My boy knows
how to put things between teeth:
gumsnarl, cheekbite, bonewhite.
Digestion starts at the tongue. Freeze your eggs
before you get old. When your mother was my age
she was reliving her lunch and spoiling her teeth
and counting the reasons to live on one hand.
I’ve been getting stoned and letting the cement
baptize me new. When they asked me to cut
the pig in half I said I can’t, I don’t like blood.
I want my boy to get wasted
and then want me. All my friends split
their wrists. My aunt says if you draw blood
when you pick, it’s because you want to die.
I had more bones, once,
my skull was bloated with teeth. In the plaster cast
of my newborn hand, I’m still small and my fingers
are uncut. I saw a ghost when I was seven
and I’d tell my boy if he’d promise
to keep my secrets someplace the light can’t touch them.
I think about crashing my car constantly. All the cliffs
seem like good hiding places. I never got the treehouse.
I let a stranger wash their beer on my teeth
and drove to the Salton Sea barefoot
and did not crash and did not draw blood,
thank god, thank god,
I changed.
I know why the turtle doves
erupt, shirkers.
Olivia Treynor is a Barnard College student from the upper half of California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Southeast Review, CutBank, Yemassee, phoebe journal and elsewhere. She loves lakes but is scared of the ocean.
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