Elisabeth Sharber
Diapause
Sumatra is the best denial phase coffee.
Three years ago is the best today.
You look at me, a moving statue.
Our fingers fold into streams.
I trip over a bicycle.
I think God will reward me
for loving you like a wife
by rolling back time
like a wheelchair
over a cracked sidewalk
before your bed became a desk,
your sweaty phone the tongs
to transport your father
and apologize to his nurses.
The dismantled television
a familiar apocalypse,
as if the answer lay
in the severed connections
between wire and coil.
The respirator hiccups.
****
I pretend you see my chest cave in
behind a rack of cobweb books,
the rain’s shadow melting
on my suspended breath.
You think, wow.
She loves me so much.
I should take pity on her
and love her again.
It is cruel not to love her.
I pretend we are not
parallel mirrors
incising each other’s oblivion.
Two globulous black holes
dragged into each other
by a ravenous arrow.
****
I’m the asshole today.
I yell in the open space
where “the children” walk,
which is to say
“our chosen disruption of the peace.”
I do not lower my vagrant voice,
like a Wallstreet Bro
with you’re-welcome energy.
Mephitis curls up from the ocean,
where there are “plenty of fish.”
Some of it looks like you, some of it doesn’t.
I hate it, have dinner with it,
for the same reason.
****
Stage four. Arithmetic crumbles
into lobel tributaries.
What number comes after three?
What does green look like?
Rage–the only shape left in the rubble.
The last time I say your name
I will almost have forgotten it.
****
Every night
I put us back in the coffee shop
tracing a lithography
on my nervous system.
If I go there enough
I can feel you again.
I fumble with pretend happiness
like an armful of packages,
pinching razors in my stomach.
The weight of eye contact
pulls my lids to the napkin.
I link my fingers around yours,
and exhale shameful ecstasy.
You retreat and apologize.
The wave passes.
My ribs oxidize
thick, sturdy, and still.
****
The clouds flip their bellies over.
Copper wisps in
and I remember
tomorrow begins with the letter T.
Elisabeth Sharber teaches English, Etymology, Creative Writing, Poetry, and Composition at Hope Academy High School. When she isn't teaching or writing poetry, she likes to blog, do improv, and get lost in the woods. She has been published in The American Aesthetic, FLARE, Driftwood Press, The Chestnut Review, Bending Genres, Sand Hills Literary, The CHILLFILTR Review, and Pensive.
