Autobiography
I was battening everything down so I wouldn’t worry.
I was in a park with another group on a blanket,
salt and vinegar on my lips.
I was in your head, I was on her mind,
I was anywhere but here for myself. I love you like Henry James loves fate.
His characters break on the shore of it,
make another character of it.
I was there to impress you, to make you take my picture,
to do one funny thing in a parking lot
to right your mood before you drove away a stranger.
I was the sigh of a dog in a purse with eyes on you.
I knew the news was getting worse.
I wanted to cover every possibility
with monogrammed towels,
Kennedy sailing in white trousers,
determine a favorite feeling about music:
a spell that fell all over the beach.
I was sibling words. I was rapt and agog.
A rose on the table in an Italian restaurant.
I was the jukebox with really only
Sinatra and “Tequila” on it.
I was in your yard drinking water out of a hose.
I would always flip the tablecloth
and have dinner again.
I thought you’d be back,
but I don’t know.
By sunset I was made ordinary by homesickness.
Palo Verde Road
Somewhere between laundry room couples and whoever braided branches to look like a snake then left them on the courtyard table and me there is a lady with a raucous laugh I’ve never seen.
I hear her laughter waiting for clothes in the dryer over the forgettable sounds of new cars. She probably watches football and has curly hair. Every day I like it here more.
At my desk I keep looking out the window at the laundry room shack and its trellis, the green and yellow leaves hanging.
When I smile for a picture I am only trying to look how I did in a past picture. The one for whom I smiled was distant then, and is now, even in approximations, wholly absent.
Here is a place he’s never seen. Fast lizards cling like static on dark coral walls. Twice now out of my basket and into my hands came a matching pair of socks, side by side.
Brooke Harries' work has appeared in Arkansas Review, Salamander, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from UC Irvine and is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she serves as Associate Editor of Mississippi Review.