Katie Byrum
Claire Anna Baker "Anti-Shock" (Detail)
To the River House
It happened every night in pieces: you left me
talismans from the other side, dreamthings
with a sideways-sense that blurred
when I tried to back away. You were tethered in place,
sunk in the mud near a threadbare bench.
Your tired eaves. That yellow face whose windows
watched the river slap at the banks when the boats went by.
I was driving away from you, my eye
on the rearview. I watched your trees recede
into a green hum, your yellow behind me and behind me
till something gave like floodwater:
a long thread unraveling.
A feeling in the hands
like braiding hair.
Now I look at my life
with a seasonal madness,
frantic at what I left behind:
banana plants with brown edges
that curled like hair, old photographs
we pulled from the wall, those white squares
where the frames had been.
Glosa
They love a night like this.
Obliteration’s wild and quiet rush,
the star-blown snow
so beautiful it makes them stupid.
—Paul Violi, “Buckaroo”
Amped up, off the clock but still
in uniform: slip-proof shoes that love
when a crack in the routine opens
and they find the night
dragging them by the hand,
pouring tequila shots they will drink
down an ice luge dusted with crushed-up
Doritos—a little sloshy now,
rushing out the door to chase frozen stillness
past Doppler voices, hectic plaid and taxi lights
so red and white insistent and slurry they shut their eyes
and tumble back into the star-blown snow
and lie there dwarfed into silence by cold and stars,
belly up to the sky and reaching
each for the other’s hand in a drunk and snowy dark
so beautiful it makes them stupid.
Bio
Katie Byrum was born and bred in Kentucky and now resides in Brooklyn. She writes poems by day and manages a bar in the city at night.
Notes:
The poem “To the River House” comes from pieces of dreams, images that wash up on my head’s shore.
Tequila down a Cool Ranch Dorito-dusted ice luge is a real thing called a “dude ranch.”