by Cynthia Atkins
All in by Cynthia Atkins
by Cynthia Atkins
Their arms, almost touching, but not. Made in a factory of hands and chains,
unholy plinths furnished and built to tender our long vowels. Taller than us,
and standing to quell the worry of having nothing to say, if only for the weather,
the shopkeeper’s favorite topic. Wired through the fields, where haystacks are yellow
as newly sharpened school pencils. Now waiting to channel our instruments,
our proxy of voices. Our chorus of gossip taking shape in the chatter of afternoon sun.
As if conductors in a symphony, because the music to our language holds
the long maps to the fossils, bone to bone, house to house. Even the birds are wearing
their darkened silhouettes, outlining the sky where long distances go
to be alone. Our glyphs hanging on the laundry line of clouds,
as if the divine was burrowed inside our need to speak—Greet the day,
kick up the volume, take umbrage, and really listen to someone’s
heart leaping into chords—words thrust first, between a string and a cup.
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Cynthia Atkins is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press, March 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, The Cortland Review, Diode, North American Review, SWWIM Every Day, Tinderbox Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. See more at www.cynthiaatkins.com and @catkinspoet.
by Cynthia Atkins
I took my body out of the hand-me-down
bin. It sagged empty as a winter coat
on its hanger. Believe it or not, once it was chased
by a town-car of clowns—The drunken
pimpled sons of sons of sons
of the Ku Klux Klan.
I was a Jew, a Jew.
My body had kinky hair and a crooked nose.
Not like the girls with bowling-pin white teeth
and doily-tanned toes. The blood of a Jew
on my virgin Kmart underwear.
They shadowed me down aisles,
into a junkyard purgatory of broken toys.
God’s drunk at 2 am
when the fluorescent lights
hone in on the Denny’s bathroom.
Interrogating every truth and blemish.
I did it in the graffiti-riddled stall,
staring down a cracked toilet. My body’s
tongue forced on his dark pulse.
He squeezed my head so hard,
it burned a hole in time.
I counted the headstones
of my people, like tiny boats
in an inlet. One by one, they saved me.
The cuts and wounds filled
not with blood, but umpteen years
of Sweet’N Low and sadness.
I’m easy, tell me what I want to hear.
”Your face is damn ugly.” The next day,
“Kike” and “Slut” Magic Markered
on my locker— a swastika like a jungle gym
for the dead. My name scrawled in every
defiled bathroom stall—Our calls
hollow in the wax of God’s ear.
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Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In The Event of Full Disclosure, and the forthcoming collection, Still-Life With God. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Diode, Florida Review, Flock Lit, Green Mountains Review, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, Tampa Review, andVerse Daily, among others. She lives in Rockbridge County, VA with her family. More info at www.cynthiaatkins.com or @catkinspoet.
by Cynthia Atkins
It has been steam cleaned
in 10 states. Slapped by a mother
spat on by a boss. This is how
everything is fine until it is not.
It changed its mind
like umbrellas brought
on all the wrong days.
It wore shoulder pads and burned
a husband with a curling iron.
It called 911. It did what it had to do.
It held your bag of hygiene, oily
perfume, rotten teeth. Joy and pain
live on the same street.
It has an expiration date.
It hung in the closet like a bad check.
It flagged all the pools of blood
and the grief of mothers.
It was a dirge of old wars and vacant
parking lots. It was the place I sat alone
and cried all nightmare long.
It is a junkyard clock
with dog-chewed hands.
It is God mouthing the anthem
I never learned. It gnawed
at the wind shield, made of rain.
It sat in a diner all night long, waiting
for the lord or the guy with a day job
to take his knife home.
This is the lake that lives within the skin,
that lives with an illness that dangles
like a yo-yo on a string. And another body
beget out of mine, long and wide
as the Rio Grande. The body just wants
something loyal and divine,
a dog’s eyelids fluttering in sleep.
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