Stephanie Lane Sutton is a poet and organizer based out of Chicago. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Albion Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, Euphemism, Chicago Weekly, and The Detroit Free Press. Previously she has worked with or appeared alongside many talented artists in her field, including Patti Smith, Gil Scott-Heron and Buddy Wakefield. Currently she is a writer-in-residence at West Side School for the Desperate.

Three Poems (November 20, 2011. Issue 33.)

Malort

Some days you can muster up enough confidence to pick your own songs on the jukebox. Take a shot of malort no more than three years late. It's been almost a week since Easter and you haven't had any chocolate, have consumed more cigarettes than calories, Arnold Palmer like your Moses in the desert, and many things have come to pass. Pick White Stripes, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and The Divynles in that order. Dip out after the eighth "I Touch Myself" and head back to your brainspots, speckled all over the face you forgot to powder, uncomfortable on the unwiped toilet seat, the smell of tequila and shit holding up your nostrils in the beer light. Today, a pigeon will try to land on your hair. You tried to part yourself a different way. Get stuck with twenty minutes of a parade of bikes and wish you could pedal with them, behind the Lounge Guy with a speaker strapped to his back, and think of the good karaoke songs from last night. Think, "This is my statue." Think, "These roads follow the patterns of pedestrians and glaciers." At some point, the pronouns don't seem to matter that much anymore. All have taken their keys out during the passing, the white t-shirts and darkened coats and the faces hidden under hats, the brown paper bags containing discretion, the mud still stuck on the bottom of the shoe. Empty feet and mp3's waiting at the foot of the bed. Turn up the audio. Make the neighbors crazy. Make them ears not be so alone.

Dear Judas

At 5 p.m. today the chill began to set in and I remembered.
The dusk clouds grew heavy. The eyes began to wander towards naps.
I ate dinner, alone, in bed, not thinking of you.

Weeks ago we saw each other
passing through the corridor, trying to move
with the walls, disappear like marble,
your eyes little lizards dashing under dead leaves
and mine, frozen
mouth barely moving
as I ducked into the feathered blue coat of the woman walking with me.

It's been six months, at most, now,
and I've been afraid to count.
You gave me up like that,
left me on the living room floor
heavy with sleep & grasp & blankets
and a lingering taste, penetrative
you wrung around, thinking
If the firepit could be so beautiful,
I'd try to make it love me too

after I had waited outside the gravesite for you
someone
to come help me move
the boulder, for nights, for three of them,
only the applied visions coming to haunt me
when you came to wake me up, and I wept, and waited some more.

I am awake most nights.
I spend most my time alone, to others,
I am either a priest or a whore
which is still probably what they thought before
you came to me, wet, from a rainstorm
you invented as you watched me sleep
thinking of my dreams, of the reason
why I waited so long for him to come back
and why when it was you, you couldn't take me,

wishing we had never moved the boulder,
that I had never waited, that you had never watched,
that we didn't tell the stories like some god had been talking to us,
that I couldn't be the undersigned, could be anything else,
and you could be, too, no more legends

like you were the door I was trying to open,
a slab of wood that would never know
who, exactly, had carried it on its shoulders—

I want to sleep unalone again.
I can't until you get out of my bed.

Blue, the Color Blue

She left the painted leaf
between the covers of naked lunch
and her name inked on your skin, pinned
into you with basement-light clarity

By the time she called you only to hang right back up
she had become buried under the black permanent line
traced with insistency

The breath of pages dropped into my lap, pressed blue
like the ocean.
I asked: what's the Puerto Rican word for ocean?

he said: she would have kept it in her hair
(if she pulled her hair back)
instead she left it in the pages of your favorite book
you gave to her

perhaps so that it could fall into your lap
as if she had whispers, as if she had
fallen cold
& asleep
so that you would touch
what was not given

shutter, instead
at the dead air that comes
after hearing the voice
you never wanted again:

what's the Puerto Rican word for betrayal?

Blue, the color blue
ninety-five percent of the surface of the world,
most of the sky; blue—
what she left
for you, to find, in finding
with the dead dying leaf
in the turning pages
I watched him keep

what she put in place
for the hindsight, blue,
the foreigner, blú,
the backwash, the stab back, the whiplash
traded in for a skinny blond to be
so sweet
so
all
black
and
blue

The water: blue.
Her bloodlines: blue.
Silver bullets: blue.
Page turned: blue. Paper cuts,
blue. Glue on acrylics, also blue.
The skin under the line over her name

blue, blue, blue.

Blue like the ocean.
Blue like the word for
forget. Blue
like the color
like the collar
like the eyes
of someone new.