In First Person
poetry by Suzanne Grove
In First Person
Tell me about the tornadoes,
about the marsh wet with saline
and Saltgrass and the heat we folded
into, an air thick enough to feel like
moving through the swarm, through people—
to feel like being loved.
Tell me about the muskrat asking
if we were playing god when you grabbed
your shotgun, about your torso’s heat sucking
swamp-like at my back, scolded with sun.
I was ready to be undone and undone again
against the soft arc and crook of your spine.
Tell me about my mother’s house where she
fed you blue crab, kept your favorite liquor
in the cabinet that fed my father’s disease.
Where we hid away in the cool of the root
cellar, our syntax confused among spoonfuls of
jam and apples caught up in cellular respiration.
Tell me about how I later had to stay there,
in bed, and tell me about how you came often
and often and often and then not at all.
Blame fear, blame desolation. Blame the fact
that only men are permitted to disappear into the
wide spaces, to disappear for freedom.
Tell me about the honeymoon, the fig-tree
afternoons and hot stammer of our bodies and
tell me again about how hard it is to hold a hand that shakes.
Forgive me. The medicine drip makes it hard to
remember. Tell me a story. Tell me my story.
Tell it to me in first person.
Seventeen
poetry by Suzanne Grove
Seventeen
In the fabric: a glut of bowling alley smoke and fryer grease,
t-shirts washed to nothing and your dad’s New Amsterdam gin.
The crawling hot, wet on the windshield of your brother’s Mercury sedan,
his Florida-legal windows never revealed the migratory patterns of our hands.
Everywhere—everywhere new tastes for the body, and for our bodies.
Helium yowl of dope and grass blades slicing our bare ankles
and my boyfriend’s inner thigh like an organ.
We sang no songs, only the public radio station playing smooth jazz,
10 PM Sunday and slurp of Svedka in the backseat,
faces sun-tired and perfect.
What did we have to remember?
Stay safe and stay safe and—years later, we were much smarter,
yet Julie still disappeared on her dawn jog and Ron had one Vicodin,
one, two, seven Vicodin and had to be incubated in the ICU.
And my disassociation came after a Rush Week in which I did not
actively participate. One touch, two touch, no and no and no, no, no
until it became a manic prayer.
What did we have to remember?
Buckle your seatbelt.
Brush your teeth before you kiss your mother and father goodnight.
Suzanne Grove
Suzanne Grove is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and received the J. Stanton Carson Grant for Excellence in Writing while studying at Robert Morris University. She currently serves as the short fiction editor for CRAFT literary magazine, and she finds joy in helping other writers to share their stories with the world. Her poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Penn Review, Porter House Review, Raleigh Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She received honorable mention in Farrar, Straus, & Giroux's June 2019 contest for her short fiction piece "Shift Work.” Find her online at SuzanneGrove.com.