April Manteris is originally from Slidell, Louisiana. She currently works and writes in Tallahassee, FL.
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How We Love
Sunny capital of oversexed flies
and homeless motherfuckers,
depression of porn shops
and pine, gulf-hugging armpit—baby,
this is where you built a bridge
to your assassin,
determined as the moth stuck
between two screens,
willing as pink hibiscus
flowering every day in a burnt yard,
I have been in this house
where, you say,
you have coddled him, where light,
like cockroaches,
shifts and scurries,
I imagine you in his kitchen, stuffing
yourself on grits and drop
biscuits, a desperate
Gretel loving him more each time
he stews your heart.
I have overeaten
at love’s table, scraped against boarded
up windows and locksmithed
locks. I know
the shape of your puncture and I can
show you how
to celebrate grief:
think how all the teeth in a little girl’s
mouth will leave her,
how the woman
on Monroe slackens her jaw every day
below birds who sit fat
and buzzing
on power-lines, how mothers rarely abandon
their children—here
the closest river
will always be the Mississippi. These nights
are nothing. The moon’s
a smart beggar,
but collapsible as a salt-lick on fire.
Tomorrow may come
without him,
but after that, I swear, it’ll just keep coming.