Adrian Blevins

Two Poems

Northern Status Anxiety

Peed once with X in a dull alley. Just a little wiping chat about the weather. Knew Y some too. Just a trifling lobby exchange, but still. Was on a panel with Z. But was already with T. Oh, and slept with A and B and told C once she had salmonella. Or was it E. coli? Drunk maybe. Off her ass. And was once on a flight with D. Stared for three hours at the back of that little woman’s creepy neck. Dated the boyfriend also of E, who was nowhere near as important as A and B and even C, so why she did want to touch her blithely on the cheek in a cathedral where there’d be tents for some reason and flashlights and lamps and matches and Bics?

Overall Status

Overall Status was the dull little roar of a person. You might even call her Zero Float. She didn’t carp or whine. She did not drink. She didn’t sing. She went to bed before Lawrence O’Donnell and did not ever sing or drink thanks to the Children’s Choir at her house way back in 1968 all got up in the loud but chaste finery of the ragbag dross of the faux fur required of them by the fashion rules of it being Christmas in America in 1968.

There was also lots of forest green, she remembered and guessed you called it, and blood red or whatever. And there was snow. It had been snowing all day long that day.

Her father was sleeping in his recliner behind her, and did not wake when the choir’s bells outside the front door began to ring. There were little bits of beer slobber on his collar. And there was Lawrence Welk on the TV with the volume off—she could see his piano out of the corner of her child-eye. Or was that Liberace?

Her father’s sleeping hands rested on his sleeping thing below the bulbous belly. They held it, making a tent masking it that escalated it.

The Children’s Choir said something about the faithful, and sang ye and ye. Overall Status shivered then, and shut the savage door.