Mamie Morgan

Everyone I’ve Danced with Is Dead

I don’t know how to build the world I’ve asked you to build,
how to write him taking you hood-up against the engine of his Pontiac
without sending your poem into some country song of a Saint Tammany Parish

childhood you can never get back. One winter my father bought my mother
a hatbox of lingerie including her first thong & she spent that grace-note of Christmas
buck-dancing through the living room like some vaccinated mule, those hunter green

drawers upholstered to her head. What else is a woman to do
after the man she’s known twenty years puts to her the task of reimagining
their own life? She sent him with a receipt back to the drawing board of stores

confused. She sent him out into the earth like a fool. I don’t know
why people act the way they do, but one night in hospice my dad dreams he’s
a Brazilian painting & Mom climbs into his bed saying, Show me what you look like.