Poems by Robert Reid Drake

Writing

Jul 28

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You Never Thought Not to Tell

But he still doesn’t know— how you got hard
watching Porky Pig fall from his fishing boat,
basted and bound at the bottom of the ocean.
Someone else for supper, you thought. How
you played shepherd with the lambs on your
sheets in the summertime, lead them to safety
in the folds of yourself— still learning to bend in
ways that felt natural. Celebrate that which is
still wholly yours.

Think about it when he breaks the arm rest in
your car. Think about it when he’s t-boned after
taking you to the bus station. Think about it
when he makes you cry in the parking lot of
your favorite video store. How long did it take
to plunge a knife like that?

********************************************

Our Lady of Garden & Gun. The hair on their
legs give blessing to pansies along footpaths.
Village to village they sing with subtlety & to the
spiritual welfare of the whole of life: yeah, Lie to
the cops, yeah we playing stupid. Our Lady of
Fitting Room Mirrors. squeeze tree trunk thighs
into slim cut Levi's and sigh relief with the
stretching seams. Run a thumb down a thread
as remembrance of what it takes. Hold yourself
together. Our Lady of Concern That We Smoke
Weed More Often Than is Healthy. With his
insight and sensibility he can pierce the depths,
but in his innate frivolity he fetches up from
them not a jewel but a tinsel ornament. Our
Lady of Tattoos We Might Regret if They Were
More Visible. But break open a pen & give
yourself four more in the month of March. By a
window wait for the last clumps of your first
winter alone to slide from the gutter, fall dead
behind the compost. Our Lady of Unread Emails.
Negotiate your meeting in the car so long that
your battery dies. Tell the man who's dick you
have seen from seven angles that god has it in
for you, that twelve blocks is too far to walk in
this kind of cold. You're sorry, you're sorry, but
this is much bigger than you. Our Lady of Well
Intentioned Afflictions. It gets better. It gets
better. Oh, it gets better. Someone will point out
a spectral gem and say it's something other than
far away.

********************************************

Massive Delight for Runaway Scouts. or, Troubled Fun in Troop 69.

There is no foot path, no blue blazes to point a
way. It is thick, just thick- the camera man’s
breath, the rhododendron’s guard, a spinning
arm outstretched and a cotton mouth clasped
at the tail. No one knows when to strike, in what
direction. We can forget ourselves in motion.

In an almost accurate Boy Scout uniform, his
black brow in exaltation, laughter breaks past
tongue and teeth. A worried glance shoots
quick into the camera. The second boy arrives
and attention turns. The snake is thrown. The
same broad hand slides across the other
scout's belly, pulls him in by the bend of the
back. But cut to the snake— black body bent
beneath the leaves, coiled shaft pulsing in
blood or breath. Jaw opens to the edge of
unhinge, pale mouth patient. We can forget
ourselves but for a second. Every body is a
foreign shore.

Robert Reid Drake is soft butch, pansy poet currently living in Washington, DC. He is a former host & curator of Juniper Bends, a free & femme-centric reading series in Asheville, NC. He is a graduate of UNC Asheville and his work has appeared in Assaracus, The Birds We Piled Loosely, and Crab Fat Magazine, as well as the collaborative zine, Doing It Mostly Wrong. On the internet he is sweet, sweet, sweeterthanspit.

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