Brooke Harries

How to Test Gold

Some stories only come out for certain people.
When the moon comes down so low,
what does it want? 
To dry the clothes on the line too?
It was romantic because he was talking about himself
but it seemed like it could be about me.
Everything romantic is cryptic.
In the end I gave my love a miniature coffin full of poems
he could unfold and unfold.
Now tines reveal afterlives of eating as I'm cleaning forks,
looking for the new sponge I hid around the sink.
It takes a year to find out how bad a person is.
Everything is a distraction from the fact
you can forward anyone’s U.S. mail 
up to six months at a time.
I forgot the days of the week in French
but I feel like one is almost like mediocre.
Maybe the middle day, our Wednesday.
I’m in the cool approach distance
hanging around like James Dean.
If I see him my eyes will be dancing on cobblestone
into a place only old stars go, a woozy wanting
not to lose a single thought of him sleeping
with more pillows than the Elephant Man like he joked.
With compassion, with bored reaching.
How my grandma would put a tissue over a lollypop  
and made Halloween ghosts that way.
I heard you can choose to stop thinking of certain things.
It sounds miraculous,
like putting a birdcage to sleep with a sheet.
One time my great-uncle chased a bull out on the road
back into his pasture using a tissue and gentle coaxing.
I still wonder,
was he using the tissue like the red cloth in a bullfight,
or did he just happen to have it?
I still hurt under the freight yard.
I waited for someone like this for so long.
He was the type of guy who water-colored
with his back to me.
I want him to land on my lap like a lost purebred.
It happened once;
I named him Jackson.
He was ten years my dog.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brooke Harries’ work has appeared in Salamander, Sixth Finch, Laurel Review and elsewhere. She has received the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship and the UC Irvine Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry. She has an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi.