Crystal Cox

Ars Poetica, or, When a Bottle Breaks

Once you tell someone that it’s filled with bullets,
there’s no taking it back. I could say A’s hands
were dripping with them, bullets clanking on the floor
like a broken piggy bank. We had money in it once, maybe,
but it’s hard to remember a time when we didn’t dip our
hands right in. I do remember that piggy’s county fair,
and the Aunt who kept feeding the bottle-man dollars
on my behalf. Atta Girl, he’d say, not entirely unlike
my dad. Atta Girl, and toss me a bloated baseball in its
final stage of decay. I didn’t know enough to respond to him,
just that I couldn’t resign until I made sharded rubble of what
was in front of me. I threw a slugger, my Aunt’s words, but
when those glinting receptacles toppled, all they did was doink.
Plastic. I did learn that I can throw it straight: there’s a defeat
that exists before the body can even usher in desire. I couldn’t break
my addiction to A if I tried. The piggy bank was always plastic, too.
But it was never so much about a moment of impact as it was me leaving
the feeling of his warm body in our bed to tiptoe into the closet and check
the chamber of his gun, or, what awaited us tomorrow.

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Crystal Cox is a MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in Nimrod International, Kissing Dynamite, The Bookends Review and elsewhere. Her poem, "Self-Portrait with Dolly Parton," won the 2022 Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Andrew Grace. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter @crystalxcox.