Elizabeth Wing

Rasputin asks for a second cup of wine

O they say it’s the wine making us dizzy like this:    But as children            didn’t we whirl in the
cherry orchards           till falling?
For this one,    I think we’ll need the crowbar. No men.        We die like airbags.

Hold panic on my lap a block of epoxy and human teeth.     And everything else is a kielbasa on
a stringpulled away      & pulled away & pulled away.
Often I cannot sit still long enough to microwave tea water and I want to make a pinata with real
animal entrails.

This is why we can’t have nice things.                       And no one warned me that Doctor
Bronner's peppermint soap burns the groin.     One must at times such as these leap from the
shower shouting   ALL ONE! ALL ONE OR NONE!

I do not want to be watched over by saints if they look like this:
Porcupined with arrows, eyes on platters.      In the shade of the fig tree my fever breaks.
No visions.
Sometimes I said I could make the blood clot. That I could trace the powerline to the power.
Sometimes I said I was a volcanologist.    Sometimes a furnace, repair technician,
Or an egg yolk examiner,        or the one they bring in to keep the heart pumping when they cut a man open,         or the one who studies the sun.

But it is a fact that I am a child up after bedtime.       Please. I am eavesdropping in the hallway,   
inching closer. Please.             If you may.     I am trying to listen.     Please pour me this
second cup of wine.

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Elizabeth Wing is a writer and trail worker based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington Square Review, ALOCASIA, +doc, 7x7 and numerous other venues.