Karen Rigby

Girl I Can't Bring Back

Girl in yellow capris, rabbits
appliquéd on each knee, forgive me

for the years I didn’t love you,
or the pale one on a gurney

called anhedonia. Forgive my nested
selves, thin as balsam, who dined

on memory like mammals
that rake what the lion leaves.

Girls with dyed, burgundy hair—
catwalk of grim supplicants—

they never saw their own beauty.
Forgive velvet & wire tongues

that sought cures on the altar
of no good & the year

of emergencies. Girl who built
a marquee of her grief. Forgive

hands like bird bone dioramas,
each hollow a skyless dream.

They were all of them me, in river
cities, blue hours. Inked lines

down their sheets. Forgive each
night I wrote them into blankness.

The moon was never a lozenge,
but a distance no language speaks.

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Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press). New work is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and Southern Humanities Review. www.karenrigby.com