Five bodies of the moon
The town drunk slipped
antifreeze in his morning orange juice.
The ME drew glycol from his blood.
I heard it from the beetle woman.
She cuts people open too.
And she says with death comes moonlight.
She raises burying beetles
in her living room. Drops a carcass
and watches them eat flesh and lay eggs.
First the mouth, cheeks, muscle, then
deeper: into the stomach, thigh, chest.
Eggs determine time of death.
The Hanson’s boy, found in the ravine,
had his cheeks chewed out,
rice filling his mouth.
He’d been dead nine months.
And in town
the union strikes the drilling pay
and marksmen stop shooting wolves.
But the beetle woman does not mind;
she likes dogs.
Someone’s second wife
funneled barbiturates, her body swirled
muddy in the backyard doghouse
shadow falling over the blonde.
The town can’t afford the oil
they jerk from the ground.
The state trooper, barrel stuck in
his mouth like a childhood thumb,
lay near the highway onramp, prone
the wind whistling.
Most scrape coins and head
to drink. All in the town bar
ride the mechanical bull.
But of the dealers, you can’t
buy meth at a reasonable price.
It’s a far cry from here to city
and the car won’t take to road.
I may be next.
I remember it was gray
I had ripped it from my body.
The lump of un-me.
The town walked on by –
I stood waiting.
When the milk goes gray
the clumps soften in tap water,
carton crushed in a compactor.
Blood rolling hip to ankle
I went to hang the wash.
Blood freckling the carpet
dried black,
yellowed at the edges.
Plasma dries faster than blood.
A doctor told me that.
I was not belted
to the table.
I took pills.
I only saw it a minute—
Headsong
Weeding through droves,
I balance a cocktail flat on my palm.
A song or a sin?
Are those the choices?
I join him at the tabletop,
but don’t ask about snowfall
in the open ocean, or
why my mother left with a bang.
Across from me, the woman’s throat
gleams oxblood on a chain.
I want to tell her —
the Costco parking lot by my house floods.
I’ve swum it drunk.
I’m wearing my funeral dress,
I want to tell her.
He’s in his wedding suit.
My mouth filled with olives,
the salt pickling and we get up to leave.
I stuff my martini glass down his coat.
My skin betrays a blueprint dress —
a zipper puckering down my back,
nubbing over my spine. The thunderheads
break to rain.
I’m naked in the kitchen,
martini glass in the sink, tap water
leaping over the sides.
Morgan Plessner is a second year MFA student at the University of New Hampshire studying poetry under professors such as Charles Simic. She has been published in Ink & Voices and Foliate Oak and has previously received the Ann Pazo Mayberry Award for poetry.