Revenge

When he tells me he loves me,

he has Kleenex sticking from one nostril

for the nosebleed, and I’m pushing raw meat

to his blackened eye. He gasps the words

from between bruised ribs, whimpering

with a split lip, chipped tooth. I’m wondering

why he waited, and why he thinks it matters now,

now that it’s been a year at least

since we both fell in love

with that bright-eyed bohemian girl

in Spain, who took a photo for us

when we asked, then stayed the night

and ran off with him in the morning.

I don’t even remember her name.

And I’m not about to ask what happened

to her, won’t ask who busted him up like this,

whose honour he was defending, or where

he’s been for all this time. Instead I say

come in and of course you can stay, I’ll bring

Band-Aids and beer and we’ll catch up,

talk about Spain and those good old days

as though nothing strange ever happened.

And he tells me I’m so good to him, too kind,

and he doesn’t deserve a friend like me. But

I’m not being kind, after all. Just patient. This

pity is a quiet revenge, the perfect payback,

and we both know it. For once we have something

urgent to share, something about heartbreak,

half-truths, and the sick vitality of obsession.

And when silence presses sharp angles into us

again, we’ll know how to push right back

with both hands.

Sometimes I Find Myself

ravenous. Thin

as an edge, with

the teeth of a wolf.

And sometimes

I find myself

as a Victorian portrait

or in a map ripped

from an ancient book –

sometimes I find myself

singing along a crowded street

or muttering here

into an empty room.

Sometimes

I find myself naked

at a tall window

sentimentalizing

the moon –

otherwise I find myself

in the curve of the kettle

or as a greasy spoon,

or in tealeaves

at the bottom of the cup

full of holes. I find

myself empty

as an overturned bowl,

while sometimes

I find myself drunk

and walking home alone.

Or sometimes

I’m holding a jar of beach glass,

a rare feather

and a pocketful of stones.

These moments I find myself

are carved

into a fragment of bone

torn from the body

of a wild creature –

sometimes the wolf’s,

Emily is a graduate student at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. Recent or forthcoming poetry publications include The Claremont Review, Shorthand (via Toronto’s Diaspora Dialogues), Carte Blanche (via the Québec Writers’ Federation), Voices (through the University of Toronto), Black Heart Magazine, FringeLIT, StepAway Magazine, and ditch,. She has also collaborated with McGill’s “Poetry in Performance” project, and is a recent fellowship recipient for the Summer Literary Seminars International 2012.