The Single Life

As I age, the absence of my lovers becomes industrial,
an Amazon warehouse, but rather than letting you
imagine the teeming underpaid, the buckets of dildos
and immersion blenders, let the warehouse be empty
and throbbing with cost. Yes, think of the overhead,
which is massive, to keep such a place running with nothing
to fill it and the concrete so smooth, you could skate on it.

Down the road there was deer head left on a storm drain
a few years ago. Its decay made it permeable, velvet
dissolving and eyes swallowed within hours. The head
opened itself to the neighborhood, yet maintained, though,
all the shadowed chambers of February. Who could be
called to haul it out of sight? A children’s book says you
call anyone – the fire department, the police, the library –

in a voice that is naturally small and unanswered. Then
it was gone from the drain, but permanent as a history
of a thing torn free and installed in the street. I would give
my loneliness the head’s softness, its readiness to collapse.
I want to be as unhurried as its model of decay. I don’t want
to care anymore. I may as well ask to have my head taken off.

________

Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher living in Burlington, VT. Her work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Mid-American Review, Fugue, Sixth Finch, The Offing, Inverted Syntax, and the anthology Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman as well as The Book of Donuts and With You: Withdrawn Poems of the #Metoo Movement.