Two Poems for Jordan
*content warning: suicide
If I sat in the Grand River Target parking lot again, I’d gag. We called your Chinese boyfriend on speaker and asked him if Taiwan was a country, then we told him someone from Taiwan was in the room for fun. Wet wet hair. I always have to buy a toothbrush when I stay at a hotel. Memories are soft or hard, I touch that day relentlessly to feel chinchilla fur against my chest, even though you hated my leather purses. Stop, please, none of this is easy. Dill grows like a weed and my mint never sprouted. Why is one of us always sobbing on our phone calls? Do you think I could be a stripper? A customer asked if we served lattes and I said “no, we only have espresso.” They believed me and I think I might be a cunt. Forever now, I will be furiously, unabashedly, courageously messaging your mother on Facebook to tell her I’m thinking of her. Stephano from The Tempest sexually assaulted me when I was 16, Shia LeBeouf’s Holes played in the background. How can I explain that I miss physical labor? Sunburns peeling my scalp in sheets, fresh mulch in fists, calling to stray cats. Rotten tomatoes grew to feed the hungry gush in my hands as lungs squeezed too hard. A white sliding box contains all our well wishes—that memory is hard. Eats at my flesh to get fat and tender, chipping teeth on my bones. The mason jar snow globe I made for you that Christmas said “Home Sweet Home” because I thought you would move to Iowa like you always talked about. Green hair and green eyes. I wanted always.
My father sketched “life isn’t fair” into my palms as a child, I wish he’d branded it inside my eyelids. They say it takes two men to change a light bulb but my fiancé does it all by himself, now every room glows blue or red or green. No one told me how hard the skin would be. The day of your funeral I bought $60 worth of candles and burned through them in two weeks. I can’t do this every day. You missed my cat’s birthday party, I’ll throw another one. All my grandfather does is watch game shows and Gunsmoke. If someone tells me one more time I can handle this, I will make them watch me rinse my body with gasoline and dry it with flames. How do you say “suck my dick” in Polish? I fucking hate you. Cigarette smoke moved me into a new apartment, soaked all my belongings in fabric softener and blistered my body with bleach, now I look at tobacco and salivate. Men with the mother wound will never recover until they’ve killed her at the age she gave birth to them, slitting their own throats in the fury. The biggest pumpkin I ever carved molded with green spiderwebs inside. Some days I make an altar to your body, leave mandarins as offerings, encircle myself in salt, and recite everything you ever wanted in an incantation. Your blood was scalding. Other days I don’t care what you wanted, because after everything, you wanted this, the thing I’ll never get over. I said my cat’s name was short for Charcoal to lighten the mood. I was never connected enough to my body, always thought I would fall and bleed internally if I did a cartwheel wrong. Your hair looked pretty curled tight to your head, like a pageant queen. The first screaming match I had with my mother as an adult was when she told me it was going to get better, as if people could flake off and regrow like skin cells. Leaking frozen coffee ran sticky between my fingers in that hospital parking lot, it was almost normal.
Hailey Coulter is an MA student in creative writing at Eastern Michigan University. She is a freshman composition instructor at Eastern Michigan University, and a graduate assistant for YpsiWrites, a writing-focused Ypsilanti non-profit. Her work has previously appeared in the Oakland Arts Review, and in April 2022 she was a finalist for the Judith Siegel Pearson award.