Blue Hole #4

Erin Slaughter

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg gave the Pope a drone
and I let a stranger fuck me in a public bathroom.

There is a way to fall in love with a blue-green
sparkle of breath on the neck that has nothing
to do with atoms, or crying. Like knocked
spread eagle on the carpet in grief, imagining
how the camera pans out. One long, slow shot
that stretches like a river across the ceiling, or a close-up
of the cheese shards in the carpet.

Tasmanian devils are being plagued
by a deadly genetic cancer and I am answering

my own text messages with a list of reasons
everyone who loves me is wrong or lying.
I am drinking a margarita from a can
in a dark desert hotel room. I am writing secrets on napkins
and leaving them around the house for no one.

Radio says they unclogged an anaconda
from a river drain, diamonds on diamonds shed

like the memory of a summer night, the moon
looking awestruck. Like he had seen so much
and never expected to be seen back.

Erin Slaughter is pursuing an MFA at Western Kentucky University, where she teaches undergraduate writing classes. You can find her fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction in Boxcar Poetry Review, River Teeth, Indianola Review and Bellingham Review, among others. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Elegy for the Body (Slash Pine Press, 2017).