Lantern Review: Issue 5

When I sleep with strangers
you find me
the hole in your chest
has closed.

I try to talk
but my tongue's cut to pieces
each half-remembered word
a jag of one-way glass.

Didn’t you find it tiresome
always singing about him

who, later and whiskey lit,
would stare at me as if I weren't his but his

name lipsticked in blood—

(though he did leave
mine untouched—Tam—like a room
where someone you loved once lived)

—and where
did you think I’d fly?

There was too much water
and no country of ours.

I thought I heard you singing
through the sky and sea of your self.

If it was a song I heard
it swallowed its own tongue.