Poetry suite by Emily Carroll
“as you are merely a visitor to poverty, or love”
Poetry by Emily Carroll
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Between Wars
Dennis usually ate only jello or fruit salad, but he'd leave you ten or twenty dollars. More if he stayed for dinner. On the way home from what was supposed to be a hotshot pharmaceutical job. One that flew him around the world. Either way, it was a lot of money to us. Dennis had been an army ranger. He said it was the flashbacks that made his wife leave, not the bipolar. True or not, it made a kind of sense. In that place, every man had Vietnam, or something else. The ones who grew up between wars were the worst. Theirs, a kind of violence that talked. A fool’s guilt in every act and story. It’s hard for a man to show up late to history. But it's hard for a woman to fear anything that gives you a head start. And who wouldn't forgive a man a thankless war? There were other things about Dennis. The way he brought us little gifts, flashlights and pens and post-it notes. The way he read into every gesture, made of you a careful nurse, dosing with just the right attention—never too friendly, never flirting with anyone else while he was at the counter. Measured to the millimeter the kind of grace one might bestow with a whipped-cream canister. The way he talked about his whores in Thailand with the busboy. Turned on a dime, and one of you would become "that bitch." He knew she didn't like him. The way, when Rose said she was making sauce at home, he asked to be invited, almost serious, the way her son's name in his mouth didn't chill us exactly, but everyone decided it wouldn't be her turn to wait on him again. The men from between wars, the ones who cackle or grope, are the muzzle flash, not the bullet. We fear the ravaged landscape, not the mortar's echoes. The kind of violence that frightens us is deaf and dumb, the kind of man that carries it doesn't even know.
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A Ride to the Liquor Store
Joe is telling the story of choking down the bag of heroin when that cop pulled him over in Newark, of the polite conversation they had. Or the time he O.D’ed in the motel before his ex-wife showed up to retrieve him from the brink of death. Or he is opening his shirt to show someone his shrapnel wound, or musing about his promising career as a mixed martial artist, how he gave all that up because of the way it scared his girlfriend. Joe is a bright red thread unraveling in front of us, and I am a ride to the liquor store on our break. I am the best use there is around here for a woman you’re not sleeping with. I am a place to keep all of the memories you can’t stop repeating. These are the stories he tells to ward off the truth, which too often is quiet, a fleshy undefined thing that loves no one more than anyone else. Joe is injecting his insulin in the men’s room and I am pouring his customers some more coffee. I have never been to the desert. I am not practiced at giving away the parts of me that no one really wants. I am a ride to the liquor store, and Joe is a worn-out rosary, a new story every night.
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Dead Girl
I can’t listen any more about the dead girl. I’ve been here ten hours without a break. So I listen to Mike instead. Mike says he’s had his eye on a boat that’s for sale at the end of his street, sees the sign every day on his way to work. Mike’s a good boss, mostly leaves you alone. When it gets late he’ll tell you stories about the lemon trees in Greece, “this big,” he says, stretching his hands football-distance apart, looking through them with little boy eyes. He says he doesn’t know what kind of boat it is, the kind he’d look good in, he says, doesn’t even know how much it costs, but he always thinks he’ll call that guy and ask. That’s just what he could use. Bill says he won’t take any more coffee, or he’ll be up all night. (He doesn’t want to pay for the bowl of soup, I know—Mike says I can’t fill the guys’ coffee anymore unless they get something to eat.) He says if he drinks too much, he’ll be up to pee three times tonight. His prostate must be growing. Sal’s, too, Sal offers. I try to seem empathetic but not overly interested. They found her two miles away. She was a good kid, good grades. It was probably the boyfriend. These are the parts everyone agrees on. While I fill the sugar shakers, Mike talks to the guys about the Mets. His tie droops sleepily from the handle of the cupboard behind the register. You can tell what kind of night its been by what time Mike finally loosens his collar, revealing the heavy gold cross in its nest of dark hair, and loops the tie through the handle of that cupboard. The guys at the counter have long since given up on the Mets and Mike gives up tonight, too, walks back to the register, checks his watch against the big, lighted clock on the wall. I go out for a cigarette and when I come back, Mike’s filling the guys’ coffees, eyes still glued lazily to the screen where the men in their white uniforms are painted against a backdrop of impossibly green grass. The screen says it’s the fourth inning, and the men seem to be waiting for something, too, a flashbulb burst of activity to wake them from the otherwise washed out daydream. If you ask Mike how the Mets are doing, he’ll tell you, without taking his eyes off the screen, that the season was over for them a long time ago. The guys have circled back to the topic of the dead girl. I turn one half-empty bottle of ketchup upside down to gulp out its contents into another.
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Ask a Fellow Waitress
after Tori Amos
Like every place and culture, we had our own mythology, and Nick was the perfect $2 an hour boogeyman. The story about Nick the Dick was how the waitress tried to call out during a miscarriage, and he told her she had an hour to be on the floor. The other details were always changing; she called from the hospital, or from the bathroom floor. She lost the job, or showed up bleeding. The story was solemn, or indignant, depending on whether it was offered as advice or complaint. Patty had actually worked for Nick, and her version was wild, almost pornographic. Patty met her fiancée six weeks ago at a bar in Rahway. He rides around in her painted-over patrol car, bought at auction, a machine she keeps pridefully immaculate. Paul's first two wives died suddenly of organ failure. Tragedy just follows him, she tells me when the police question him after a roommate also goes. It becomes easy to imagine a sudden ending for Patty, too, Dateline glamorous. But no one here has ever had a mammogram. The things that kill them move slowly. The body weaponized against itself: a trick knee, a sudden, sharp pain, an endless dull throb, a slow layer of fat, a wrong way of being born. In the paper, a war begins without anyone expressly saying yes. Patty pours me out a line of Paul's coke in the ladies room. Remember that you are a visitor here, as you are merely a visitor to poverty, or love. It might or might not save you. It never stopped anyone else.
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Emily Carroll is the curator of Moonlighting, a Boston area LGBTQ reading series. Her poems have recently appeared in Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Guernica, and Umbrella Factory.