William Stanford Knudsen

Welcome to Texas

We hold our breath.
Texas is wide mouth hungry.
We run our fingers across its lips.
The dry breeze busts our knuckles.
Widows down fistfight with the highway.
Sagebrush burns the skyline in every direction.

We are as safe as anyone could be
barreling through the old south in a collection of gears and wheels.
Speaker crackle songs by dead men.
Billboards selling afterlife but we’ve only got $40 between us
so Texas will have to do.
Sam in the backseat writing a letter to some semblance of familiarity.
Lavender in the driver’s seat, white knuckling the steering wheel.
My left hand two months bare of wedding ring, resting on lavender’s thigh.

We are learning the exact geography of lost. The silence of Texas at night. The reality of wanting something with all our hearts and not knowing if $40 is enough to get us there.
We hold our breath as sagebrush burns the skyline in every direction.
The light quickly swallowed by the endless expanse of night.

On Having Phone Sex With Your Ex-Girlfriend

There is nothing noble about having phone sex

with your ex-girlfriend in the bathroom of a friend’s apartment.

The shower curtain looks offended.

Tile ashamed to touch bare feet, toes curling.

Mildew in the bathtub corner is judging me.

 

But I am only flesh, muscle, and blood. A collection of parts

that ache and spill over. She loves him now.

But we still search the static of each other’s lonely,

trying to pull and honest fuck out of the phone line.

 

Bears stir in our bellies. They slept a season

and woke hungry. The audience holds its breath.

 

She moans theatrically and we are playing our roles just right now.

I fall into character without skipping a beat. We both close our eyes

and pretend we are acting out our favorite scene.

But I am monologuing to an empty room.

My body echoing nostalgia, harsh breath fogging the mirror

instead of dancing the nape of her neck.

 

I knew a girl once who had never touched a man

but practiced kissing with her vanity mirror.

We are much too old for this,

supposed to be trained better than

barking at closed doors.

 

I want to say I’ve thought about the arched dimples

on her lower back every day for two years

but that is not in the script.

 

So we just talk empty dirty until we come

and hang up as the credits roll our names.

Cleaning up to go back to our lives

and temporary lovers.

 

I step out of the bathroom only as myself.

A tired spindle, a film reel unwound.

A man undone.

After Survival

On the plane over Texas,
I read seven pages of the book
you gave me and fall asleep against the window.

2,100 miles later is waking up in LaGuardia
and my watch says I slept three hours longer
than my body has known life.

There are so many time zones between the runway
and my birth that I wonder how old I really am.
Yesterday, it was spring in Seattle.

In New York, it will be winter another two months.
I take two pills and let time slip into next week.
Here, I am in Denver and no one on 16th Street has my eyes.

I swallow 3,100 heartbeats in eight blocks with another three pills.
Panic is what remains after survival. I have not traveled far enough to
know what comes after.

Denver is a city that never grew up, a homeless boy
in his father’s hand-me-downs. No matter how many
neon lights flashing in the window, a pool hall is still a pool hall.

A drunk is still a drunk, even in his best dress shirt.
Portland stole my coat and the phone dies before
she doesn’t call me back.

Delirium carries me two hours north to the Wyoming border.
This is the house where I grew up. My mother worries with her eyes
but we belly laugh as though the wind isn’t howling outside.

In the morning, she hands me a skinny stack of bills,
tells me to buy a bus ticket to somewhere warm.
36 hours later, St. Paul shivers me off the greyhound.

I buy a cup of coffee at Kopplin’s and read another seven pages
of my book, dog-ear a page and leave it on the table.
I know that I’m only 10 blocks from Sarah’s apartment but walk downtown instead.

All the shop windows are mostly bare from post-holiday sales.
Midwestern folk bundled to their chins shuffle to diners on lunch break.
I envy the heat shared between mittened hands, know there is a bed

with a standing invitation less than twenty minutes away but I can’t stomach the inevitability of dawn knifing through tomorrow’s blinds.

Sundown finds my boots
crunching fresh snow on 219, angry with myself for coming back here.

Up the road, two boys stand with red noses, bright grins, and their thumbs out.
They still find this to be romantic. Their hunger for something more is still novelty
and I am grateful when a truck pulls onto the shoulder to cater to their faith.

My shoulders are the shiver kings of alchemy, turning empty miles
into dead weight, limbs of privilege into driftwood from a far away shore.

My body has become like the drugs in my blood.
Searching for purpose, ceaselessly buoying the concrete waves
of America’s blue highway veins.

Spite

There is a lemon tree in the backyard.
Newly ripe and full.
All of the fruit will fall in a month.
How does something born sour spoil?

My wife does not love me today
But maybe tomorrow will be sweeter.
At least the room where I will sleep tonight
has a pleasant view.

All the lights in San Francisco smile up at me
and I want to fuck them until they flicker,
to bite their rinds until pulp dribbles down my chin.

Spite is the dagger I slide between my own ribs
when she does not love me.
I would suck the flirt from his teeth.
I could hang myself from a meat hook,
let hungry strangers dig for my marrow
but she still would not look at me.

illuminated-love asked: Thank you so much for writing Waltz 17. It brought me to tears. I am in that situation currently, and it is so hard. But thank you for writing this. Thank you for putting my jumbled feelings into words I could understand.

Thank YOU. Every time someone reaches out and says that they are affected, I become a better person for it. You are a good soul. Please be good to yourself. Thank you for the kind words.

Things That Will Outlast Me

after Sierra DeMulder

 

Wedding rings resting side by side in the soil.

                                 Cigarette butts flicked without second thought.

           Sound waves, every admission

                of love and guilt ever uttered.

 

A sacred fig tree in Sri Lanka, the first ever recorded seed

                                               pressed into dry ground by hopeful hands.

                     South American Macaws, plucked from their forests

to decorate empty mansions, feathers falling 100 years.

 

The fishing line my father held delicately in his palm,

                                   showing me how to cast in the Yampa river,

              will outlive seven generations of men wading the same shallows.

 

10 bullets rested in the clip of the handgun

                         I tucked in my waistband those winter months.

        Not a day goes by I am not grateful their lead will outlive                   

                                                        the legacy for which they were forged.

 

If there is mercy in the world,

                         the child who lives across the street will survive

                                 whatever weather is to come.

 

I wish for her a century.

      That she might never know the legacy of lead casting or stale smoke,

                     but instead be taught the weight of fishing line,

seeds planted with hope.

                    I hope she keeps her feathers, the color in her cheeks.

                             That she knows love all her days.

 

And I hope that when her time comes,

                she and her beloved will pass through this life,

dirt through an open palm,

                                      wedding rings resting side by side in the soil.

Waltz #17

She only looks like you when we slow dance in the living room.
Her hair swan diving the small of her back, the soft curve of her breasts
rising and falling beneath her blouse in perfect 3/4 time.

This is the waltz of falling in love wounded.

The look she gives me some nights when we collapse into sheets exhaling empires into the night.
She rolls onto her side and looks at me the way aging mathematicians
stare at formulas they once knew so well.

This is the equation of mercy, the waltz of forgetting.
Last week, my nickname for you accidentally fell from my lips out of habit,
sounding foreign for the first time. Tonight, she asked if I remembered
a walk through Prospect Park I never took by her side.

This is the path of healing, the waltz of clumsy feet.

We will all slowly forget our wounds, hold our new lovers close
and slow dance in living rooms.
This is the mercy of poor memory,
the waltz of forgetting your face.