To the Addict Who Mugged Me

William Brewer

Dear Mr. So-and-So with my blood on his clothes,

the Internet says a dollop of my spit

will take the stain right out.

I’m generous like that—I give myself away

to erase any sign that I was here.

What’s more brutal:

A never-ending dial tone

chewing the receptors in your brain,

or waking up in an alley with a busted face,

teeth red and penny-sweet, the rain

coming down clear as gin?

Wherever you are

with your stamp bag of winter,

your entire universe boiling

in the breast of a spoon,

floating in a hole in the air

in the middle of a room,

I wish I felt it in me to wish you well.

When goodwill tells me to be tender,

I have a trick: what I’m incapable of feeling,

I imagine as a place—

this throbbing in my brain

is now the sound of your rowing toward

what I pray is, if not home, then mercy.

Naloxone

William Brewer

Do you hear that? All the things

I meant to do are burnt spoons

hanging from the porch like chimes,

Do you have some wind? Just a hit

and was the grass always this vocal?

A hit and the blades start sharpening

in the sun. I wear a belt

because my pants don’t fit.

My pants don’t fit because I wear

the belt. I can tell you how it tastes.

Tannin. Heaven. Is it May already?

As onetime owner of my own

private spring, I can say

it’s overrated. Remember? Someone

found me in a coffee shop bathroom

after I’d overdone it

and carried me like a feed sack

to the curb. As they brought me back,

they said, the poppies on my arms

bruised red petals.

They said, He’s your savior.

But let’s not get carried away.

Let’s stop comparing everything

to wings. Have you ever even felt

like you’re going to not die

forever? It’s terrifying.

Leaving the Pain Clinic

William Brewer

Always this warm moment when I forgot which part of me

I blamed. Never mind the pills kicking in, their spell

that showers the waiting room, once full of shame,

in a soft rain of sparks that pity sometimes is,

how it mends the past like a welder seams metal,

and isn’t that why we’re all here, addicts

and arthritics—we close our eyes completely

but the edges only blur—and though the door’s the same,

somehow the exit, like the worst wounds, is greater

than the entrance was. I throw it open for all to see

how daylight, so tall, has imagination. It has heart. It loves.

Detox Psalm

William Brewer

Only in the slow braid of a dream

can you study want and need, their

patience, their cruelty. Amid the thin

trunks of their campfires’ smoke,

I watched the hours shed

their polished armor, clean and

sheathe their blades, water their

stallions, refuse to leave the shore.

Always a shore, overcast, a sun

that offers me to climb inside its mouth,

and therefore cannot be trusted.

You’re asking to be taken apart

without the help of time, in the face

of its broken promise to keep

forward. I thought to give myself

to the dogs, but they only gnawed

my thighs. With the waves’ jade

coaxing, I heaved my every organ

through my mouth, then cut a mouth,

at last, in my abdomen and prayed

for there to be something more divine

than the body, and still something

more divine than that, for a torrent

of white flies to fly out of me,

anything, make me in the image

of the bullet. I begged, release me

from myself and I will end a life.

West Virginia

William Brewer

Fall kingdom conquered first by bedlam,

then bedlam’s hunger—hush—heavy

in the air between the hills that crash

like waves into each other. What is a hive

without its queen? Thirst can rule, so can want.

A crown of needles, a gown of clouds she parts.

Bees in the streets below, their tongues

like hands reaching to the sky for an offering.

This is what want does, this and the raindrops

becoming pills in their throats, spurring wings,

all that fluttering the hum of a false heaven.

And who, through that, can hear a few wings

folding under the weight of death? It is too late.

Like timber, like anthracite, death is a natural resource.

The colony glows. The colony does its work.