Two
poems from Rhett Iseman Trull's From the Glass Cage
followed
by a note on the author
The
Real Warnings are Always Too Late
I
want to go back to the winter I was born and warn you
that I will flood through
your life like acid
and you will burn yourselves on me.
On my sixteenth
birthday, I will use the candles
to set the basement aflame and run out laughing,
wearing
smoke like a new dress.With a pocket knife,
I will try to root out that life
you so eagerly started.
I’ll dent the garage door with my head, siphon
Crown Royal
from your liquor cabinet, jump from a gondola in Venice. I’ll
smash
my ankle with a hammer, drive through stopsigns
with my eyes closed,
cost you thousands
in medical bills. Forget about sleeping.
I’ll dominate
the prayers you keep sending up
like the last of flares from an island no one
visits.
For every greeting card poem, I will write four
to hurt you. Some
will be true.
Other people’s lives will look perfect
as you search
the house for its sharper pieces.
And when they lock me up I’ll tell the
walls
I'm sorry. But these warnings will come like candles
after a night
of pyres. I already know
how you will take one look at that new life screaming
into
the world, and open your arms,
thinking, if it looks this innocent,
it cannot
be so bad.
Instructions
on How to Leave Me
Tell me again about that dream where,
in my lace skirt, I’m stealing your
blueberries
faster than you pick them. Tell me how that day
for
decades has spread its sweet dark stain
inside you. Remind me of our feet swinging
from
the church pew, good shoes knocking together.
Any
old memory will do: my Indian-head nickel
flattened on the train tracks, the
bad
haircut I got to match yours, you winning me
the
onionskin marble from Rush the Crusher.
Or our panic every time we couldn’t
find
Bob, your dad’s retired firedog
that
Crazy Miss Robins used to take into town
without asking, letting him ride shotgun,
buying
him cheeseburgers at the drive-thru.
Tell
me the stories the grown-ups told on porches
as they shelled peas and we organized
our
army men, adding up our casualties
in
little piles of pewter soldiers. Kiss me
the way you did that first time
in
Dr. Harper’s office after hours as we waited
for
your mother to come out crying with the news,
so sure we were the snake was
poisonous
and you were going to die. Kiss me like that,
as
if to say you’re sorry you’re about to leave, sorry
for the unpartnered
square dances, ungiven presents
of kittens and decoder rings, undedicated
late-night
radio songs. No. Don’t
say anything. Just look at me the way you did
that
first time you thought you had to go. And go.
©
Rhett
Iseman Trull earned her BA from Duke University and her MFA from the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. Her poetry
has appeared in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, storySouth,
and many other journals. She has received awards from The Academy of American
Poets and The Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. Rhett lives in Greensboro,
NC, where she and her husband Jeff edit the poetry journal, Cave Wall.
"The
Real Warnings are Always Too Late" first appeared in Explorations;
"Instructions on How to Leave Me" first appeared in the Greensboro
Review.
