July 31–August 6, 2023: Poetry from Ashley Cline, Jan Harris and Kathrynn Axton

yellow bruise, in F# Major (god bless Carly Rae Jepsen)

i think about the way Carly Rae Jepsen sings run away with me / three minutes & forty-nine seconds into the song / of the very same name / more often than i think / of more important things / like, i already know that the planet is dying, for example / know how she is burning herself alive / for a lover who calls her nothing / calls her maybe / calls her venus, redux / & only Carly Rae Jepsen understands this / what it is to spin on an axis of want / knows that you can’t fake passion / like pleading / like burning / like the way she sings run away with me / near the edge of that final chorus / the way she extends that one me in particular / until it hangs shimmering like caramel lovers / unspooling their legs from / the split lips of diner-booth vinyl / sticky & sweet from the flush of an august heat / knows that you can’t pull it from yourself no matter how hard you try / the heat, i mean / & knows that to be in love is a culmination of the body, humid / the way it clings to your skin like a bramble, feral / like pressing a finger into a bruise on purpose & watching the sky drape herself in something softer than violence / knows that this is a love language, too / the body, i mean / & leans in anyway.

Patsy Cline sings of heritage, in G major

1. 


there is an old myth/joke/legend in my family that goes something like this:
we are related to Patsy Cline, the famous country-music singer, we just can’t prove it yet.

it is 1997. or 1998. between the bursts of hands & the cascade of feet, i tell everyone
on the recess field that Patsy Cline is my great-great grandmother;
“Heartaches” inheritance—

when they do not know who she is, i run even faster.


2.



i do not know how much of that is true, but i can tell you is this—

the smoke clung to the crushed red velvet of the car’s interior—
i was sitting in the passenger seat—

i saw my name (her name) on a cassette tape cover—
& assumed we must be family—

assumed the world was smaller than it was—
small enough to fit in the tape deck of my grandmother’s car—

my grandmother, who would outlive the woman she loved by several decades—
a fact i learn later, in a used bookstore—

i am there because it is my birthday—
at thirty-one, i have outlived the woman my grandmother loved, as well—

& when my teeth kiss the driveway decades before my feet—
i assume this is inheritance, too—

the way the blood keeps this memory, this tempo—
plays it back & rewinds—

plays it back. & rewinds.

3.



i stumble across Patsy Cline again by accident—buy her albums in bulk the shape of
tree roots & nicotine. later, a cardinal mistakes a doorway for a window & divorces skull

from spine, discovers two new hemispheres of flesh—& we call this a clean break.
later, a glacier flows down a valley in Seward, Alaska—

& this, too, is our inheritance.