TWO POEMS by AMY DEBELLIS
Practice
Summer like a dead dog draped over the city, buildings
scowling up at an ugly white sky. I brace against
the filthy wind, worry my swollen gums, seed myself
in the empty afternoon. Planted, I could be anything.
But once again I find myself scrolling support forums
for aging men, undesired men, unloved men, reading about
their inviolable girlfriends / fiancées / wives, their women
sculpted out of stained glass, human cathedrals.
Desire with nowhere to go, love collapsed
in on itself. I wonder, if I switched you
with one of those men, would he want me?
If I could go back in time to my nineteen-year-old self
I’d yell at her for chasing you, I’d slap
her silly. But she’d probably like that.
She’d probably ask for more.
I walk out a few weeks later but nothing is fixed.
It’s difficult to stop wanting what you tried
not to want for years. It’s difficult to stop wanting,
period. Habits linger like phantom limbs.
Cool party trick: stand in a doorway and for a full minute
push your arms against its sides as hard as you can
and even when you step out of the doorway
you’ll find them floating up in silent
involuntary prayer. My hands are floating
to the space on my breastbone where your necklace
used to hang, bone tapping bone, a metronome, a clock
winding down. All these sour memories
rotting in overexposure, a septic blur. My fingers floating
to my phone to open our abandoned WhatsApp chat, the one
I’ve archived, the one that’s supposed to be
hidden, the one that I keep
checking, every day,
just in case.
Thoughts When Your Husband Goes Away On A Business Trip
It takes just a few days of his absence, of flattened self-indulgent sepia, before everything flips back over. Warps brilliant. You’ve felt this kind of shift on drugs before, but on loneliness, never. But now you grow fat on solitude and the ability to stretch your legs in bed, on the glut & greed of your Netflix binges, and you forget how to miss him. The notes he left for you crumble to dust in the back of a drawer, crumbs in the bottom of a pocket, somewhere you’ll always forget to look. The idea of him seeps in less and less often, and when it does it’s salt-sharp, threatening. Barriers turn porous; the screen door pants, a honeycombed lung. You swim indulgent through the new pockets of the day, try & fail to come up with ideas for songs, designs for tattoos that you won’t regret having. When you do think of him it’s in numbers and hieroglyphs. Each evening you take an hourlong bath and watch your body rising out of the water like steam as you breathe, archipelago turning to island, and he is faithful to your memories, every weekend he calls to let you know that he’s still alive, or that he loves you, but you’re losing track of what it all means. He recurs like a dream. And whenever he speaks, his voice changes through the phone, husks and whirrs and rustles, until all you can ever hear is the sound of insects.
Amy DeBellis (she/her) is a writer from New York. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications including The Shore, JMWW, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, and Atticus Review.