If You Were to Ask Me Love
You never told me about the blueberry milkshake
or if it rained, thundered,
or heavily hailed waiting behind a McDonalds.
It had been cicadas blotting tint blue sky. You
were getting out a brown Volvo barefoot, old Converse
in hand by the dingy shoelace.
A waste Management Dumpster
cockeyed a white mattress, a tissue box
broken down flat. Sideways, you looked at your lover,
forgot what taste and him have in common,
forgot
what we talked about at your parents’ farm,
how you snuggled under a week-old calf in its tin bed,
placental odor fresh for a Heifer
to tell where it’s been.
Adult scent is different than a child’s.
The cow wouldn’t know the difference.
You sensed that this calf, too, would be slaughtered
in some feign for veil meat, an upholstery purse strap
styled by manufactures on some factory line. You
sensed in me goodness, saw in him
valor, validity, value.
If a kitten’s scent is changed
the mother cat may kill the offspring.
We’d wait until she leaves to pet the newborns,
hope for mother’s grace.
I am the animal, right, the thing in a kennel?
What would happen if we mix our scent? What
will my owners do to my body? Or is it
the other way around?
Is this what it comes to when you befriend a prisoner,
that at any minute life would take him/me
to a slaughtering house, turn
him/me into something materialistic — to be worn,
or warned, or is it warm?
Poems are you making love to me, like
interstates is how you make meaning out of life.
But there aren’t any signs on this freeway
and the next city isn’t a city, isn’t a bunch of buildings
and surplus stores with glass counters encasing jewelry.
Dog leashed outside a liquor store, a humane society
across a street, next to a Lens Crafters.
Where have all the people gone? Where is when I know
what to call you, this old city of silence?
Let’s meet somewhere else because this
will never be a fairytale. Please
don’t mention the trash, the speed limit,
the repertoire that reminds you of —
It’s a bad time when you leave a milkshake in the back of a Mickey D’s—
My grandma calls it that. What do I call you again, quiet storm? Wind? Love
— don’t look at him, don’t count the many times you’ve cried,
the parking lot full of spoiled milkshakes and decomposed cups,
the arch a sonic boom faded. Make
sure you’re on a radio station that doesn’t play music.
Let whoever talk into the car about a mattress sale, next
to that prison he keeps calling you from, a
gun range aiming at the fences so when he’s on the yard
he thinks he’s in some neighborhood
with barking deer.
When you arrive at his family house
expect Your Lover’s family not to speak about the redness
in your eyes until it’s too late. Cover
all your smiles with halfway chuckles, a lay of a joke
capable to include you in their criticisms of others —
don’t look at him: the family knows you’re too good
for him.
I know
you are too good for him.
for me.
Milkshake on your breath like cigarette. Go
out back and dip your feet into a top ground pool
with the rest of the girls who visited —
what flavor were their milkshakes?
How many ripples can you make in a pool bought
from Walmart? Is it a pool or am I imaging things?
You have a message: I’m writing solar
rainbows to a crumbling
opaque plexus of interrupted dreams.
I am the matador in red, capeless and afraid
that I wished we had a love like this.
Demetrius Buckley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review, where he won the 2020 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, Apogee, PEN America, and RHINO. He is the winner of the 2021 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Find more at demetriusbuckley.com.
