I Have to Marry Him
Prince Bush
I want to watch him die,
& ensure every organ, tissue, each eye
Is donated—as he wishes.
When they remove the tubes,
I’d ask for a chaplain, alone time,
A photo for numbness: needle stick, then catheter
Stuck in. I would put on his prescribed glasses
& close my eyes, grasp his skeletal wrist to take his watch,
Hear it tick post mortem, grabbing the ultimate,
Last things, even the final change in his
Pajama pockets; I want to look like him.
I want to make his burial
Arrangements, see him still knock-kneed,
But feet made close in the open-casket, contemplate
Climbing in to join him—as he wished
In jest. I have the bark & trunk, but
Can’t shift the news from root & shoot system.
Angry & uneasy, I don’t know how to speak
To his parents, who sentenced me to loss
Of life—for my core is molten metal at the bottom
Of his furnace, where I was to spend eternity—
As they wished. Maybe I’ll push a letter through the slit
Of a post office mailbox, in this bereavement, formal
& succinct: he has expired or passed on, & he was gay,
& eventually clinched their night terror of marrying
Me, & it was a solemn, lovely funeral, & I wish
Relations weren’t severed, but to abbreviate—goodbye,
Autographed, after sincerely, his stubborn spouse,
Alphabet in blood, hand & arm yet attached
To the written message, from the pits of my personal hell;
They’d have to peel my palm off slowly, like a cheap-
Tempered-glass screen protector, to read it.
We Became Irreparable
Prince Bush
My fossilized hands from working,
Cast in the rocks of bars of soap,
Eked out a living—the onslaught of
Bacteria trained my hand hygiene
From backstroke to butterfly—I
Hand washed at least fifty times a day—
I even eked—like eke was once also—even knew
Paper-towel drying was better than jet
Air drying, & like eke defined today, my frugal, small spouts
Kept the last hand soap an extra week, after I left him.
The kitchen had a ball faucet, bathroom, a disc faucet—
Replaced the cartridge faucet—my grandmother,
The compression washer faucet: like a plumber, I
Became keen on sinks & washing, they opened & closed
My conversations; put my metacarpus on everything; grabbed,
That night, my boyfriend’s arm, who was seeming
Like some stranger next to me, staring at the two-handle faucet,
Scrubbed his hands like erupting volcanoes, where magma punches
Through the surface, where the earth cracks
& lava thrusts out, & straight-faced asking, looking
At the sink of at this moment, so many things,
If I could, verbatim, hurl at the sight of all this,
Invisible to me, dirt he can’t scour; took him
To the hospital; can’t get the blood off my seats,
Door, jacket, catalytic converter—scared stench
Still pollutes the air of earth—the chapped lips,
& the guilt that I dropped them off & didn’t
Come back for them, didn’t come back for him & help
Him learn how to eke out an existence, rinse, lather & soak
His battered paintbrushes, plastic-brush-basin destined, for maybe
The ink in there, of us beginning to know each other
Again, would float to the top, or maybe I’d eke the memory
Loss that comes from drinking it, & skip the pipe of my brain
Bursting the chills expanding & building in every bathroom, cues
Gone, a ball, disc, or compression washer faucet always, instead.
about the writer
Prince Bush is a poet in Nashville, TN with poetry in Cincinnati Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pleiades: Literature in Context, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. He was a 2019 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets Fellow and a nominee for The Pushcart Prize.