Deborah Allbritain
Poetry
Deborah Allbritain’s work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ecotone, Fugue, Salamander, Thrush, and Plume. Her poems have been finalists in the Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest, the Wabash Poetry Prize, the Bellingham Prize for Poetry, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, and the Comstock Review Poetry Contest. She received the Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize in 2017. Her first book will be published by Brick Road Poetry Press in 2023. Author’s website: https://willaflora.com
What the mind keeps, it keeps
as in the story a friend told about the time she wanted to kill herself.
Night, late winter, wearing a raincoat over her nightgown she drove
to the house that was no longer theirs. She had expectations. Him,
in his man-chair watching sports, eating chili from a can— At first
glimpsing him between the blinds, bare chested candlelit, she thought
porn channel, masturbation, which for an instant felt erotic,
but a woman’s legs were held against his chest, hips rushing, dog
perched on the cushion beside a black thong—My friend in a panic,
fumbled open the patio gate, vomited twice in the boxwood hedge
or maybe it was the flowering quince. Later in the tub, wailing
to Jesus and a different dog, she put the razor back, sick of
punishing herself. It was then she heard the faint trill
of a waxwing having devoured the fruit and moved on.
Listen: