Mag Gabbert
Two POEMS
ANOTHER HELL
Near the airport. Planes drift and circle it, like gnats. Remember that birthday when I drove past a dead person on the highway? An omen? In Arkansas a man who went by Jimmy Dean said, “Karma has a lotta names.” I’ve always liked revolvers because they have limits. And because pains can rotate. We’re all in-between places we want to be and want to leave. Slow-motion apocalypse with its chem-trailed comets. Everything’s droned out. Hypnotic. In sleep, my friends’ faces look different. They twitch and glimmer, like rats. Then little birds plunge and swirl—sky-littered, frantic. When I say “startled” the word just sparkles there in my mouth. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a scrap of metal flutters out of the sky’s grip. A perfect crane comes unfolded. There is no coming back from this.
The Dream of Reincarnation
He’s always wanted to pee between the legs of a woman as she sits on the toilet. So, I let him.
Sometimes we lick drugs off each other’s skin.
Sometimes I read books while he listens.
He keeps a gun in the drawer beside the bed. Once, he took out the magazine and laid the rest on my stomach. It was cold, heavier than you’d expect.
Rovelli says, “A storm is a collection of occurrences.” A lucky thing, I guess.
My love language is the one in which verbs consume their own nouns, like: “drinking this drink,” “living my life,” “fishing for fish.”
The man tells me he’s always pictured going down like a flame, whatever that means.
I’m a little afraid I could die in my sleep and then not realize I’m dead.
I like when he puts his hand around my neck, holds it there until the edges go thin, releases, and I come back together like birds settling onto their branches, calling out from one limb to another: again, again.
Mag Gabbert is the author of Sex Depression Animals (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which was selected by Kathy Fagan as the winner of the 2021 Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry; the chapbook The Breakup, which was selected by Kaveh Akbar as the winner of the 2022 Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems (Cooper Dillon Books, 2020). She lives in Dallas, Texas and teaches at Southern Methodist University.