Mary Helen Callier
Two POEMS
How Everything You Touch Makes a Spark
It’s summer. The girl is tied to a tree in the yard. Boys take turns
putting their hands up her skirt. One of them holds a cat in a box
as the other one lights it on fire. The girl is alone until
it gets dark. When the boys come back she’s asleep
by the tree and the box is a pile of ashes. Even when they leave the field
they stay somehow inside it and this goes on for a very long time
until they no longer know what loneliness looks like. You could’ve helped me
she wants to say to her mother but won’t. No I couldn’t have
her mother would’ve said but doesn’t. None of it happened that way
the boy argues. Later she’ll walk the rooms in cheap dresses
looking for ways to be taken apart. But for now she’s eleven.
It’s fall. Her father is standing beside her in the yard
teaching her to hold the bow. He shoots the arrow perfectly, exactly
where he aims it, and the arrow is still moving when she walks
across the yard to reach it, back and forth as if to widen
the single hole it’s made.
Running Your Hand Through the Flame
All week the sun was beautiful.
It bore a hole in the lake. Everywhere,
there was the smell of burning rubber.
I saw nothing felt nothing was nothing.
Wore my new plaid nothing dress.
Walked to the edge I call the edge. I still
call it that. All my life I think I’ve looked for
something to destroy me. When I was ten
I stood on a beach and watched dolls being passed
in the air through a crowd. I wanted to be light
and easily devoured. I was not. I was hard. Fixed
as a current. Dense as a forest in which no
paths are cut. Loves slip through me like deer,
making no sound. There is something inside me
that has never been opened.
If I could take your hand I would
direct you to the spot.
Mary Helen Callier’s work is featured or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and is a current PhD student in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia.