Connie Voisine
The Office of the Examiner
All hail the boy on the bike, the teenager
who ODed against the door, the man in the
halal slaughterhouse who fell down amongst
the living sheep, and hello to you dear body,
in the derelict row house, your bruised face
and broken heel, hello dear body too old to do
more than wait for relief and that neighbor who
has the keys and brings soup, and you, too,
dear human given to bleeding too easily,
dear body who has too much pressure in her
veins and heart that cannot help enough to stay
well, and well enough that you for now still
shout on the street corner, thin arms jerk
and flail in intermittent impulse, and hail
your mother who doesn’t know where you are
and even though you used her all up she will
cry when we tell her the news, and you
sipping at the colorful world in the gazebo
at the park before you pull the trigger on
all that seemed too much, and you who wished
for other things and you who had come in for
to purchase, hail death so generous, our blasphemer.
Sensualist
Just like Saint Julian, you met a handsome stag in the forest
who told that you would kill someone, that you might wake
to bloodied hands, mud on your shoes, unsure
of what has been dream and what is memory.
A whole family gone—off a cliff, shot in the kitchen,
children, etc. The mother is often the one who’s
found dragging her dying self towards a phone, a knife,
a son who may be the shooter, or it was another
troubled one. A lover caught in a bed, a neighbor stumbled
into wreckage, attempted heroism, foster children
too, dead. S/he/they would not have done this horrible
thing and I would like to think I would not have
become the time bomb we often discuss and ticking.
Am I certain it was not me who was volatile or
who created wrong details to protect someone, me?
Morning after pill. Laundry, bleach. I see your spill
of blood, a shattered window and wonder how and why
you might do some terrible thing like this. Problem is
I can imagine doing most things fully, enough for guilt.
Connie Voisine
Connie Voisine is the author of the book of poems, The Bower, begun on a Fulbright Fellowship to Northern Ireland. A previous book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. She has poems published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2021-2022 Guggenheim Fellow.