All This and More
–Mary Karr

The Devil’s tour of hell did not include

a factory line where molten lead

spilled into mouths held wide,

no electric drill spiraling screws

into hands and feet, nor giant pliers

to lower you into simmering vats.

Instead, a circle of light

opened on your stuffed armchair,

whose chintz orchids did not boil and change,

and the Devil adjusted

your new spiked antennae

almost delicately, with claws curled

and lacquered black, before he spread

his leather wings to leap

into the acid-green sky.

So your head became a tv hull,

a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger

sloppy at the mouth

and swollen at the joints

enacted your days in sinuous

slow motion, your lines delivered

with a mocking sneer. Sometimes

the frame froze, reversed, began

again: the red eyes of a friend

you cursed, your girl child cowered

behind the drapes, parents alive again

and puzzled by this new form. That’s why

you clawed your way back to this life.

At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave a Message
–Mary Karr
That’s what my friend spoke
into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
as we both did in our thirties with still
no hope of revenue, gravely inking
our poems on pages held fast by gyres
the color of lead.

Godless, our minds
did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
a scar, this poet

who can crowbar open
the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
and the cocked shotgun’s double-zero mouths
(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
and not a few locked doors) never touched
my friend’s throat. Praise

Him, whose earth is green.

Sinners Welcome
–Mary Karr
I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:

no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.
He’d sailed past the clay gods
and the singing girls who might have made of him

a swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.

Metaphysique du mal
–Mary Karr

Pathetic Fallacy
–Mary Karr
When it became impossible to speak to you
due to your having died and been incinerated,
I sometimes held the uncradled phone

with its neat digits and arcane symbols (crosshatch,
black star) as if embedded in it
were some code I could punch in

to reach you. You bequeathed me
this morbid bent, Mother.
Who gives her sixth-grade daughter

Sartre’s Nausea to read? All my life,
I watched you face the void,
leaning into it as a child with a black balloon

will bury her countenance
either to hide from
or to merge with that darkness.

Small wonder that still
in the invisible scrim of air
that delineates our separate worlds,

your features sometimes press toward me
all silvery from the afterlife, woven in wind,
to whisper a caution. Or your hand on my back

shoves me into my life.