By Bethany Schultz Hurst
the trees
flaunting their flowers after a while
their blooms will die and then
swell into a fruit and I submit to you dear viewer
this process is not monstrous
we’ve spent too much time
at night watching these shows where the queens
keep making bad choices
like torching the city with their pet dragons
or with sickly green fire
lit in tunnels underneath because they are mothers
they love their children too much or is it
not enough the flowers this spring
are ridiculous on the way into the theater alone in broad daylight
for some comic book sequel I can’t stop
shoving my face into the showy pink organs
of the parking lot trees
at night I’ve been balancing like a knife on my side
of the couch the bed because I’m
too tired already to have anyone really
touch me
enough already
with these velvet-eyed children
smudged in ash cling-wrapped to their mothers’ legs enough
already with these ruined cities my children beg
to come to these movies with me but I declare
they are not old enough really I just don’t want
to mediate whose hand is inside whose
popcorn whose arm has wandered past
the neutral zone and into the fraught
territory of someone else’s
armrest I am wandering
between stories I keep thinking at night of
the dinghy waiting outside
the castle wall on tv if the fallen queen could just
make it there through the rubble I like to pretend that
someone would love me enough to arrange
for my escape from the fallen city even if I’ve been
a monster even if I was the one who wrecked it
in the first place and I would dip my oars
into the sea and the ripples would scribe
across the water like a message
like the little “hi” inscribed
in ballpoint pen right at my eye level
on the movie theater bathroom stall where I retreated
when I needed to pee so much I had to run
from the carnage onscreen how I contemplated
that handwriting tried to remember
when I stopped wanting to leave behind
that kind of mark tried to remember when I was something
in between the kindling and the torch
in there
the brightly lit bathroom it was clean
enough and I didn’t have to wipe up
anyone else’s pee
and we all waited nicely
with dripping hands
patient for our turn at the dryer
before opening the door again into the cold darkness
into whatever reconciliation can be conjured at the snap
of the jacked-up hero’s fingers after this
elongated last act after this interlude
would my beloved even want
to be stuck in a dinghy with me
now that I’ve been crowned the Queen
of No Fun Anymore now that I would make
a spreadsheet of who should row
and when still
with any luck the wind
will discover for us a shore that hasn’t even been featured
onscreen
but was mentioned once in passing
by a secondary character a nice warm place
that the tyrants have forgotten a shore heavy with blooming
trees and again without permission I would bury my face inside
their bells and hear them ringing out
surrender
and I submit
to you I cannot fully
remember the many episodes that led us
to this war
Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Miss Lost Nation, winner of the Anhinga Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015 and in journals such as Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Image, Narrative, and Ploughshares. A recipient of a literary arts fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she is an associate professor in creative writing at Idaho State University.
Website: bethanyschultzhurst.com
