By Maggie Glover

—West Hollywood, November 2019

I get a whiskey. I do not call my father back. I text you. I try on my new dress
in the bathroom among the western decor. I get another whiskey. I write a poem
about cowboys. I text you. I finger out the cherry from the glass. I take the cherry
the bartender offers me, red-glow-glop in a bare palm. I don’t text you for 24
minutes (I count it). I let someone down. I smoke a cigarette. I think of my mother
smoking: outside restaurants, department stores, in the kitchen on Sunday mornings,
late-at-night while typing, the cigarette dangling from her mouth with its long,
tender arm of ash. I order a whiskey. I don’t answer my phone. I ask the bartender
for another cherry but I’m way ahead of you, he says, offering a dish of alien
jewel-fruit. I like the dish: shaped like a cowboy hat, porcelain. I am being
trusted with breakable things. I joke: I don’t need to eat dinner now thanks
to all these snacks. I know I’m not joking. I don’t text you. I write a poem in
which I am the cowboy and you are the O.K. Corral and I make good choices
and my father is sober and my mother remembers me. I smoke another cigarette
and the bartender joins me. I know what this is. I say it out loud: I know what
this is. I pretend I mean something different from what I mean. I order a whiskey.
I listen when he explains his tattoo. I text you. I let him touch my shoulder. I
go to the bathroom and change into my dress. I ask him to clip the tags from
the hem. I write a poem in which I know exactly what I’m doing though I don’t
know it yet, do you?

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Maggie Glover is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her debut collection of poems, How I Went Red, was published by Carnegie Mellon UP in 2014. Her work is featured in several anthologies, including Best American Experimental Writing 2015 (Wesleyan UP), 12 Women: An Anthology of Poems (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2014), and Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods (West Virginia UP, 2015). Her publications include Ninth Letter, jubilat, Glass Poetry, Smartish Pace, and at least one bicep tattoo. She lives in Los Angeles.