By Nick Norwood

because of the way they bang together on a closet rod
get left behind in sleazy motel rooms
crappy apartments where things didn’t go well

because she is not irrational
other people are irrational, not her

when she was a little girl she and a friend snuck in
an abandoned farmhouse nobody’d lived in for twenty or thirty years
the earth plowed right up to the front porch
weeds springing up between the boards:
inside, in a back room, two of them, like bent dusty filaments
hanging at odd angles on a bowed rusted length of irrigation pipe
unmusical in their slow, sad clanging
wind moaning through the broken windows

askew on the floor in an empty unit in condemned government housing
pick them up and set them jangling
the joyless sound like the same notes an octave higher
of iron bars clanking shut in county lockup
that same awkward swinging on the clothes rod
as bodies from tree limbs

and who hasn’t had to jump the rent in the middle of the night
or help somebody jumping rent load her car
a friend’s sister
a friend’s sister’s friend from work
her backseat full of clothes on hangers from shuttered dry-cleaning shops
a burnt-smelling hair dryer
wallowed-out shoes
tampons rowed like soldiers in a half-empty box

and who hasn’t had to try to unlock a car door with one
back in the day
in some cold dark parking lot in a bad neighborhood
down the street from a bar
where you slammed well-drink whiskey
your fingers frozen as popsicles
the idiot end of the straightened hanger
banging against the inside of the window
fumbling around the knob
bark bark against the glass
the keys glinting in the ignition

lying in the street, bent, sheathed in gray-brown mud
they’re about the saddest thing you could ever see
sadder than a teeth flosser thrown down on the sidewalk
sadder than a used condom

and who doesn’t know that a hook made from one
is vicious as a shiv

and when she was a kid on a camping trip sitting around the fire
they told her to stab her marshmallow with one
impale it on the clothes hanger before she surrendered it to the flames
then, later, as a teenager on the beach she saw the beer-bong crowd
skewering shrimp the same vicious way
to grill them over a driftwood fire
like they were cooking little embryos

and who hasn’t had to try to explain this one more time to her mother
and it’s just too fucking exhausting
and who hasn’t heard her mother say she’s praying for her
and imagined that vicious wire thing hooked inside her belly
because the law has spoken

somewhere deep-sea fishing off the Cape the wise and upright
their heavy robes depending from carved cherrywood hangers back in chambers
snag mountable trophies on hooks
barbed as gaffs

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Nick Norwood’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, Poetry Daily, the PBS News Hour blog Art Beat, NPR’s Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology XLII, and elsewhere. His third volume, Gravel and Hawk, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, was published in 2012, and his fourth, Eagle & Phenix, in 2019.