3 poems
A WAY OF LIFE
When I drove through my home it was an orange
Ford lit bricks in the grass, littered it, my house
In the plants. When I drove through my home
I didn’t expect it so small. I crashed a gathering
All my friends attended, but I didn’t sustain any
injuries then and walked around, snacked and took
In pictures of me on one wall, a watercolor of a ship
Ashore beside them. I didn’t paint it. I didn’t
Sustain any injuries then, or in the moments
After when like anyone I listened for my name
In conversation. It was later than I imagined it’d be
Later than noon, and the scrims on the windows
Disturbed, but not much odd, and not much said
When I drove into my home. I drove through it.
BURROW
Like religion
Or good TV
You command of me
Orthodox tokens of
I love you so much
I want to buy you
A makeup bag
And get in it with you
And rattle in excess pink
And nude powder pink
And nude as the day is
Among the tools
Along the bottom
I want to stay on the shelf of your life
Or by your mirror ten or fifteen
Years and lose my color
To your handling pink
Orange, green, and purple flowers
Pale from light and frequent use
Or get in it with you, and in there cover
And uncover our same and
Different skins
At a pace at all
Times we each
Agree’s comfortable
And safe in the face of
How I count them
Our four zippered walls
THE LONG VIEW
In the back of the cab we collaborated on your new family
History, paring to the pit the moment it began to write itself
Around the table, almost right after it happened. Clearly
Your stepfather wanted everyone in the restaurant to know this
Family’s his now, the way his arm was yoked over your mother.
Your cousin mentioned her sons, how they could say anything,
Really anything at all they saw online, and we agreed, the mothers
And the younger of us guests from the wedding. It’s one of our brand
New fears. Your uncle at the other end of the table looked up
From the tray of oysters he was splitting with his wife to chime in,
And as she speared one with her tiny fork he said so we could hear it,
Come on, baby, mama bird it, your mouth to mine. Your sister, with her
Sopping fleshy chunks of fish lined up by size on a square white plate
Deflected eyes made her way by the waiter while he wiggled the tip
Of his shucker into the hinge of an East Beach Blonde, and brine
Dripped on his apron and the table. We must be one knife short’s
All she said, to no one in particular, since what else could she say,
And he moved on to dismantling a Sunken Meadow Gem and set
It in its halfshell on the tray filled with ice like the room was
Filled with noise. Levelled it. When we sat down to dinner what I asked
Was for a place as good as any at the table and not can you believe
I’m blinking in this picture that Cassini took today from space?
Tanner Pruitt received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he taught and was awarded a Maytag Prize for Poetry. A former assistant director of the University of Virginia's Young Writers Workshop, Tanner now lives in San Francisco. His recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in TIMBER, Permafrost, Bennington Review, and Crab Orchard Review.