Sample: What Will Kill Me

The following is a sample of a poem I recently read at the COPLAC Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Conference at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
This material is copyrighted by myself as the author, and I reserve all rights to this material and the borrowing of this material for reproduction purposes.
For inquiries, please email me at olivia.m.cyr@maine.edu

"What Will Kill Me"

I. Alcohol

My father’s father bottled everything.

French Canadian by blood and mean.

We don’t talk about it—Daddy turned out

alright. We don’t talk about it but

it runs in the family, drips and branches

down glass, then pools. My sister, me,

our children, drenched in 80-proof.

I am 19 and angry: The irritating, self-righteous,

contradictory, indulgent voice

in my head speaks when it is very seldom spoken to.

I make every attempt to drown it.

                        (What are you having tonight?)

           

                        Please, I’d like Gin.

           

In high school at a party, I chased

every word with a drink.

I’d pop corks and caps

with my strong teeth, clutch cans, bottles,

glasses with angry hands and hold on tight;

I shouted and pressed my body against walls.

Wanted to taste that bubbly scuttling inside

my mouth, cold and burning simultaneously.

(There’s beer in the kitchen if you want…)

                        I need to go ‘ome.

                        (Oh, come on.)

                        I don’ wanna talk about it.

---

I remember going to New York City

in college:

I step off the subway and teeter on a wild precipice.

Spanish Harlem whirls for me, the quivering heat above

the city pavement and the tartness in my nose,

this new world. Sun on my cheeks like meteor fire

and then someone whirs past me on a bicycle,

and I am caught in the intricate web of the city.

West and east are monogrammed into sulfur exhaust so

I follow its cloud, and the movement of everyone

else. Pollution and noise pile heavy on my tongue, and

people are moving but I am not. Push-pull of their bodies

and no rest for them weaving solid and fast past me standing

by a café, map flimsy in my fist, and there’s nothing familiar

about all this. I imagine finding a street-side tavern, saddling up

to the bar, pretending I belong, and ordering whiskey.

Everything slows down.

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