While I was in Brit Lit teaching Dracula,
you were shoving a kid through a small window
you broke above my utility room sink,
and when we were wrangling with Lucy’s blood sacrifice,
you were sifting through my jewelry,
tucking my mom’s wedding ring and my dad’s
onyx cufflinks into the pillowcase
my four-year-old son slept on the night before;
the shadows of your hands braided
into my bedspread that Black Monday,
but you should know I’ve been acquainted
with thievery since the day I was born,
and when my mother, turned trickster, gave me away,
she had neuroplasticity in one pocket,
a bottle of Budweiser in the other,
and a trickster birth mother
begets a trickster daughter,
the umbilical complicated and uncut somehow,
and did you notice
the loose pearls in my jewelry box, Thief?
My trickster mother crafted them from her brief breast milk,
small round reminders of what’s there and what’s not,
because sometimes it’s necessary to remind
a thing of its loveliness, but some gifts
rob you almost crazy blind, so
I press my heart to Jonathan Harker’s heart,
alone in a castle with a maniac
who somehow looks like him,
shared blood that severs something inside of you,
and I’m after you,
my Black Monday Thief,
I’m coming quick and wild.
Colette Tennant has two poetry books, Commotion of Wings, and Eden and After. Her most recent book, Religion in The Handmaid’s Tale, was published to coincide with Atwood’s publication of The Testaments. Her poems, nominated for Pushcart Prizes, have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Ireland Review, and others.
