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Jill Mceldowney
I'll Have Another
You cannot buy love
but you can buy actual sex
& I haven’t been this bored since I believed in Jesus.
Hey player,
play me better.
You & I & the airport drug sniffing dogs know
what glitters on the fluid holding our vital organs.
Send up your sighs.
I know you laugh when you don’t know what else to say.
I will say it for you:
“I hear banjos.”
Call me daddy & get me another beer.
If M is for Messiah then I want you in cheap sunglasses
& I want diamonds for your dick.
I happen in those cell phone hours,
I am that light at the end of the tunnel.
I am all combinations of ‘fuck’
& my name is expensive.
There is No God in Antarctica
If this was a movie,
you would touch my face like that.
There would be gentle flurries—
What if I am the body in a red dress they are going to find
at the bottom of the elevator shaft?
—something dramatic like this wilderness,
this freezer burn, the meat locker taste, the hotel pool frozen over. In
the post party Playboy Mansion hush we are becoming totems, you
see my breath: we are both really good liars.
cut
to a somewhere, the city wolves & their lonely howls.
This stopped being a movie when
the temperature dropped. &
sometimes,
the soundtrack is Motown drifting from the Hard Rock Cafe
other times,
it is just a seal barking from a rocky outcrop.
In the Elevator
You do not care that I am dangerous—
they say that shit in movies.
This hotel with a gold ceiling used to be a cathedral,
used to be a temple—
used to be this,
this—
this is not over.
“I can tell. You have come to forget.”
The elevator is a magic hour,
is a red dress and a filth song sung by champagne—
Put the Bible in the hall.
I want money in my blood, I
want to fuck a stranger with a
king of hearts tattoo in a room without a Bible.
Let’s be internet celebrities.
Say my name.
I like emergencies.
Killing at the Neighbors’
do not let the sun go down on you here, stranger
It is written: Detroit is no dry bones.
Detroit will live
because here is a man this earth refused.
do not look for me. I am still here.
I am here & I have a gun—
I am here & the crimewater is rising.
Jill Mceldowney is an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University. She is the author of the chapbook Kisses Over Babylon (dancing girl press 2016). Her work has also appeared in Vinyl, Corium, Ghost Town, and other notable publications.