The Birds We Drank

by Barit Angharad

Inspired by: “Chemical Party”, Gavin Degraw, Chariot (2003)
“Mad Season”, Matchbox Twenty, Mad Season (2000)

We cockfight with bottles,
grey geese and wild turkeys fly, thrown down
the backs of our gullets, wet and on fire,
the fire, only fire we light
in the fog night contact high of joint magnetism –
the kind where your joints should wrap around mine,
my joints should socket yours –
we should stick together.

Spin that bottle again,
your flair is showing, and my predilections
for lace waistbands and silk bra straps
with zebras underneath that you can’t see
racing, stampeding against this voltaic flesh,
all raised hairs and goosepimples
you brush with jimp fingers
as you set down the shot glass.

Pass the juice around the jungle
we have built in our heaven, in our closet,
in this space that belongs to someone else –
space that will not remember us in the morning,
will not remember undone zippers,
sthenic, sweat-soaked zebras, and the birds we drank
from each the other’s maw beneath blankets
scented with sex and the dope in your pockets.

I don’t even know my name
anymore, I don’t care to know yours, I don’t care
what’s in your pants –you aren’t wearing them,
you’re wearing me, I’m wearing the curve of your skin –
somehow we have pierced each other,
somewhere, further, the dawn silence begs
lingering, for another battle, for cigarettes
and coffee I’ll drink if you will.

Barit Angharad is the shallowest part of the North Atlantic Current. She currently lives in a boat between the shores Nefyn, Wales and Rye, New Hampshire where she writes poems with fish bones and octopus ink. You are the first to decipher her scrawl.