wildscape. literary journal

I Have Spoiled This Body We Once Shared
by Kait Quinn

after Helen Dunmore*

Stained the blue floraled porcelain
with the blooded berry of unchristened

holly. Filled its oyster boughs buoyed,
then broken. I have gathered a sorrow

of ravens in the peach orchard
of my valley—I have forgotten

sting of steel through flesh; grenades
tossed to ankles, nail bed detonated;

your guitar-scarred thumb running
the length of my collarbone like a fret-

board. I am not the homeland you
remember. High desert bled you

vermillion from my nose.
Mariposa sand storms carved

my bones of every atom
that once brushed yours.

All the spine-bruised,
plum-lipped, August-viscid

agony I once saved for you—’til we bent
under the tension against laundry room

doors and your parents’ seven-thousand-
dollar couch—now sacrificed

for the poem. Even if I could gap black
tea seas I spilled between us, I’d have nothing

to offer save a leaky aorta, wet
matchstick ribs, a poem

I didn’t even write for you. Every line
is another organ failure. Every letter a brain cell

sputtering to recount the broken-winged
mockingbird I traced across your bister-

dappled back before it flickers out.
Can you hear the bells?

Their death knell tolling?
These slices of carved strawberry

and buttercream are never what you think.
I am constantly writing my own eulogy.

*Title is a line from the poem “To my nine-year-old self” by Helen Dunmore.

about the author // Kait Quinn