Tropic of Squalor: Poems by Mary Karr

Author:Mary Karr [Karr, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

IV. Exodus: Bolt Action

I left home to escape the swamp of self.

The locusts swarmed as in the days of Job.

Each wore a prophet’s face.

My mind was a charnel house and a death camp

and a mud pack body wrap in which you twist and steam

as every toxin leaches from your pores.

In every room of my home, the candles had been pinched dark,

the pages of the books wiped white of any word, and some

bacterium had begun to eat out everybody’s eyes

so yellow pus spilled from the lower lids like sick tears

God was a bucket I spoke into, so to protest His absence

or cruel subtlety, I stopped speaking to Him. I ran away

from the land where I never heard His voice.

I hightailed it out.

Nobody sent after me for I was lazy and feckless and poor

at most orders, and I served an inescapable master:

In my head it sits

ugly and loud, hands on the controls

peering out my pie-slit eyeholes—speaking

the voice of my mother telling me to go

make a cardboard sign with a city on it,

stick your thumb out,

run, you little bitch . . .

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