ELEGY FOR INNOCENCE, OUTER BANKS
My manicured nails shock pink
against the double clear of a tumbler
of vodka. Your canoe-carrying
hands, the bitten nubs, cradle swirled
blown glass. You suck at it like
a giving nipple, blow the sweet whorls
at my face, open and wide as when receiving
a kiss. No paved roads, and while stuck
in this rented house in the sand, our skin
grows too apparent. We stare
at wildlife. A dozen wasps you kill
as I perch on a bar stool, porpoises
that surface, the slick grey moons
of their backs that pop forth,
to show us, for a moment, what was underneath
the white-capped peaks
of the near black Atlantic. The island’s
wild Spanish mustangs nap in the warm dirt
of the lawn. Because you do not love me
and I cannot bear to hear it, you read
the newspaper aloud: there’s been a killing
that shocked the five hundred locals.
Three horses, high-powered rifle, a mind gone awry
that was never caught. Like Britney on the cover
of the Us Weekly I paw through over breakfast
at the diner as you tear into biscuits and gravy.
Her bald head gleams, lit by streetlights
as she beats the side of a paparazzo’s van
with an umbrella. Across the restaurant,
a table of lifeguards rises to leave.
They toss fives and tens to pay for plates
of waffles and coffee, then stride toward
the door, the blue of their windbreakers
flooding the exit.
Anna Claire Hodge is a PhD student at Florida State University and the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Journal, diode, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, and Willow Springs, among others. Her poems have been anthologized in Myrrh, Mothwing Smoke: Erotic Poems, It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop, and Best New Poets 2013. Read more about Anna Claire and her writing at www.annaclairehodge.com