Devil’s Lake

Spring 2011 Issue

Alex Lemon: Everybody Has a Skeleton

Spinning, we closed our glitter-painted eyes

& sung the alphabet until it no longer felt

Like someone was renting out space in our heads.

We felt on fire, molten, & passed out public service

Announcements about the bone-strengthening

Benefits of hip tosses & heavy metal. We jumped

Until our jawbones went rubbery & our devil-shaped

Hands glistened with spit. Everyone, in perfect

Unison, yelled, You dog. You silly dog, you, over & over

& over. It was exhausting. People heaped, heart

Smooth jazz or a jibber-jabber Jesus in their molars.

I ran out of oxygen & remembered the sodden days

Of my youth—What a fool I’d been, believing

That, The struggle to the heights is enough to fill

A man’s heart. & what a sucker I still was, trusting

That day’s moonman mathematics. But staring

Up into the clouds, I knew what was next. I hate

To admit it, but I did. I knew, right then, about

The coming hocus pocus. But like everyone

Else, I just stared around dumbly. There we

Were: A foodball field filled, sideline-to-sideline

With La-Z-Boys & bathtubs. I didn’t point out

The darkening clouds. Everyone is afraid already.

An old man looked up at me from his chair

& there I was, looking into my own face.

Tucking a blanket around my wet thighs.

Centering my nice little shawl. Lightning

Jigsawed the horizon again & suddenly, I thought

Maybe it had been right all along—it was struggling

& the heights but I’d been imagining a teeny,

Ill-shaped heart inside me, when

A humongously bloody & engorged lovemonster

Had been suckling inside me all this time.

The air made my lungs pucker. The bonfire smoke

Made me weep. I poured a bit out, then poured out

A bit more, before shaking the last trickle down

My throat. The old man, the old me & a sky darkening

With facts: even the best among us is not innocent

& without good bones, we could not stand up at all.

a photo of the author, Alex Lemon ALEX LEMON is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner), the poetry collections Mosquito (Tin House Books), Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), Fancy Beasts (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions), and the chapbook At Last Unfolding Congo (horse less press). His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, BOMB, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. More from this issue >