Three Poems by Rachel Custer

You: a Ghazal

Here’s the truth: you’re sick to the bone of you.
The whole world is selling you on the throne of you.

Better a shack in heaven than a mansion in this world;
The same ending awaits the most well-known of you.

A tsunami of sameness drenches all you meet
Even the stranger seems just a clone of you.

So much falseness demands your worship these days.
You grow weary of God sometimes, let alone of you.

Realize, Rachel, how little it all matters in the end,
How much of what’s true is overthrown – of you.

*

Repentance

Here is Mercy, Indiana,
a town you thought you knew.

Here is the room
behind the boarded door.

(To return is to repent
though you didn’t sin by leaving,

though you left
carrying nothing but regret.)

Some places kill with silence.
Some places kill with words.

Like cornstalks, gossips
crackle stories into the wind.

(to repent is to return)

Junkies inject the lies
they see in others’ eyes, the truth

nobody thinks they hear.
Mercy is a hard place to stay clean.

A child’s teeth rot for simple lack.

A mother trips along
toward the liquor store.

The fields hum a gathering song.

*

Malediction for the Madness in Me

Hard child, home
in my marrow, wildness

orbiting the eye of me,
may you live forever.

May you live forever cold,
wandering joint to joint

in search of burning,
purpling your bare arms

with desperate slaps (see, fever,
how the spell we need is never

the spell we cast? The reassuring
purr of pain?) and may

the fires you find be dying.
Despair, be a desert in me: entire

in your lifelessness, endless
in the pursuit of yourself.

May you never be loved
for what you are not: poet, lover,

woman, dancing alone
in your calloused feet. Be exile

in your own hallucinated homeland,
thumbing rides from men who promise

to feed you plums, so long as you lick
the stains from their thick thumbs.

Beg them to love you.
Beg them to love you again.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, One Art, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.