Tell Me

Hamlet Act V, Scene 1:

I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.

At 22, I thought Hamlet hit peak
romance when he leaped into her grave.
I wanted to be loved that way, I said,
imagining some frenzied ex whose heart
would finally crack open, cascading tears
over my corpse. Those days we’d dress up
all in black and stroll the graveyard
talking Kierkegaard, Camus, The Cure—
death distant as a Denmark tomb.

This was years before
my mother’s lungs filled with the sea,
her body twined with tubes like lily stems
ascending from her metal bed;
before I’d sprint to reach her room and find
the blinking cosmos of the monitor gone black.
And my father then confessing
he had wanted to return—2000 miles,
40 years and two ex-wives in tow.

Yes, sometimes love is far
too long and late. But fuck
this keeping secrets for the dead,
the power ballad bombast,
the sepia-toned regret,
the last glance back
as the subway doors meet.

Here’s what I know tonight:
the sum of our near misses
is silence. So lie here, lean close,
tell me everything before we sink.

*

Poem for the Closing Scene of Every Incredible Hulk Episode

Poor David Banner always ended up the same.
After someone made him angry,
turned him avocado green,
pecs popping through his last clean button down
(but at least lucking out that his pants stayed on).

After tossing drug lords through a glass gazebo,
upending a sedan or two, occupants
suspended while the wheels still spin.
After hurtling a jukebox into the wall of booze,
bartender ducking just in time, or lobbing
leisure-suited playboys into the swimming pool,
sending them slo-mo shrieking from the hotel
balcony. Main street now in ruins, bad guys
cuffed and packed into the backs of Dodge
patrol cars, PG cussing over minor injuries.

Those wan piano notes would sound,
final credits toll his time, again, to exit town.
Condemned to walk the highway
in a crisp new shirt, thumb outstretched as happy
families whoosh past in their wood paneling.
D minor sob crescendoing as a semi
brakes to let him climb aboard.

Even then, watching from my grandma’s
velvet couch I knew that knot of sorrow
in my chest was for my dad
who looked like David Banner,
but less tall and more Hungarian;
who’d loaded up a white VW bus
and headed off into some desert sun,
sending gifts of fossils, petrified wood,
three rattles from the snakes he’d shot.
Leaving me back here to clean things up.

*

How I Would Haunt You

Not only in the ways you would expect—
With flickering lights, an obscure Smiths song
to halt your cart from a Costco intercom.
I’d haunt you hard, send 3 am texts.

I’d pick the oddest times to show my face:
the DMV just as your number’s called,
the last sogged Cheerios circling your bowl,
a billboard on the M-10 overpass.

And forget the nightgown, long and white.
I’d go sexy into that good night, slut
it up just so you’d know exactly what
it is you’re missing in the afterlife.

And when you’re drowning in some fever dream
I’d wake you with a kiss that fucking might have been.

*

Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World, now in its second edition from Dzanc Books. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Failbetter, Rust & Moth, Gargoyle, and Mudlark, among other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She has served as submissions editor for Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation and poetry editor for Failbetter=. She currently resides in Ann Arbor, where she co-hosts a paranormal podcast called Shadowland.