Apostasy by Lauren Hilger


 
 
Wet with your youth,
you called for champagne in the log cabin
and tried not to burn the thing down.
 
How still you stood to drink it, a Greek bronze.
Your torso a flame over a saint’s head.
In the woods, you were an angle,
 
had rowed across Mink Lake to get there.
He held your arms back, your ponytail in his fist
like you were a creature who would bite.
 
Then that last night in your glasses—
as if wearing them out to the bar
counted as staying in—
 
How you looked at women
who said, “I’m good,”
meaning they were done.
 
 
 
Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016.) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from the MacDowell Colony, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens