Dump me in August, so I’d know
it wasn’t my fault. Sell the banjo,
the canoe, each worn book swiped
from the second-hand store. Let his lease
run out in November. Then that recipe:
swig from a bottle, tip pills speckled like ladybugs
into a cupped hand. Garden hose, sedan,
exhaust. But he’d changed his mind, and tells
me this on a playground just outside
our rented condo. I say nothing, my legs
numbing as the rubber curve of a swing
cuts into my thighs, and my feet churn the mulch
underneath. All day we’d sipped beer
from foam cups, hidden the empties
from the passing beach patrol. The lifeguard’s
flag blazed yellow, some warning we’d ignored.
A fisherman approached our camp of bright
towels and rusted chairs, asked if we’d seen
the shark that leapt from waist-deep water
just that morning. We tried to forget, of course,
what he’d said, to forget that anything could
hurt us here in the shadows of balconies
draped in stars and stripes bunting, the smell
of charcoal edging white.
Anna Claire Hodge is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, and Copper Nickel, among others. Her poems have been anthologized in Best New Poets 2013, It Was Written: Poems Inspired by Hip-Hop, and others. She is a contributing editor for Organic Weapon Arts chapbook press.