The Dogs I Have Kissed Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Trista Mateer

  2nd. Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review.

  Editing by Clementine von Radics

  www.clementinepoetry.com

  Cover & Interior Art by Krystle Alder

  www.krystlealder.com

  for S.—

  I read somewhere that dedications

  are like coded love letters,

  but I always seem to lay us out bare.

  Sorry for the poems.

  Bite

  I Am a Runner

  I have been told that girls always fall

  for men like their fathers,

  but I found it a hard concept to grasp

  when he was always gone

  and I grew up on radio static

  and blackberry preserves.

  I remember having smaller hands

  and looking at him through wider eyes

  like everything

  was so much grander

  just because it was so much bigger than me

  and he was so much bigger than me

  so he must be grand too;

  for a long time, I thought that he was,

  but now words like sweetheart and princess

  make me straighten my back

  and shuffle my feet: back and forth, back and forth

  always on the move.

  I am a runner (just like my father)

  only we prefer leaving

  to lacing up sneakers and hitting the track.

  The first boy I loved used to start our mornings

  kissing my forehead in the high school lobby—

  until one of his friends laughed and said:

  “What are you? Her father?”

  and I realized why I liked his careless mouth

  so much.

  I used to bury my face in his clothes

  because I liked the smell:

  cheap beer, cigarettes, Old Spice cologne.

  And I knew it from somewhere,

  I knew it from somewhere,

  I knew it from

  the way my father used to lean in

  and smooth back my hair,

  plant a kiss on my forehead

  before he left for work.

  Sometimes the noises of mouths still make me upset:

  kissing, chewing, breathing, slurring speech.

  Shouting makes my insides jump up my throat.

  Once my mother said to me,

  she said: “You’re going to fall for men

  like your father; I’m sorry—”

  and I wanted to ask her if that meant

  I would fall for a fighter

  and a hard fist and a fast car,

  boys on motorcycles,

  people who ran from their problems,

  midnight phone calls from the beds of other women,

  slippery mouths with tongues that twisted truth

  like cherry stems

  or if that meant I might just be comfortable

  with absence.

  For the One Who Loved My Hands

  More than Anything Else

  You saw only what you wanted to.

  There were flowers blooming between my teeth,

  promises wrapped around my hips,

  handstands in the gangly corners of me.

  There were blades in my hands.

  I was carving my name into your side

  and you were calling me soft,

  calling me gentle.

  I do not think you were paying attention.

  Texts I Shouldn’t Have Sent to My Ex:

  can we say goodbye again? i miss the way you rip me open.

  i know your mother never liked me. i hope she knows we drank her wine and fucked on the living room couch. i bet she’s where you got your stubborn mouth from.

  you were supposed to write me a song for my eighteenth birthday and you never did; do you remember that? i remember that. i don’t know why, but it’s the first thing i tell people when you come up in conversation.

  sometimes i think i resented you so much it felt like love.

  you’re the only person i didn’t mind sleeping next to. i could never fall asleep next to the one after you. i still can’t sleep.

  i saw a photo of you holding a baby this morning. it fucked up my entire day. thanks.

  i hate that i never hated you. i tried really hard for a long time.

  do you still love me?

  every time i delete your number from my phone, i write it down somewhere because i have no self control. sometimes i miss you and i don’t mean to.

  hey, me again.

  How to Not Forgive

  When I was small, I remember my mother saying that she believed aliens helped build the pyramids. She used to keep crystals around. She used to carry healing stones. She used to believe my father would always come back to her.

  Now that she is older, she prays to the nail marks in someone’s palms but I don’t think she believes in forgiveness anymore. She sent me to Sunday school in little floral dresses, not to torture me but to learn this.

  Hurt me once: shame on me. Hurt me twice: shame on me. Hurt me three times: shame on me but fuck you. Hurt me four times and we’ll get severed-head biblical. We will pick up stones.

  And now that I am older, I don’t give a damn about sin. I will be the first to cast one.

  I Was Nineteen Years Old

  When I found out that you could cry

  “please no, please don’t, please no, please don’t”

  loud enough to wake the neighbors

  and they still wouldn’t turn on a porch light.

  And I never wanted to tell anyone

  but the poems

  because I was the one with the pink garter belt

  and the thigh-high stockings. And I was the one

  with the little black dress.

  I was the one

  who still tried to kiss him afterward

  because I thought that might

  make it okay.

  It didn’t.

  The Poem That Begged Not to Be Written

  For the one who broke me like bread

  at the dining table and then left mid-meal.

  For the one who called himself an animal

  so I didn’t have to.

  For the one who cut me in half and scooped out

  all of my nice, all of my forgiving, all of my trust.

  For the one who cheated

  and for the one who bruised

  and for the one who left.

  I learned the word fuck from my mother’s tongue,

  as in fucker, he fucking left me,

  he fucking left.

  I learned the word no from myself.

  From somewhere deep in the pit of me,

  it rose like some ancient thing

  and slunk its way out of my throat,

  heavy-handed.

  Will I ever let this guard down long enough

  to learn anything new?

  Fuck no.

  When I Was a Little Girl

  In the bone-white basement of a church, a woman

  told me that I was made from the rib of a man.

  I tried to count my brother’s ribs because I wanted

  to ask why he had the same number as me and

  shouldn’t he have one less? Or maybe two less,

  depending on how many little girls God wanted to

  make when my brother was born?

  Instead I asked, if I were a little
rib girl,

  then what was my brother made of?

  She told me that man was created from dust and

  breath in the image of God; and I tried to imagine

  that God looked like my brother when he lost his

  two front teeth in a bicycle accident and ran

  screaming into the house, crying for my mother

  with his bloody mouth.

  I asked why God couldn’t be more like Mom instead.

  And she said to me, “women are sinful.”

  Years later when I taste my first one, I agree with her.

  This Is How New Religions Start

  Waking up too early because your breath

  is heavy

  in the bed next to me:

  wide-eyed-awake early morning reveries.

  I could probably make a sermon

  out of the way your mother looks at me.

  I could probably make a sermon

  out of the way you mouth words in your sleep.

  Light slipping through the curtains,

  every part of you looks saccharine.

  I want to wash your feet with my hair.

  I want to rinse my mouth out with soap.

  I want to wash your feet with my hair.

  I want to rinse my mouth out with soap.

  Violets, Violets, Violets

  Girl like a flower that bloomed only at night,

  I spent months unfurling by your bedside.

  In the beginning

  the empty wine bottles on the bathroom floor

  seemed flirty, somehow mysterious.

  But when the sun came up, I looked stark by contrast.

  Everything looked bright, so bright

  laid out next to the bags under my eyes.

  Violets, violets, violets.

  And you with your lungfuls of hope,

  teeth like slick wet promises

  every time you opened your mouth.

  We used to do so much talking

  before things got quiet here.

  We used to do so much not-talking.

  You with your doe eyes, you with those lips

  that could almost suck stubbornness out of anybody.

  You with your wishful thinking.

  You with that hope.

  After a while you started to resent the color purple,

  the way my apologies

  surfaced like bruises after the fact.

  After a while it was those violets, violets, violets.

  Girl like a garden you never volunteered to tend.

  Dirt all tracked into your front hall.

  Picking New Sheets

  When I replace these, there’s no

  going back.

  When I throw these out,

  the only thing that will remember

  your small ragged-breath sleeping

  will be me.

  No more touch memory on my pillowcases.

  No more “I can almost smell you.”

  I think the walls

  of this room have already forgotten

  you used to breathe here.

  For Brittanie

  There will always be men

  who have fishhooks for fingers.

  There will always be women

  with wet, sharp mouths.

  It is okay to get caught up in them.

  It is not okay to drown.

  Don’t you ever let another human

  being tear you apart.

  Remember that you have claws

  and teeth, too.

  Remember that you are better off

  whole.

  Apartment #9

  I am not going to miss you.

  You are not going to miss me:

  the filler conversation in your empty bed.

  I know we both said some nice things in the end

  but I already forget the shape of your mouth

  and the night you cradled my face in your hands

  and said, “You’re so pretty, you’re so pretty”—

  almost, anyway. But I swear

  in a week, I will not remember how

  I moaned for your hands

  or spent an hour on public transit

  just to get to your front door

  with a careless grin and smudged lipstick;

  in a month, I will not remember anything.

  Not even the scent of your skin

  after a whole day in bed

  with me.

  Not even the way we said goodbye.

  Barbed Wire

  Boys are always trying to fix me:

  taking me home like a weekend project,

  all pursed lips and furrowed brows

  when I don’t snap out of it with a kiss.

  Approach me like I weave caution tape into my hair.

  I will greet you with a mouth full of barbed wire

  until you learn to stop coming after me

  with your hands.

  4/23

  I don’t know how to exist properly

  in the same space as someone

  I don’t love anymore.

  I Want to Be Sorry for This

  I wrote our breakup poem

  two weeks after we started “going steady.”

  I wrote our breakup poem before I ever said:

  I love you. I wrote our breakup poem before

  we moved in together.

  My hands are still shaking from

  nights spent not knowing

  how to want you.

  Sorry I Stole Your DVD When We Broke Up

  We sat on your couch in your basement apartment

  that had somehow become our basement apartment

  with the dim lighting and the wet air.

  The pages of my books curled.

  My dresses smelled like mildew.

  We sat on our couch in our basement apartment

  for the same date night that we had every Wednesday.

  With bad Chinese take-out

  and a movie that you already owned,

  we sat for an hour and forty-two minutes

  before I ever dreamt of leaving.

  We sat on our couch in our basement apartment

  while the credits rolled

  and you expressed your frustration with the ending;

  and oceans parted inside of me with urgency.

  Looking around at dirty clothes and empty bottles,

  I got seasick for the first time in my life.

  We sat on our couch in our basement apartment

  while you ejected the movie and tucked it away

  and I hung my Y’s back up.

  Your couch. Your basement apartment.

  Your complacency.

  Not mine.

  Keys on the Coffee Table

  I had played the string-along game.

  I had done my fair share of pushing away.

  I was all tease and no follow-through,

  all want me but don’t depend on me.

  I was an evader of intimacy.

  I sought out commitment until it came knocking.

  Then I was diving out of first-story windows

  and hiding in the bushes.

  You were the first person I ever really ran from.

  Bags packed while you were at work,

  phone calls ignored.

  I took off wordlessly,

  effortlessly.

  I planned it for weeks

  and still kissed you goodnight.

  It was so goddamn easy.

  I thought I’d feel guilt wedged up

  under my ribcage somewhere.

  I thought I’d feel remorse.

  But I took that first step out the door

  and all I felt was

  free.

  You Will Teach Her to Spit Out My Name

  When you fall into the arms of someone new

  I will just be the mess of a woman

  who left your love notes on the floor

  and ran off.

  When you
bring up the past,

  I will be the monster you could never outrun.

  I will be the fear in the back of your throat

  and nothing more.

  I will be an unfortunate thing to overcome,

  not a person with a handful of fuck-ups

  and a mouthful of apologies.

  The Poet

  After Caitlyn Siehl

  The poet can’t stand the quiet. She can’t stand

  the buzzing in her head. The murmur of memory.

  The poet picks up a book of poetry. It is not her

  writing but it reads the same way. It is not her

  story but the ending is similar enough to pass.

  The poet tries to read a verse out loud and only

  tastes blood in her mouth.

  The poet worries she is writing the same poem