H R Webster

Badlands

I didn’t notice. Watching Sissy Spacek or reading Chelsea Girls together
in the narrow bed, on the city bus—ear to ear listening to whale songs

through a shared headphone, shivering under the meteor shower, dipped on the dance floor
at the VFW then snapped back into your arms like a branch shaking off snow,

at the museum pacing before Flavin’s blank magic. I didn’t see you.
There’s no formula for transposing light waves into sound. Only clumsy organs

built around particular interiorities. The world doesn’t bend to my desire for relation,
but still I mourn the gap between what I had imagined was our shared experience

and what I did not see until I learned to look: your absence from yourself. In the Badlands
living out of our car while unemployed, I began drawing pictures

to show you what you did and said. Your stick figure walking into the brazen landscape
holding up two middle fingers. Your ragged speech bubble: I’m begging you

to crash the car and kill us both. Outside the hasty frame: sticky playing cards
held to the picnic table with a Corona from the case we fought about

at the gas station. How it felt to pull the box off the shelf and see,
suddenly, the disarray of the cold storage behind, bologna

logs and the stockboy’s folding chair—the prize for opening a window
to a secret world. And then the bison we followed breathlessly down the washboard road.

The way she set her teacup feet so carefully, the way she shouldered through
the evening air. Can you blame me for this hard-won gratitude? I learned my lesson, 

but I still need to be reminded all the time how little I know. Who was she to you,
the bison, processing across your narrow consciousness? Turning her head

side to side to see what was directly in front of her from each wick-black, wideset eye.

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H R Webster is the author of What Follows (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Her poems can be found in POETRY, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ecotone, AGNI and Guernica. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.