Tracy - Half-Hazard: Poems

POEMS KRISTEN TRACY Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation Graywolf Press Copyright 2018 by Kristen Tracy The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Winner of the 2017 Emily Dickinson First Book Award established by the Poetry Foundation to recognize an American poet over the age of forty who has yet to publish a first book.

Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-822-8 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-873-0 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2018 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934511 Cover design: Mary Austin Speaker Cover art: McLoughlin Bros, The Circus and Menagerie Picture Book (1890), courtesy VintageLithoArt.com for Alan Tracy (19771980) & Sheriann Tracy (19801995) This all could have been so different.

How could she have known that statistics show convincingly that when a bear attacks, the victim who fights back is likely to fare better than the one who plays dead? Attacked! John Long, ed. Goodness wont protect you; if youre too good you will die, but then it can be seen as a kind of reward. Kathryn Davis, Hell

I fell from a Bible. A half-blonde tease. With a good good start, I struck out God-filled and thrilled to claim a spot. Here? Where? There? I touched grease, dough, steels.

Raised my low country hem. Up. Up. I met the butcher, the baker, the transmission maker. What next? Girl-girl sin? Boy-girl err? No. No.

Trouble came. Pure purr. He led me off a hat-flat roof. All swish. He spun me near a slippery crag. And I let him, let him.

It wasnt all bad. Trouble makes trouble and soon Trouble went poof. Its not sin or err I live down now. Wow. Wow.

At the magic show I always wanted the tiger to reappear. At the magic show I always wanted the tiger to reappear.

Did I have a pea-sized brain? The beast was in the box. And it was impossible to tell, but I thought the tiger looked blue, as blue as a little girl who has lost her purse with money inside for milk. I wanted someone to tell the tiger it could lead a completely different life if it stopped being so good at performing the trick. But who listens to me? The tiger was replaced by a lion with a caramel-brown face. It had a new trick. It opened its mouth and received a mans head.

He put it in sideways and it came out wet, hair sometimes sticking to the cats fat tongue. Bright bulbs lit up the lion from behind. Its big fur held the light as it balanced all four paws on a milking stool. It stayed steady, mouth open, so a man would not die, not in front of us.

Atop his mower my father chewed the yard while I hid with my trembling rabbit in the garage. I wasnt perfect, one day she got loose.

Fox, dog, tomcat, it wasnt clear what found her. Behind the raspberry bushes, days away from having her first litter, my pet bled like a machine. Fully dismantled. Prey versus predator. I couldnt stand the story. What kind of animal has that kind of heart? When our chickens finally lured a weasel, to keep them safe, for days I fed the beast a small dish of food.

Lunch meat. Cereal. Popcorn. But it wasnt enough. Not even close.

It took a quarter to keep the lights on that was all the machines knew. It took a quarter to keep the lights on that was all the machines knew.

And so my mother emptied her purse for change while my father tried to resuscitate a man on the tennis courts in the dark. But the man died. The paramedics called the heart attack massive, a widow-maker. My parents had just wed, neither one knew how to play tennis well, it was something they would pick up together. Years later, after their son died, after they divorced, this is the one story where their two sides continue to match. They say it felt like it was another ordinary day.