Miss Dashed Hopes

(an imitation of Laura Kasischke's poetry)

To have been the meat in the jaws of a wolf. To have been a handkerchief tied around a headache, set on fire (while the cat
gave birth to two kittens,

both dead).
To base the outcome

of your romance
on a raven’s beak. Or the way the bedsheet crumples

between kneecaps and nightmares.
(Do not bother her, her eyes are postcards,
she buys things in pairs.) To have been the seatbelt
that saved the child. To have been

the metal frame of an umbrella, stabbed into cake. Or the yellow of hair
snared in a brush. Like the nest

of wasps in the cabinet. Such concentrated worry. (Will it ever
end?) Twenty songs in one night. All the trumpets and bass drums
sounding out

their final notes against the dusk.
(I’ll beat on this drum ‘till I’m dead)

Once, I heard my brother punch a hole in the wall we shared. My father returned
his birthday gift, unopened. Once, someone stared
and asked, “Did you see that shooting star?”

It was gone,
but I looked anyway,
as if it could have frozen, just for me. To have been

that star, and to have become the black sky.