ALICIA MOUNTAIN, "HEROIC CROWN: QUEER SONNETS" (Issue 15)

HEROIC CROWN: QUEER SONNETS
                       
                                  after Beyoncé's Lemonade

1.

In a winter dream, months ago

she came. The queen, braided and

furred, promising a betrayal song when

the time was most right, promising

your betrothal would only bend a season

for me. This train town has a howling

in the night. It is a beehive alive with

honeysuckle whispers, sweet stinging.

Your maps don’t stray like I do,

but we were both drawn to scale,

traced by your fingers for a path,

we both fold small for safekeeping.

Her prophesy said, run from your want—

whatever most right was, it waited.


2.

Whatever most right was, it waited

until I skipped town south to sink in,

to get me sprung on spring-heavy air

like breath against neck, like my long

white girl hair sticking to your sweat.

Daytime bathroom belt buckle betrayal.

Bodies inside bodies love, your hands.

Now all I have here is Virginia, weeks

and weeks of alone, in breathy Virginia.

When we were in love, men would ask

if we were sisters. What a wicked way

to deny what was already buried and plain.

How I set a snare for the life they saw

between us, held tight like too much hope.

3.

Between us, held tight like too much hope,

and thunder sounds spanking the hills,

all year was a racket. House party borrowed

bass beats and cheap tequila with no chaser,

jumping in aqueducts, down on my knees

in the locker room shower, shoved up against

locked office doors with you. Landlock

that wouldn’t hold. Drive me to the stolen

land, lake big enough to be an ocean. He can

come—he who’s in here too, to whom you

are promised, the smoke dozing in your

rafters. He can sleep in the backseat if you

give me directions. Some rough-faced boy

I would never try to steal you from.

4.

I would never try to steal you from

the hills so steep I lose my breath,

where I breathe you to keep going.

The queen tells me not to drink the

tidal push and pull from some mug

left on your bedside. Who mouthed it

last? What solemnity and grace did

they avow? To what am I entitled?

Did you name your book volcano?

The queen promises an overripe

rupture, full-court press. The most

I can say is no one’s too old for

high tops, the high-water mark,

the shore I couldn’t start to see.

5.

The shore I couldn’t start to see.

The storm I couldn’t feel until it had

soaked me through, wrung me out.

Let my pink water-wrinkled hands lift you

onto the countertop. I write to you  

from the counter at the Waffle House

closest to the Jefferson Plantation.

I watch myself on a security monitor

swiveling, my hat turned backwards.

I think I will always look like a child

when I am alone. The nearest train,

whose tracks I can’t find, stops sinister at

Lynchburg—named after a man. Hard to

believe the less terrible, even when it’s true.

6.

Believe the less terrible. Even when it’s true

that I have been sweating everyday,

shrinking a little, drinking a little less.

Even then, I wonder if my body is more

possessive of you than of itself. At the

gym I drink watered-down lemonade.

To start the stair master’s churning,

I choose a setting called Life Quest and

level 5 because what am I trying to win?

The queen in my ear doesn’t need me to bow

my head to her. The stairs collapse and

collapse beneath me. Does he build rough

hills to climb for you? Do you recognize

this book is a monument to touch?

7.

This book is a monument to touch

even with its hands in its pockets.

Even with your hair in your eyes as

disguise, there is no making public

how we push and pull in dark corners.

The beehive whispers when it sees our

hands touch, the train town howls and

howls. The rough face smiles beside yours.

Lick my teeth in the daylight. Still no

chaser. Still no closer to extinguishing

the bolt of my lightning you hold captive.

I have held the bright storm of you

hot in my hands. I would do it again,

however quick, however long it lasts.

8.

However quick, however long it lasts,

this hot breath season is for growing.

Have you cut your hair at all? Have you

turned his rough jeans into cutoffs you wear

on weekends? Is any day not a weekend

for you when the high desert burns off

its chill by lunchtime? I offer to trade you

a poem for the story of the place we pressed

our bodies together. We’ll write twin books

to outlast this. We’ll press them cover to cover.

I will tell my book that it was once in love,

even if it doesn’t remember fitting against

you as it slept. I don’t think many people

remember my body, the folded map of it.

9.

Remember my body. The folded map of it

spread out on the floor at your mother’s

house. Remember the winding road to

the rose garden and just going slow together,

stopping to smell sunscreen on my neck.

The queen says in these breathy weeks away

my panting for you has been forgotten.

But you started wearing my deodorant and,

at some rough point, he probably started

wearing it, too. In Virginia I have run out.

I am grocery store, I am shampoo as soap,

I am very little toothpaste. If I ever return

to our train town, I’ll smell like him—

whoever you love. He belongs beside you.

10.

Whoever you love, he belongs beside you.

The rupture is a slow roiling, the moan

let go by a falling tree. My volcano seeps

fire blood love up to the surface so it can

cool and dissipate, so it can run downhill.

The queen in my ear breathes heavy that I am

alone at a desk, taking what doesn’t belong

to me. I come from a long line of betrayers

who have worn many rings and read prophesy

into desire. I pretend I am good. I would

get you lost in the hot forest, I would bring

lemonade, speak thief songs to you, panting.

The queen says enough, puts me to bed

lying in your honest kind of shade.

11.

Lying in your honest kind of shade

under moaning trees older than I’ll live

to be, I roll onto my belly in a final try

to say, come with me to the high desert

where our breath will be our breath and not

the springtime breathing for us. Pack a car

with most of what you need, rough-faced

trust, hands in pockets, body inside body,

toothpaste, tequila, map worn along its

creases, smoke in rafters. Come with me.

I try to say all this by getting to my feet,

by saying very little, saying I am not lost,

I swear. The queen says lost is a sort of

somewhere. Inside me there is a swarm.

12.

Somewhere inside me there is a swarm

that wants out. If this storm is electric,

if the power goes out, wait. What has

flashed across every spring-static sky

will come again. I have paid my leap year

debts and with what’s left, cook breakfast

hot in a kitchen, kneading something

and letting it rise. If I’m being honest

I don’t know that I ever saw your eyes.  

I don’t know if you put your mouth

to my neck without looking over my

shoulder. Who is more dispossessed

than the thief? How long have I been

keeping quiet when I want to howl?

13.

Keeping quiet when I want to howl

is old work, the day labor that never

breaks me even. In some accounting,

this was worth every minute of leisure,

of lemonade, of cool, sugared wanting.

The horizon puts her feet up, stretched

out across hills that bloom, even while

they burn. There is no other queen above

her. This is no return ticket between us.

I took my body with me, took my book.

I am not trying to be good. Double knot

your high tops, turn backwards your hat.

Walk the highest hill until you see that

what you buried can’t be driven out of me.

14.

What you buried can’t be driven out of me.

The train town grasses have grown tall and

mowing sounds put me back in the secret

in your mother’s house, where I would tell you

over again how I have broken many things

in my thirst. I would lie on the floor and

give you my hands, give you my mouth,

try to hear you through your hair. Because

I am going to the desert, because you are not,

I am trying to remember your breath. I am told

we still look alike. I am told that every train town

has the same smoke in its rafters, the same

monuments, the same stairs collapsing and

collapsing, the same tide pulling at my belt.  

15.

In a winter dream, months ago,

whatever most right was, it waited

between us, held tight like too much hope.

I would never try to steal you from

the shore I couldn’t start to see.

Believe the less terrible, even when it’s true:

this book is a monument to touch,

however quick, however long it lasts.

Remember my body, the folded map of it.

Whoever you love, he belongs beside you,

lying in your honest kind of shade.

Somewhere inside me, there is a swarm

keeping quiet when I want to howl.

What you buried can’t be driven out of me.


ABOUT THE POET


Alicia Mountain is a queer poet and PhD candidate at the University of Denver. Her poems can be found in Guernica, jubilat, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Witness, and elsewhere. Alicia's work was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her unpublished full-length manuscript was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and a notable manuscript for the BOAAT Book Prize. She has received received an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Idyllwild Arts Fellowship and a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Mountain earned her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula. 


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