Bodega | Guilty

Guilty

I walked into the bar with a bunch of toughs,
bullies, The Holy Roman Empire.
They knew the ways in which we could be locked in and out.

One of the times, it made me stop, but not before I drank my
self italicized.

Before I gave it up,
I let pain reverberate off every brick wall,

as pain will, as it breaks with abstraction.

But solid as a Grecian marble in a mirror,
I’d tongue the bittersweet eyeliner for application.

Hippocrates measured my pulse, an insistent march figure.
A Riviera-thick cat eye.

Vodka-pale.

I watched myself do it.

The sound got on me, and I believed anything
that was power.

Please
don’t make me a joke,
I asked someone.

Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) and Morality Play (Poetry NW Editions, Spring 2022). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

113 – March 2022

By Lauren Hilger

Guilty