Untitled ("Hurting in the middle")

A stark domestic-weather poem where pain, desire, guns, and exposure move through the same interior space.

A taut interior poem that locates pain twice over - 'Hurting in the middle / Hurting in the mind' - then sets it loose in a bare room with wind, window, rain, exposure, and firearms. The speaker paces 'To and fro across / the wooden floor,' pulls up 'a too tight skirt,' lets 'God sees me show my ass,' and ends by naming her weapons of choice: 'I like Winchester's / over the thresh hold.'

The doubled opening fixes the wound at the center of both body and mind, and the rest of the poem keeps that centrality - there are 'not any rooftops,' nothing overhead, only the speaker 'In front of the wind / In front of the window,' fully exposed. 'Waking is my favorite Sun' is a small, genuine pleasure threaded through the 'gack and forth of / the rain,' a domestic weather that mirrors her own pacing. The body is defiantly present: the too-tight skirt, showing her ass with God as the only witness, being 'Alone and good' on the wooden floor - a self-sufficiency that is part loneliness, part pride. The pivot to guns is sudden and characteristic of this sequence's armed, frontier-tinged femininity: she knows 'a cowboy gun... long barrel forty four' but prefers 'Winchester's / over the thresh hold,' a rifle positioned at the doorway, defense aimed at whatever might cross into her one room. The spellings 'gack' and 'thresh hold' are the source's and I have kept them.