Portside

Trauma Walks into a Bar

By Melissa Spohr Weiss

orders a rum and coke and lets out

its belly, fat with history. Trauma knows

more names than ancestry dot com.

Trauma heard dismembered cats

are turning up in your hometown –

Glenmeadows, Ben Lee Park.

Trauma peels photos from its wallet.

There are never enough hours

in a day, Trauma laments. Trauma

tells you it sleeps with the lights

on. It knows your secrets, jabbers freely

to those around you. Trauma likes to quote

Stalin: One death is tragedy; one million

is a statistic. Trauma has walked all

5.2 million square miles of Siberia.

It knows where your ancestors are buried,

knows which ones were drunks.  Trauma births

trauma births trauma. Trauma knows

all the answers but doesn’t like to share.

Trauma shapeshifts. It’s your jeans

that don’t fit right. It’s the peanut stuck

in your throat. It’s the empty shot glass,

empty shot glass, empty shot glass…

Trauma doesn’t fuck around. It knows coyotes

probably got at the cats. Knows that even though

this is natural, it doesn’t make their carcasses

any less bloody. Trauma knows you hide

mickeys of Smirnoff in your closet. Trauma asks

you to think of someone other than yourself

for a change. Trauma dares you to take

another drink. It grows mad with hunger –

boils its leather belt into broth.

When you try to leave, Trauma insists

on picking up the tab.

Melissa Spohr Weiss (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. Her poetry has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Riddle Fence, The Malahat Review, CV2, Prairie Fire, The Maynard, Oakland Arts Review, and elsewhere.