B45
Public Record
Excerpt from novel: with Abandon

the other day I stumbled

into a preERA old book store
and opened a poetry book at random,
flipped flippantly to some old page
and read a short one by a sailor's wife
whose husband had taught their parrot to swear.
the wife recalled fondly her husband repeating
"drown me in my own cum, you cockless pedant!"
over and over to the parrot
until it would say the phrase back exactly as he had said it
using the husband’s own voice.
she would laugh and laugh as the two would
squawk expletives back at one another —
laughing until breathless
at the parrot's apparent loss of innocence.
the sailor would be gone for weeks on end,
and she'd be left home with the parrot saying
"cunty parliament, fuckless minister; jism bins, the lot!"
it would sound just like her husband's filthy mouth
and she'd giggle, sometimes guffaw,
and sometimes it would make her miss him so much
she would swallow her whole self in one gulp.

once while he was gone
his ship tipped over.
everyone on board was taught never to learn to swim,
because if their ship ended up tipping over
they'd just end up kicking and paddling for hours,
making dying much more drawn out and unpleasant
than it already tends to be.
so the sailor died in sight of land,
flailing without grace and cursing like a parrot.

the wife received word of his death
two months after he was due home.
the house was quiet enough almost
to hear her husband's dust settling
except for when she heard his voice
coming out of their bird.
when the thing cursed, she wept,
sometimes guffawed and then wept
until her muscles ached from weeping,
thinking of her husband drinking up the atlantic.
"eat out my asshole, you blithering cunt,”
the bird would say,
and she’d bawl and weep and tear herself in half.
finally, at the end of the poem, she lifted the bird out of his cage,
and opened a nearby window.
she stroked its beak as it looked outward,
then it spoke with her husband’s throat,
"fuck it all"
and she twisted off its head.

that’s all I want from any of this:
for someone to somehow stumble into it,
read it,
be moved entirely
and then forget it altogether.

Frida Bilson