Occasion

Gatsby is not drinking a gin rickey.

Dracula not puncturing a vein.

Jack the Ripper does not knife a teenage girl

deep into her abdomen and then snake her intestines

through the town square. The birds remain in the pines.

Hunter S. Thompson isn’t dropping acid in Vegas

and grabbing a woman who came to clean his room

with fresh sponges and bleach.

The room does not hold a frat boy

opening my legs. It does not cool

the man who gave me wine and refused

to let me eat and followed me to my car.

It does not have my bed after, only me

in it. I had pulled the door out of his hands,

locked the car, driven away.

The poem does not include the teenage boy

who unfurled his tongue between his pointer and middle finger,

following me on a bike while I pushed her stroller.

This isn’t about the man who played with himself

between the book stacks while I shelved

Probability and Image before closing.

The crickets are not in this poem. Not the summer night,

Pine-Sol mopped over ice-cream-stand floors.

I washed those tiles. This poem does not contain

the spiked punch the fists on the door the

men who circled at the bar and sang,

Just fuck him already. Do us all

a favor. Every year, I write this poem.

I saw them later, passed out drunk

on the carpet when I was pulled into a room.

This poem does not have a mouse.

Not cardinals, not chickadees, not finches.

Every year, I observe pillows and sheets

move into dorms. Yesterday, a boy tried

to take a stick from my daughter’s hand. I wouldn’t let him.