MAC WILDER
One of These Nights
It’s been five years since she last pivoted on the high school basketball court
like a B-movie of Anna Pavlova possessing a teenage boy, so my mama’s feet are sore
from heel to knuckle, each arch aching like a motherfucker, not that she’d say that.
Her & my daddy, eight months married, have snuck away from his suspicious parishioners
for one night only. The year is 1994, and the Eagles are on their reunion tour.
With this bass lick in her sternum & sacrum, she can almost forget the mundane grief
of him inside her, the stench & stick of infant vomit & shit—not that she’d say that—
in the church nursery, the singular chair in their apartment. And the deals with the devil
she performs once a month at the corner pharmacy to fight off a certain sort of pressure
in the atmosphere, one which warns of a coming storm in the form of a child—and s/he
shall be called, et cetera—whom she’ll shield from any song that isn’t praise, forget that, too;
tonight, one of these crazy old nights, Don Henley is singing, unexpected, about the boys
of summer, and her young husband is tipping his head back in the August dusk,
lips mouthing the words, eyes closed in cautious awe like when he’s worshiping.
She remembers watching him play when she was a freshman and he was varsity,
lanky & luminous under the joyless gym lights, running like he could catch up
with Jesus. She thought he was just about the prettiest thing she’d ever seen,
a Sargent sketch scoring a three-pointer, some new sort of miracle. In a couple hours,
the traffic’s gonna be so bad they only make it home in time for her to change clothes,
redo her makeup, and head straight to her shift at the bank. Her feet still hurt.
Her husband’s face won’t stop displaying some combination of rapture & anguish
she’s scared to recognize. Mostly, though, she’s feeling out the harmony in the dark,
the urgent pulse it prints on her palate, like learning to anchor one ankle and twirl.
She thinks it stings a little like the Spirit. Not that she could ever say that.
Mac Wilder (ze/zem/zyrs or any pronouns) is a homebound high femme whose work explores queercrip sexuality, high-control Christianity, & their intersection. Zyr work appears or is forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, manywor(l)ds, Corporeal, and beestung.