Two Poems
Ann-Marie Blanchard
Fidelity’s Bonefires
Some days, Fidelity chews tobacco,
spits why-nots and splits herself—
skull to toe. Hummingbirds thunder
across the vastness of her tastebuds,
her sugarcane punch. Some days,
Fidelity doesn’t give a fuck about
fidelity, makes trouble with human
remains. Constructs tibia tents and
tailbone torches. We can’t stop
her. Most days, Fidelity isn’t fun
—transforms into unadulterated
trouble, lone-wolf terror, seeks
the meat of voyagers on British
Columbia shores. Winter doesn’t
worry her. Fidelity hunts bloody
brewed bodies, massages bunnies’
livers into her scalp. Nothing cools
her clit. She gives herself to a grizzly.
Poetry
11 October 2023
Fidelity Climbs the Caldera
Fidelity says goodbye to her long-haired lover and his sunshine state, his swamp truck and vape heart.
Fidelity wishes oceans would corrupt for him, collide for him, sanctify him.
Fidelity has seen God walk across the tightrope of her lover’s sunshine hair. She doesn’t lie.
Fidelity believes in returning to herself again and again (having lived wrong as nobody’s sacred).
Fidelity deposits her lover home, accepts he must face the sad stashed in his dresser drawers.
Fidelity has a way with scissors—cuts the ethereal line that links the pair. It only bleeds a little.
Fidelity has an intolerance to the color red yet can’t help poking her own arteries.
Fidelity is a volcano lover; she wouldn’t call herself a scientist, simply a lava devotee.
Fidelity knows not to wear boots that melt on scorching earth. She’s smarter than that.
With her lover gone, Fidelity is more inclined to eat cake and does so on the edge of a volcano.
Fidelity marvels at whipped cream lava, pokes the careless red, and comes out clean.
Ann-Marie Blanchard, a native of Australia, is the director of Great Books at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Louisiana. Ann-Marie earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In 2022 Ann-Marie won the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in fiction. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, Adroit Journal, Palette Poetry, Meanjin Quarterly, Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her manuscript Homebake was a finalist in the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series.