One Beer On My Porch

Maren Logan
after Anne Sexton

Your bones are still there. They didn’t even flutter. I left them in the cupholder, on the boat, the
white leather. I wondered if there was a better, more reverent place to put them, a reliquary I
could fashion, or a safer place, like a sock drawer or hollow rock. But something told me to leave
them where you left them. Something told me St. Anthony would raise a finger to his lips and
whisper the secret. We are all somebody’s lost thing. We floss our teeth with it, thin as fruit skin.
As you told me once, as I was reaching for my pink dress splayed across the foot of the bed: if
you want your body back, go and get it. Let that be our last argument. I will not crush and soak
the almonds, I will leave, drive my own pickup truck to the store, purchase the last cases of beer.
I will drink them on my porch. Windows laced with curtains will be left open, like figures in the
showerheads streaming, but red as poppies. Don’t call before you come by, your narrow fingers
on the phone’s plump white body, on the scratch resembling a belly button, the cord of tight
curls. Or rather, do what you want. As long as you come. As long as your boots crunch gravel
and spit it back out on the driveway, the coir doormat, the lightless entry way. Like a writer who
removes the winding key from his brimstone clock, on the top shelf of his study, and folds it in
yellowed pages or presses it like a flower, for when the right time comes, when enough words
are scrawled and he’s properly satisfied, he can refasten time with his hands.

Maren Logan is an emerging writer and multimedia artist from Indiana. Her collection of
poems, Midwest Boredom, won the Tom Andrews Clapping Award in 2025, and she was listed
a Commended Writer for the 2025 Adroit Prize in poetry. Her art publications can be found in
Penn Review and Michigan Quarterly Review among others; her poetry can be found in
Frontier, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and Pleiades.