“Three Poems for Jack Dempsey” by Kierstin Bridger

After, the Fighter 

For Jack Dempsey 

After I ran my fingers

thru his thick, black curls 

he was like a found pup.

He’d worn me down

with his apple-colored sweater

with his empty pockets

and shiny raven’s eyes.

He was our dishwasher 

when he wasn’t mining

or training with the 

muleskinner Malloys.

After I told him

I saw the same sort

of hummingbird

we had in Terre Haute

here in the wilds of the San Juans

he found me days later

both hands behind his back

pick one, he coaxed and in his 

south paw he held a tiny nest

almost a thimble in his open palm.

After he placed it in my grasp

I was dumbstruck, could not look him in the eye

nestled inside the tiny space 

were shells, once broken

pasted back together with his enormous fingers

After a week of rose water and candied violet gifts

after boxed chocolates and long plumes for a new hat 

it was this rough-hewn fist of twig and grass 

the fine silk of spider thread binding 

this home of hollow blue

that felled me to weeping

all my plans unhatched,

a cup so empty in my hands. 

After a year or so I saw him again

he’d filled out 

he was a real fighter now 

and had a little ring not too far

from the parlor house.

Big Billie, our madam, was still bigger than he was

and never let him throw out any of our degenerates

--afraid he’d hurt a fella too deep.

Jackie was like a raging cock in a fight 

no time to block-- jabbing

to the point of exhaustion

and me in my corner of the sporting house

flitting, lighting nowhere for long.

After he walked me halfway home

we sat outside, talked on and on

as the night wore thin.

He told me about preparing the skin

for slap and impact.

He said the smell of brine and lard

he used to condition his face

had a trace of his mother’s Mormon soup

comfort welling from suet.

After a beat I talked of heading south 

the stores I needed for hard winter

we laughed at the way

we both never missed a meal if offered. 

I led him around back and up to my room

birds of feather you and I 

I said and traced his dark lip

both of us sing for our supper. 

Finally, after we ran out of words

in the weak hours before the stars

melted into day

we fell into the familiar clutch and breath

lovers have known for centuries

and after a spell and once still,

breath caught, ragged and muffled

after the small of my back

ceased its pulse and eased into linen

we circled the bruises and the scars 

under our night shadowed skin 

we traced broken bones

and throats uncut, hearts yet beating.

The Poetry of the Body

looks like a once starved boxer 

                       throwing his life in the ring,

                       the heavy weight of his pain

punctuating the air with generations of scar.

                                                     The poetry of the body

                                                     is the slump of his ancestors

                                                     on the hunch that walked them west.

The poetry of the body

is in our buried wings

at rest beside the spine,

their avian nature of span,

of clip, of forgotten flight.

                                              The poetry of the body

                                                              is the space between two bodies

                                                             the dark connection and the invisible

                                                              glow of press’s absence.

                              The poetry of the body

                              is the narrow column of spine,  

                              the full collapse when the heart

                              is removed            or the breath

Dempsey, Lizzie’s Twin Palimpsest 

Shhh. . . words betray what is written

under the heavy coat and the bound fists.

There are secret marks, invisible

worlds of deep scarlet scratch and graze

purple storms across the native canvas of you

I know something of rough tongues, of second patois

the coarse speech inscribed deep

without known alphabet.

You whisper your given name in your sleep

so I trace my secret initials on your chest plate 

the curl of E, the silent trail of S like my phantom

self on a slate clouded gray from erasure. 

Our time is stolen, each rendezvous written over

on the warped back stair of our goodbye.

About Kierstin Bridger
She/Her/Hers

Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer currently living near Telluride. She is the author of Demimonde (Lithic Press), the 2017 Women Writing the West's Willa Award. She is also the author of a full collection, All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). Winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the 2015 ACC Writer’s Studio award, and short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Competition in the UK. She co-hosts Poetry Voice with poet Uche Ogbuji. Find more of her work in December, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner and Painted Bride Quarterly. She earned her MFA at Pacific University. Kierstinbridger.com