Laura Falsetti

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All the Other Swans

I’m held together by tubes and other snakes insulin.
I sing loudest when my mercury catches fire
when my eyes light up like liquid silver candles. All the other swans
remember me from a long time ago when I was pretty was bitchy

didn’t fit in. At Madigan Army Medical Center, when one of the resident swans died
they said they couldn’t pair his widow with another
because she was devastated she’d stopped eating swans mate for life
and that’s a love story I can’t fathom can get behind

but I didn’t want to believe remember the story you told me about how
a long time ago, the Tacoma Narrows bridge ribboned wildly in high winds
and flipped cars and please, no dogs dogs off its deck
and into the frigid deadly crystalline waters
of the Puget Sound far below, and how you smirked at my distress
held my hand as you told it, as if to comfort me. Cats tend to dislike road trips

and for this reason I’m glad I left them at home and far from your apartment
where they wouldn’t feel safe and speaking of this disease partnership

I’ve been paired too many times a few times before and humans mate for life
until they don’t, but I’m always up for a no-strings fuck found art
like the day last spring when a hummingbird judged me admired me
through the window as he snacked on early azalea blooms

or the times I notice the bell toll tick tick of my insulin pump as it delivers
another reminder of my mortality day on this planet, and I go out and snip
two or three of those blossoms and bring them inside
stand over the kitchen sink and suck
quicksilver glazing my chin.

Laura Falsetti is an emerging poet and dentist with work in Lunch Ticket, Sweet Lit, Iron Horse Literary Review and other journals. She lives, reads, and writes in western Washington with four bossy cats.