Creep Love

Michael Walsh

• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781938769764
• eBook ISBN: 9781938769795
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Michael Walsh's poetry collection Creep Love explores a family contending with a complex and ongoing crisis, the aftermath of which creates a shockwave that reverberates through these poems. Stories, half-truths, and lies combine into disturbing fable: A young pregnant woman flees her abusive boyfriend only to discover with terror that he is focused on her younger sister. When her younger sister later gives birth to her abusive ex's other sons, the unsettling presence of the child's father becomes unavoidable, and the family soon forces the first son to become a family secret.

We come to find out that the father carries a secret of his own. As tensions rise, attacks within the family escalate and finally culminate in an attempted murder. In Creep Love, Walsh captures the terror of this event, and these poems take us through the surprising outcomes. Near death, rather than floating into light due to hypoxia—a temporary release from the grip of compounding trauma—the speaker sinks into all-encompassing darkness. The anxiety of this moment returns him to his body from the edge of death. These poems give witness to the fallout, demonstrating how love can be charged with something ultimately unknowable.
 

V.

SWITCH OR AXE

Because someone has to go back, I return

to that boy showering, unaware of his stepdad

listening at the bathroom door with its little hook

for a lock. The man decides he’s had it

with the wife’s kid: it’s time to get a stick.

Get out now, I tell the boy, get dressed,

grab your smokes, a change of clothes,

the phone number of someone you love

who’s not related, and run. Whether he can hear

right then doesn’t matter. One day

he’ll understand who he had to save.

Leaving the kid, I follow my stepdad with the plan

outside to the spring trees bending green.

I tell the man, dead fifteen years now,

I found a way to forgive,

but stop anyway. Don’t transmit

your childhood—the axe through the TV

when you were watching Saturday morning cartoons,

and when you cried, the fists to your face.

One day his heart will break

over what he’s about to do. But today

he twists the green meat of a thick branch

until it snaps, strips the fresh bark

with his pocketknife like a hunter,

his law and mind untouchable,

certain of the correction necessary.

Back inside, he rams the bathroom door,

the hook popping. He yanks open

the shower curtain, revealing the boy

who can’t tell what weapon of choice

the intruder holds, dark and blurry.

I want to get in between the blinded child

and the screwup who’s trying

to be his father, to take the hits.

The man’s shouting gibberish, the kid’s

trying to protect his dick, the switch

landing on his arms, chest, thighs,

stomach, shoulders, hard enough to sting

but bruise minimally. The man’s got enough control

not to hit his face, his hands, anywhere

those welts can be seen. The way the pain settling

into softer flesh is the man’s way of saying

this boy’s spoiled life isn’t so bad.

He could’ve gotten the axe.

GIRL BARN

Alphabet Love

My mother names Zany and Escher after their psychedelic,

black-and-white hides. The shaggy cows she calls Ozzy

and Yoko. Dumb momma Daffy begets Dipstick.

Like a librarian she collects one of every letter: Alice and Gertrude,

Mushroom and Kesey, Hester and Ursula in a barn row

across from Inky, Queen, Fantasia, Jinx, Pandora, and Beauty,

rivals of the three sisters

Solar, Luna, and Umbra, who in turn

butt heads with Raggedy, Viola, and Never-Never.

Turning Against

Their noses black detectors

of vibration, cows examine every inch of wire.

There they go, over and through, the fence

dragged, ticking feeble underfoot.

I don’t want to chase them back inside,

into the tangle of steel and rubber

tubes, the milkers attaching like spiders.

In the free minutes before my family

finds them, they gorge on soft cobs

and sweet husks, alfalfa fresh

from the root, and wander toward the lake.

When my parents find out, I have to join them

with dirt clods and rocks,

scare our bad girls back home.

Sapphic Pastoral

In need of no bull, the girls

are riding the one in heat,

her clear honey quickening.

One mounts her, she scoots, another

sneaks behind, climbs up again.

In the barn, my mother slips her hand

into the plastic glove, tugs the tips

of her fingers into place, unwraps

this odd condom up

to her aching shoulder.

Never Give a Cow Your Name

the way my little sister did. Theresa seemed sweet and innocent

but grew so much faster than a girl, until the calf it once was

towered over her. The gangly heifer

still wanted to cuddle and play, knocked her down,

licked her like a block of salt until my sister couldn’t

control her fear anymore, announced how much

she hated Theresa. When she entered the pasture,

the heifer sniffed her out, its head lowered

like a mean girl, charged to let that child know

who was boss. In tears, my sister cowered

in front of the beast my mother and I hit and chased,

the monster she hadn’t meant to invent.

VISITING MY OTHER MOTHER

For years the hope ripens.

My aunt, a nurse, asks about the odd marks

on my back and the scars too. She notices

anything off or wrong,

asks why, at my age,

I don’t have a girlfriend. By my curt answer

and her silenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I.
• II.
• III.
• IV.
• V.
• VI.
• VII.
• Acknowledgments