Lannie Stabile
Cabin in the Woods
Sometimes you go to a 4th of July party with your best friend and mostly strangers, and you get toasted by the sun, toasted by the Melon Ball Boone’s Farm.
You heap potato salad and fresh fruit on your paper plate, balance it on your knee, pick at it with a plastic fork.
And you spend the day tossing sandbags or frisbees or golf balls on a rope.
Which is to say, nothing worth mentioning happens.
But sometimes when the sun goes down, the wine coolers hit the bloodstream.
Boys and girls pile on, and the blur of slick skin makes you dizzy. You balance your reluctance with the sloshing in an exceedingly unsettled stomach.
And you spend the night blowing chunks in the guest bathroom. You can make out cantaloupe and potato salad and a few pleas nobody ever heard.
July 5th, your body reeks like stale alcohol and regret, and you want to tell your best friend how many times you thought, no no no. But you don't mention it.
A Friend Assures Me A Glass of Wine Will Cure My Insomnia
A glass of merlot before bed is a lullaby
sung by neon lights.
The voice is deep, but the sleep is not.
My body drones
with the weight of an underwater mortgage,
a home on a weak leash.
I didn’t brush my teeth tonight, and the taste
is dry in a bitter mouth.
My legs are also dry. I scratch long, white
lines into them,
like contrails running from one lost sky
to the next.
I count a flock of unpaid bills: 1, 2, 3
collection notices.
Sometimes, in the dark, the ceiling fan
looks like a person,
drawn and quartered, squalling
above me.
My legs are also achy, like my arms.
I kick the covers off,
flip over, and shove my brow into a pillow
that does nothing
to comfort me. I think of the merlot running
through veins
that stretch taut every other Friday,
when the ends don’t meet.
How it is never the blood keeping me alive
and awake.
Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry and a back-toback semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie was also named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut poetry full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, was published in 2021 by Cephalopress. Her fiction debut, Something Dead in Everything, is now out with ELJ Editions. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile or @NotALitMag, where she throws random writing contests and open mics.