Kristen Bulger
Kristen Bulger is a poet living in Jamaica Plain, MA and is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Salamander, Houseguest, and The Charles River Journal.
The Weightier Ledger
The bead of an abacus is ruby wood,
but staring out a window
at a telephone line
the grey necks of pigeons cower
where I’d want to slip each one across
and stack them neatly, as if on a weightier ledger
I could account for each wager we might risk
against days, too hard to get out of bed.
As if we carry our odds around
in back pockets I’d rattled
in the flat bed of a pick-up— how close I could get
beyond my capacity for speed
to where the horizon line shone through
a tender split in the truck’s rust.
And in the time it took
for me to lose my breath, a single red bead tumbled
out of the soft pocket of my memory
where, always, I am given
a name tag, told to write down
who it is I think I am with a thick marker,
and made to stand on a kindergarten riser
in the class picture,
shuffled from one plank to the next, waiting—
measured.