Jessica Mehta
Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a Cherokee poet, novelist, and storyteller. She’s the author of ten books including the forthcoming Savagery (poetry), the forthcoming Drag Me Through the Mess (poetry), and You Look Something (literary fiction). She’s also the author of the poetry collections Constellations of My Body, Secret-Telling Bones, Orygun, What Makes an Always, and The Last Exotic Petting Zoo as well as the novel The Wrong Kind of Indian. She’s been awarded the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Prize in Poetry, the Potlatch Award for Native Artists, and numerous poet-in-residencies posts around the world.
Bars and Planets
The bar is a planet, and you
are the moon, my mother
said to me in a nightmare
three days after she’d died.
I’d heard her body’d gone
black, marinated in gallon-
sized vodka and over-seasoned
with opioids. Found naked
in bed with the television so loud,
the paramedics pawed
their ears and the whole
street heard South Korea
had a president who gripped
the enemy’s hand. I took the five
dollar Porthole bills taped
beneath the sticky dresser
and poured photo albums
into garbage bags before the funeral
vultures landed rough. And when I saged
that property, gave her back
to the sky, I felt the nesting
in my center. A being let loose
of drink and dementia
and for the first time in decades
I didn’t hate that house, the entirety
of my childhood and all
I’d long since buried quiet
in the deep where no one could see.