Accidental Hosts Margot Kahn We fuck several times a week until it gets tiresome and then we watch TV or go to the movies. If the days don’t add up, we forget about it for the month and drink with abandon. No matter if we’re supposed to stay away from queso, street drugs and raw eggs. If in those weeks our uterine linings look thin or sad, it’s not because we haven’t tried. But we wouldn’t say we are trying. When the baby is conceived we’ll drink only tea. If it’s a ghost, we’ll lie down to hold it in until we have to stand up, put our hands between our legs and let it slip through our fingers in the shower down the drain. If the twelfth week comes and it’s still there, we will make phone calls and fill out paperwork. We are not puppets or disciples. We don’t want to be cast out, marooned with a crib in an empty room. We are accidental hosts. We want to be what we’ve been—go to the same job, the same bar, shoot the same game of pool when our stomachs bulge over the lip of the table. We are reviled, derided, feared, and crowned. Yes, some fit in their regular jeans for six months and don’t break out and still want sex, but look— look at this thing we’ve done because we’re animals and we said we’ll see what happens until it actually happened and we wondered what we’d done beyond logic or reason in the light of the open door peeling deli meat from the crisp paper wrapping, folding it into our mouths.
If someone says Catalina Margot Kahn I think of this Janis Joplin low-slung corduroy cello-playing boy. His gold hair swung like a tiki bar curtain, the fringe of a flapper dress across my leg. Together in a twin bed I was a window and that hair was a shade and the tassel, from my neck to my navel, pulled itself down. That boy played like nothing I could afford—a twenty-year whiskey on the rocks, the melt of a glacier pooled at my feet. Now someone says Catalina or cello or cancer and I’m there again singing over his requiem. Tassel and tongue. Shade and shroud. Was it the hair, or the hands? The sound, or the shape of the sound? I’m saying this so that you help me remember him. So his mother knows that night is accounted for.
Winter Margot Kahn My husband and I get divorced every winter, driving over the mountains. It’s like the joke about the chicken, where the thing on the other side is something worth getting to, only the chicken is carrying the Talmud. We’ll be fine, says my husband. But it’s not us, I say, that I’m worried about. On the icy road we stop behind a single-file line of cars. While we wait, my son tiptoes to the shoulder and pees. The road is slick under packed snow, dirty and deceptive, the way it was when I was young and boys would take me out in cars late on winter nights, crank the wheels and slam the brakes in empty 4-ways, spinning us like teacups at the county fair, flesh into flesh, careening close to tree trunks and telephone poles, our tires leaving great, looping, Spirograph tracks we’d get out and admire, howling into the stale suburban night. My husband and I get divorced every winter, driving over the mountains. It’s like the joke about the chicken, where the thing on the other side is something worth getting to, only the chicken is carrying the Talmud. We’ll be fine, says my husband. But it’s not us, I say, that I’m worried about. On the icy road we stop behind a single-file line of cars. While we wait, my son tiptoes to the shoulder and pees. The road is slick under packed snow, dirty and deceptive, the way it was when I was young and boys would take me out in cars late on winter nights, crank the wheels and slam the brakes in empty 4-ways, spinning us like teacups at the county fair, flesh into flesh, careening close to tree trunks and telephone poles, our tires leaving great, looping, Spirograph tracks we’d get out and admire, howling into the stale suburban night.
Margot Kahn is the author of the biography Horses That Buck, winner of the High Plains Book Award, and co-editor of the anthology This Is the Place, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Lenny Letter, The Los Angeles Review, BUST, and Publishers Weekly, among other places. Winner of the Crab Creek Review 2019 Poetry Prize and finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2019 Emerging Poet Prize, her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Margot earned an MFA from Columbia University and has been supported by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture and ArtistTrust. She’s currently at work on a new biography, Until Tomorrow, and a forthcoming anthology, Wanting (Catapult 2023).
Her book A Quiet Day with the West on Fire was the finalist of the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.
I especially like the poem “Winter” because it resonates with my own experiences crossing mountain passes in Washington during this season, but I also enjoy the poem because it explores how our view of risk may shift as we age or within the context of relationships.