~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

Happiness Is Yelling Bingo

because when you yell it, you think you've won. And you have
in that moment, surrounded by other people who also hold small score cards
and chips. Most of the time you get a prize just for having luck
based on a card filled with boxes of numbers that make no sense
just as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat and you think
where has that rabbit been all along? Magic and luck are like that.
You have them. You don't. You pull a piece of confetti from your pocket

and you remember the party where the one you loved gave you a kiss
in the kitchen of someone else's house, near where pans and pots crowded
in the sink like they were watching and waiting with steel and copper eyes
and even though the one you loved no longer loves you, you remember
that kiss, and how everyone ended up in the kitchen, the hostess serving
pancakes at 2 a.m., everyone reaching for the glass bottle of maple syrup
and the sticky sweetness running out but no one caring because there was honey,
so much of it, and sticks of melting butter and strawberries glistening
in a bowl. And how could you have known that you would remember

that night which mingled with morning as one of your happiest moments,
back at the beginning, when the one you had loved in secret for so long
finally noticed you and kissed you, and you ate pancakes together, shared
one plate, and the one you loved—the one you still love but in secret again
because that was years ago—poured so much honey that everything stuck
to the bottom of the plate, and that night might have been like Bingo! except

you thought your luck would never run out, you didn't even think it was luck,
you thought it was fate, not just letters and numbers someone was calling out,
not something that someone else could win just as easily. You wait
for the rabbit to appear again, but it's been years and the magician's hands

wave and wave and pull nothing from the hat today.

Confession, Twenty-Five Years Later

I want to tell you I was always loyal, that I was unflinching in my love.
The story is easier that way. Better to say I got married and loved so hard
I could not let go or imagine life with someone else. I want to tell you

I took a pottery class and did not make a bowl for another, did not press my
fingers around the sides or in the center, did not fire the clay with anyone
other than you in mind. I want to tell you that outside our first apartment

the leaves did not turn crisp as soon as we moved in, the air did not tighten
with cold. We swam in the pool we could walk to, but that didn't last long—
no more ragged beach towels dangling from our shoulders. I want to tell you

I was wise, I was certain, I was a pillar who could hold up a roof
made of trouble, shingled by what might have been. I want to tell you those first years—
our only years—were golden, tinged with the kind of light talked about in tales.

But we were two people who had stumbled upon each other and thought
it was love when it might have been anything else—a raindrop, a cacti, the side
of a crevice-filled mountain. Who knows if it was small or large, but it was never ours.

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with markers and metallic paint, and is raising seven orchids. Her six books include Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry, and Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023). Learn more at shulycawood.com