YOU ARE NOT THE SHERIFF

By Lisa Hiton

I’m not sure who the sheriff is here. The sheriff left town

before we could figure it out. Waiting out the night

    for someone to return. Waiting for the light

to show the silhouette. 

      Just because you want to be in my poem

doesn’t mean you belong here.

  It’s turning into a western

and I can’t have you running around being your Pre-Raphaelite self

while someone’s pulling a pistol on me again.

I should know who it is, the sheriff. I wrote the sheriff in.

It’s not you, though it seems strange the the sheriff goes to the theater,

sees a monologue performed (—the person watching the monologue

is also the person having the monologue, as we learned in Hamlet).

   The sheriff and the actor withhold the usual clues—

the ones that tell us who they seduce,

who they’re seduced by. We all wait for the sheriff to return

          stage right with the fugitive, captured

    even though we know full well that the only person on the way to me is you, Richie.

Alright, tonight you’re the sheriff. You’re the cowboy

with the black suede vest that has the red stitching on the edges

and the fringe on the back.

You’re the thing arriving like an idea—

first a dark ball pummeling toward me,

then the dark ball at the center having pummeled me,

your black shreds flouncing in the vision,

your face in brief light destroying what was there before

      just as the peonies in the jar molt

having withered while I was out

buying the wine.

Waiting out the night for someone to return

is not about love, is it Richie,

it’s about the shape made on the horizon.

As though a cowboy from another time could get me

to confess what I’ve done,

could get me to put my hands on that body again,

    could bring the body to me as though it were a piece of mail,

both of which bring too much light

to the cut flower in the jar.

Lisa Hiton's debut book of poems, Afterfeast, was selected by Mary Jo Bang to win the Dorset Prize at Tupelo Press. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University and an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from Harvard University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, NPR, Adroit Journal, New South​, Linebreak, The Paris-American, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and LAMBDA Literary among others. She is the founder and producer of Queer Poem-a-Day at the Deerfield Public Library.