Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The Sweating Sickness: Poems by Rebecca Lehmann NIGHT ELEGY What was the night like when you slipped a noose around your neck and leapt? Did mosquitos hover in the fog? Or was it clear, only the crickets' dirge, a faint breeze on your cheeks? Did you find Cassiopeia first, trace her snapped spine with your pointer finger? And your neighbor, when he found you, hanged outside, as the sun rose greedy-fisted over the bay--what did he see? Did you waver? Did you sway? Remember the way you demanded sex and I gave it? The way you liked to watch yourself in a mirror. Who was the double you saw there? When you fucked someone else in the bathroom at a wedding, I dropped a beer bottle in shock and the glass cut a bridesmaid's bare foot wide open. The fighting, small slaps and pinches, playful at first, became more pointed, until one day you threatened to kill me. You held me, firm, against a wall, left a handprint bruise. Your spit wet on my face.

Your eyes wild animals. Ruinous. Ruinous. Once, I rode on the back of your bicycle, shoeless, as you pedaled down busy city streets, faster and faster. I clung to your pound dog chest, and you screamed my name into the wind and it hung there like a fading tattoo, and it hung there, like you.