Defibrillator Hands~ By Steve Coatsworth

I used to drink
like a fish. 
But now I sink and suffocate. 

All the bars like reverse blood banks, 
I'd push through the dim emergencies 
filled with broken people 
who all have six bullet holes to the chest 
of each one of their dreams and scream, 
"I need three pints of beer, stat!
And...three shots of whiskeyterall!" 

I'd get so drunk you'd pull out 
your de-fuck-you-laters, 
rubbing your hands together, 
you placed them on my breast, 
as if they could somehow bring me back. 

Shockingly, they couldn't. 

I move to the bathroom 
to pump my wheezing bladder, 
"One! Two!" Three pints later, 
she lost me, laying dead 
there on the table. 

The bartender yells last call 
like an official time of death. 

Then my ghost floats home 
to dream, to torment, 
or else to rest.



Author Bio:
Steve is a northwestern writer from Eugene, Oregon. He is an activist and poet who sometimes twists both together into barbed-wire arguments for as an argument for general freedom, often doubling as a plea for friends who have less of it than he enjoys. He encourages political involvement in every sector of society as a way to reinvent political dialogue, even thought it has rarely paid his bills. He believes, like W.E.B. DuBois and George Orwell, that ‘All art is propaganda.’

Steve graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.A. in English Literature. He was accepted into the UO Creative Writing Department’s Kidd Tutorial Program for poetry. He has been published in Monkey Bicycle and Unbound Lit magazines. He taught English in Mexico and has traveled across the country to do documentary-style videos with everyday people about their hopes and aspirations for our collective political future.