Eliciting the old poetic 'hmmm'

This is the last new poem of the semester. Boo to the end of the semester. But yay to Amaud's I-don't-like-to-do-this-in-workshop-but-hmm hmm when I finished reading it. I worked pretty hard on this and about three days ago was like, no, this isn't coming together at all, I don't know how to flip it right. And then I went to Cafe Soleil and I guess the pain au chocolat helped me find the way. Or pushed me in the right direction; the ending rhyme isn't totally working. Anyway...



The Legislation Against Daydreaming

Seven years
one month
five days
before my parents tried again,
my four year, three month, twenty-six day old sister Lucy
probably sat
in the backyard sandbox building
modern replications of ancient
Mayan villages, or maybe she stood
with an elm branch
taller than herself, drawing blueprints
for the vehicle that would eventually get her
to the barnacle-covered steps of Atlantis. Mom
probably just started her walk home after
just finishing her shift at the bakery. Dad
stood watching Lucy
from the kitchen
window while probably washing
the blue and white wedding china with counterclockwise
swirls of the yellow and green sponge. And probably
after the one spare
and three conventional, full-sized
tires of the white 1972 Maserati Ghibli SS rolled over
Lucy's civilization

Lucy's inspiration

Lucy

Dad scooped up his sandy treaded daughter
from the ruins of her native land and did not
cry because that wasn't really Lucy. Because
what was left of Lucy was busy
blasting the driver blind with a black
and white home video reel of
her first day of school
her first kiss
first honeymoon
second child's birth
third husband's funeral
twenty-year high school reunion
local lifetime community service achievement award,
techicolor somedays circuiting their last synaptic sparks
in her technicolor brain and probably all
thirty-seven year, two day old neurologist
and father of four
Rudolph Rons
could do was blubber sleep-deprived apologies
through the fleshy bloody space where his
left central and first left lateral incisors
popped out
in protest
of his reckless homicide
when his face
hit the steering wheel and finally stopped
the ping pong pace
of his meandering mind

take the left on 5th Street to the interstate
hope I get home for Rudy's fifth birthday
cake would be so good right now
grocery-store sheetcake and a mug of coffee
how much coffee is good intake before it gets bad?
how long was mom wandering before it got this bad?
was it bad or smooth criminal we first danced to?
why don't we dance anymore?
what was the last song this station played?
why did I stop playing the sax?

stopped his twenty-one hour binge
drive from Bar Harbor
twenty miles short of his Paddock Lake
destination. And started the fictitious
shitstorm of BAC numbers and DUI history
and class of felony charges because no one
wants to know the leading
cause of death for Americans
aged three to thirty-three
on a midmorning Thursday
is the rubbernecker
the radio station changer
the map reader
the drowser
the daydreamer.
Because even Lucy couldn't really
convict the mind trying, trying to get out of the glass
and steel cage. Because all Lucy ever wanted
was to fill with orange and pink painted helium, stretch
from the Mesopotamia of her mythology to the California
of her heirs until she burst over time
and space and the confetti of her organs seeped
into the aged earth, and when watered with acid
rain gave way to a weed flowering four to nine
petals that children plucked while chanting
sister Lucy
gave a brush to me
wanted no blue sky
wanted no peach pie
wanted to black bean
wanted no grass green.
Sister Lucy
gave a brush to me
wanted no sky blue
now what will you do?

Pitfalls

The end of this doesn't work as well on paper as it might if spoken. So I guess I will, a) have to work on being less white and doing a spoken piece, and b) figuring out how to boom boom mmm ahhk and not sound white. Basically, I think I have to learn how to beat box, otherwise this will never work. So I guess I just have to ratify the piece so it becomes a paper poem, where both of us are more in our element.



Pitfalls of Interpretive Dancing on a Blue Stomach


Out of place in
a Manhattan
warehouse bar
ducked into to
duck out of rain
and adolescent
blues these decades
haven’t quite
matured, she
found some sort
of refuge in sitting
next to but not
speaking with the
similarly sullen
soul across the
cocktail table until
the MC made last
call and they threw
their hands up,
squeezing between

boom boom mmm ahhk

and

boom boom psss

dancing interpretively,
telling the story not
of creation

boom boom mmm ahhk

not of dust
to dust

boom boom psss

not of her white middle
class teenage escapades
through Coo Coo Cal’s
projects to get to the south,
southside where that Latino
beat lingered like cilantro
and poblano trees called
telephone poles; where
the strange misplaced
Mexican rhythm making
red the marrow of her
Norwegian-Polish pelvis
found kinetic kinship

boom boom mmm ahhk

not of his genealogical
agave roots from Puerto
Escondido to Mexico
City to San Diego to San
Jose, because his popi may
have hand-picked his way
from a clay-floor heritage
to the land of linoleum and
plenty, but he was born in a
suburban Colorado hospital,
crooning an Old Blue Eyes
bit as soon as the nurse wiped
the placenta from his mouth
and he exhaled his first antiseptic
inhale with Websterian diction
and perfect pitch

boom boom psss

not of love

boom boom mmm ahhk

not of lust

boom boom psss

but of something only
syllables and grunts
could convey, something
their ancient bodies
knew, their ancient
bones wanted to tell

boom boom mmm ahhk

if only

boom boom psss

it were
the time

boom boom mmm ahhk

for their
infant
thoughts

boom boom psss

to understand

boom boom mmm ahhk

to let the
beat drop

boom boom psss

to let the
beat become,
be the creation,
the dust to dust,
the destruction,
the story, the
myth and the
word of the
rib made woman

boom boom mmm ahhk

boom boom psss
boom boom mmm ahhk

boom boom psss

Warden, I'm Ready

So, on the Texas Dept of Corrections website you can find the last words and last meal requests of folks on death row up until a few years ago. Fascinating. A lot of people don't have anything to say. Betty Lou Beets was one of them and I read pretty much her whole file. There isn't much of my poem that is based on her real situation, but it definitely, um, inspired me.


Warden, I'm Ready

My stomach warm from chicken-fried
steak and mashed potatoes: in or out of corrections
Izel, she must have cooked Americana better than most
good Texas boys and it makes me wonder how
any amigo could consider wrestling her
for a knife and thinking he'd walk out of the kitchen

crunching on a carrot. Takes me back to that bedroom,
back to Samuel in bed, his cigarette butt barely burning
in the ashtray on the bedside table, telling me prison
would keep the trigger locked, telling me, baby, nearly
all your threats come apart at doing right because who
wants to hold grandbabies through bars? Come on, baby,

lay back down. Huh? Let's get us some rest, honey.
Rest he got, eternal almighty, folded in the basement
freezer, icicles on his beard and eyebrows cold cooking
apologetic endearments I heard whenever opening that cell
door to make sure he was still there. Ten years later, almost
to the day I shot his ass for his firefighter's pension, why,

they got me jumpsuited and shackled: the spectators, what
they won't forgive this Gun Barrel City Black Widow
for, what scares them even from the other side of the observation room
window is the last meal, the last sip of chamomile warming
my cheeks, the smile they call solitary confinement
confusion. But hysteria is no longer an option. About

all the bold Texan pageantry they want me to wave like some
of their favorite madames of death row, it found its way out when
Samuel spit up his last bloody darling
and I went to wash it off in the bathroom.
They don't want remorse or pleas, but curses scalding
their ears, damnation from the damned, lifetime sentences

passed down to the good citizens from the derelict convict.
They want a chorus kickline before legs are gurney-strapped, some
spasmodic revolution from the skin and basilic veins where
the barbiturates will enter the bloodstream. They want a she-devil
ghost in black satin screaming bastard blues through attic
floorboards. They want 109' fever and white-flickering fire:

not the woman who slept well in the penitentiary: nor the part
of her that could kill a man for nothing: that could blacken
the execution room with the nonchalance of her last words:











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Mutual Exclusivity?

A couple weekends ago I had two conversations in one day about how I cannot lend books out anymore because I break up with people and then never get them back. Per usual, that is about as much autobiography that is in this piece. And a gal in my class offered the 'constructive criticism' that this is more on an angry rant than a poem and she's tired of victim poems like this and a previous one we workshopped. Needless to say, I took that personally. She's a great writer and someone whose readings of poems I admire for her sharpness, and I don't mind when people don't like my work, but I do expect a college in a classroom to be more constructive than that.




Dear Sometime Lover,

I dreamt I wrote you a letter.
This isn't it. I would like my books
back. I would like the purple hair tie
you pulled from my pink-dyed pony
tail. Always pulling my hair. It is
probably in the console space between
the front and back seats, where all
replaceable goods gather until they
can seep into the frame and fuck with
the axle. You can keep the strands
as long as they are not braided,
knotted, closed in a hollowed pocket
watch you keep close to your thigh,
hidden beneath the front pleats of
your khakis. You are too handsome
for those trousers. My hair is black
again. Cropped close to my skull
because when you strung your fingers
through the foot of dehydrated curls,
when you told me I was beautiful, it
sounded like trains' brakes on rusted
steel rails, brakes pulled too late to
do anything but prolong the last words
a new mother in an old car stalled on
the rotting wooden ties could speak
to her baby, and I never wanted to be
thought beautiful again. Perhaps it
would be best if you vacuumed your
car, swept your apartment, and sent
all the dust and fibers in a plastic bag
along with my books. You know I wrote
notes in the margins. I want my notes
back. And all the cells I sloughed off
just to be near you. All the sacrifices
you took unceremoniously from my skin
beneath your nails, they are mine. You
said you were afraid to break me, but
I never bled, never bruised, never told
you no. My bones are steel. Don't you
remember how many half-gallons of
vitamin D milk you brought over that
month I couldn't leave the apartment
because there were men with radios
in their mouths running around the
building waiting to shove wires and
receptors in my gums? You didn't have
to lie. Sometimes I wonder if you were
beginning to break yourself. But I don't
know now. You didn't have to lie. I was
one of the first to know you didn't give
a shit about me. I really didn't mind.
You taught me what most girls learn
young, that sex is love and I only need
a loose tongue and loose hips. Why did
it take me so long? I have loved much
since you left, so how can I be anything
but grateful for your coming and going?
Beautiful doesn't hurt so much because
now I know it is transitory, because now
I know it means I am idyllic and not an
archaic idol. There is a new one who is
trying to break the rules. He wants to
hold my hand in public. He took me to
dinner with his grandmother and didn't
seem to mind when I told her the chicken
was fucking good. It was fucking good.
It scares me and I miss you and maybe
if you could drop my books off we could
talk and you know I don't mean that, but
he's got me back on the olanzapine and
I'm starting to feel again and I miss the
numbness of your breath, miss being
left and I suppose I mean to say I
somehow love you how I loved before
I knew what love really was. I suppose
I mean to say I love you and it is likely
written in the margins of the pages that
if you brought back we could tear out
and tape the floor and walk all over and
remind us why words are overrated and
feelings are for suckers too afraid to
sleep for six months and break their
bones while they dream.

Second workshop

This was the second piece of mine we workshopped, a few weeks ago. I'm getting workshopped next week again and have an idea about diagramming a sentence, but I don't know how it could possibly be read out loud, so that will have to wait.
.
.
.
Please Place Refuse in Proper Receptacle

I.
The vice grip
on my chest
says everybody knows
I'm not worth it
and everybody knows
I wasted the paper and ink,
abused the delicate balance
of electromagnetic waves criss-crossing
and cross-hatching to uphold the air
that I can't breath.
Because of the vice grip.
Remember?
The pain in my chest,
the pressure on my throat.
Do you remember?

II.
I learned the knock-on effect from Patrick: whether
you want to or not, you do unto others. So I grip
whatever I can get my hands around when there
is that grip on me. I learned it from Patrick. Patrick
who taught me how to ground him when I'd find him
wandering on Main and South Henry,
wrestling with
conversing with
the Spanish granite angels
that became graceful flesh when his frontal lobe
blazed orange, when his hands burned red
from the January night's cold, because Patrick
didn't need gloves, didn't need a coat.
Patrick was in Valencia.
In April.
Before the war. Before Franco.

Ask him.

His hands, Spanish roses. Wet and wilting.
Temporary and useless. Until we'd give them use.
Until we'd sit in the middle of the sidewalk
our palms flat to the concrete, trying to get ourselves back home.
Our hands on the concrete, trying to get us back here: Patrick
out of Valencia at the turn of the century; me, out of the space
between my skin and sternum, the space I can't scratch
out of, I have tried when I forget Patrick and I forget
to put my hands to something hard.

III.
I am not on the sidewalk, testing time or space.
I am inside.
I am right here,
inside.
I think of Patrick.
I do not tear through the thin layers covering my chest,
do not stripe red the skin. I remember
and grasp the table,
breaking two fingernails and getting someone's
not wet but still pliable gum underneath another,
someone who was probably a boy, someone
who had extracted all the wintergreen there was
from the chicle, who made it useless and I want
to do unto him.
I want
to know
the inside
of his mouth.
I want
to discipline
the fingers
that aided
the immediate disposal,
the immediate destruction.
I want
to cough
and cough up
a paste from this pain,
knead it into the rubber
under the desk, beneath
my nails. Place it between
his two left molars. Tell
him to chew.

Chew.

Ekphrasis of the ears

I've been listening to gospel lately. As in, I can't get enough of it. It is almost overwhelming; or maybe I'm listening to it in order to be overwhelmed. But come on, how do you not feel that shit in every single pore?

Anyway, so I listened not to gospel but to Nico's These Days from the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack and ended up with this. I'd take input on the title.
.
.
.
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The Mud Princess and the Galosh Bride


Because she asked I help Layla
into the pink princess dress Grandma
sent her for Halloween last year. And

because she asked I let Layla help me
with the 39 mother of pearl buttons
from the nape of my neck to the small

of my back to get me enclosed in our
mother's time-yellowed wedding dress
that we found while cleaning the closet.

And because it rained the entire night
before, even if the morning sky is blue
now, the morning ground is a viscous

auburn and I insist we wear our rain boots
if she wants to take these gowns outside,
the mud sucking, slurping a song, each

of our steps keeping time all the way from
the cottage down to the creek, the swish
of aged lace and polyester lining, a nylon

brush against the snare as I sway through
cattails and ribbon grass, the sister ten
years my younger, the sister with a mind

stuttering on second-grade spelling words
while walking through halls of a rural
secondary school, this sister speaks songs

of the chickadee and sings questions to the
answers the momentary loss of oxygen
to her brain deceives her into believing

she doesn't know. She claps fairytales
and whistles fables, asks me if I am
a hare or a tortoise, laughing because

she thinks I think I am just a human.
And I can scream into my pillow and
curse my father nightly for swallowing a

two-month stockpile of 100 mg capsules
of amitriptyline with his nightly Pepsi on
the feast day of St Rita of Cascia, then took

us, to show us, how a 1987 BMW 5-series
swims in Cullaby Lake with a family of five
inside, but he taught her something like truth

in patience and goodness so that while I insist
on ramming my forehead into the inside
of the aquarium glass, perseverate on the night

I became a new mother at 18, a new mother
of a 3'10", 49 pound reborn child, Layla delights
in the grasshoppers and ants inside her skull,

tugging at my hand even though she now
stands nearly above my shoulder, impossible
to miss with a smile I'm daily terrified someone,

sometime will mine for all the purity it is worth,
tugging at my hand to tell me somehow, this, us
in our mud-hemmed dresses at the water's edge,

a field spotted with huckleberry bushes and what
Sitka spruce survived the Tillamook Burn between
us and everything else, it must be a fable.

Sing me a story.

It must be a fable.

Sing, sister, sing.

This must be a fable.

Sing.

This must be a fucking fable.


Two sisters sit on one spruce stump near
a stream's edge, mud and grass and leaves
dying and redecorating their gowns of
once-white German lace, still-iridescent
pink taffeta trimmed with gold-braided
cord, one's mind stalled under the accelerator
forever floored at the bottom of Cullaby Lake
by a drowned corpse's bones, the other's voice
reverberating in the valley between driver
and passenger-side doors, calling, pleading
for forgiveness to the mother, father, brother,
left behind, left for decay in their seatbelts.

Aesop, please, make me a moral, write me
a fable that I can lull myself to sleep with.

He actually said it. Out loud.

I should make a note that not having a poem inspired by a person doesn't mean anything; I've tried a million times to write a poem about Shannon, which, theoretically, should be super easy; she's amazing and has ridiculous stories. But it doesn't happen.

This is a long one. Probably won't read well on blogger, but what can I do?


Love Superstitions, or Why Doesn't It Come Out Better?

Phill
says
he thinks
girls
fart rainbows and butterflies.
And I've swallowed
a lot of superstitions
and Skittles coated in artificially colored hydrogenated vegetable oil,
but I never once farted anything that
clouded, consolidated, and, when cut up and steeped
for nine minutes in boiling salted lemon-water, made a non-toxic tonic
that saved my lovers and friends from
bad haircuts
or cavities
or insincerity
or tattoos that spell it D-E-T-R-I-O-T instead of D-E-T-R-O-I-T
or mind-numbing desk jobs
or arch-flattening factory lines
or girls that say yes then but no later
or boys that hear yes now when told no, later
or snowstorms
or cars
or trees
or four times recurrent breast cancer that eventually finds the liver and the lungs and makes cotton the beautiful, beautiful brain
or alcoholic uncles that can't forget the sound of Army issue fatigues through rice paddies and can't remember you are not an enemy
or stray bullets at the Citgo on West Center Street
or ex-husbands that would rather spend their lives in MCF-Oak Park Heights than lose the kids and the house and the shitty row boat in the divorce that was their fault anyway because they couldn't keep their hands off 18 year-old secretaries.

Maybe that makes it okay
that I only stumble upon him
every couple of months. Maybe that makes it better
that the list of girls who want to love the shit out of him
is too long to include my name.

Or maybe we both need to cleanse our colons of the myths
we ate up out of necessity,
out of curiosity.
What if girls did pass rainbows and butterflies? Belched
unicorns? Sweat
emeralds and amber?

Or maybe
it is just me.
My myth
getting me
nowhere.
I think I need
to get the gum
I swallowed in second grade
out of my intestines, get it through
the twenty-some feet of brain in my belly,
that wishes upon shooting stars
are prayers made on the back of debris
before it dies.
An itchy nose is just an impending sinus infection
or allergic reaction to the neighbors' new cat that everyday
is faux-reprimanded
with a scold
of, oh Beepers, not on the couch
again, with a tone of
I-can't-reinforce-rules-I-make-and-I-will-
always-clean-up-and-wash-up-whatever-
and-wherever-you-wish-to-piss-upon.
Ringing in the ears, just tinnitus
or Meniere's
or an ear infection
or trauma
or side effects from my chronic NSAIDs use for my chronic neck pain
or the symptom that doctors will herald me as my own hero for noticing, for getting self into the office before the aneurysm ruptured and left me right-drooped, using right-palsied hand to draw clocks with letters instead of numbers marking time, waiting for D o'clock when the handsome man-nurse comes to tell me stories in Morse code instructing long and short squeezes on the tennis ball it took me two months of inpatient rehab to finally pick up.

But what if I'm not believing
hard enough?
And what will I say when I meet
Phill's girl,
the one
who makes
those fairytales from the shit we all pass
as 4th grade humor? Makes him
understand
his soul
is not black like bloody knives
thrown in dumpsters
after the fact
or wrists and ankles
after the Haldol starts working and they unstrap
the four-point restraints before closing the door
on one of the loneliest cells in Cook County.
But black like the father's fingers
picking those strings
from the bayou up to Michigan Avenue.
Black like the son's hands scratching that vinyl
four
five
six times before letting it spin.
Black like the ghosts' four part
harmony uhh ahhing straight
out of the choir balcony.

Amen?

New and Old

This is the first stage of revision of the poem below it. And it will be revised more because I'm pretty sure I've already written this exact poem before and that parallel isn't hidden enough to be acceptable. To me :)

(Titleless right now; come on, I just finished it)

Sister Sponsa stands at the lectern
praising Saint Maud
wanting us to tell her how God daily,
daily shows His majesty to our
sin-lensed teenage eyes, and I,
I want to stand up just to fall
to my knees
fall
to my hands
fall
out of favor with my peers
fall
into grace with the angels and saints,
tell them I heard Abdiel last night
in the empty apartment upstairs
the voice of a man singing
then screaming
then stamping his heels on the hardwood floor
then punching his fists against brick walls
keeping time
keeping time
to the incantation
indecipherable
incomprehensible
to the English ear
but wholly articulate to the guilty Catholic heart,
my own beating
in time
blaring
in my ears
last night. What was going on upstairs
last night? I want to ask,
to tell
that I knew nothing
but felt everything
in those beats. I want to ask if this is God and if this is faith
and if yes then what am I believing?
But in the classroom
under Sister Sponsa's dare to believe more than the patron saint
of disappointing children, Lucifer wins and the bell sounds
and I go to stand on the school steps of St Clare's with Mary Margaret
and Catherine Ann, rolling waistbands of our plaid skirts,
loosening top buttons of white uniform shirts, not saying, but saying
we don't believe, tobacco paper burning toward our sacrificial lips.






'original'

This is the New Covenant in My Blood, Shed

Standing on the steps of St Clare's after class
we roll waistbands of our plaid skirts, loosen
top buttons of white uniform shirts, saying we

don't believe, with tobacco paper burning toward
our sacrificial lips. But something in this heart
I proclaimed pagan shifts my eyes side to side,

from Mary Margaret to Catherine Anne, searching
for dissent of the after-school rebellion, hoping
they too have specters in their attics whose apologies

and pleas test their heathen faith, appeal to what
is left of the child in the adolescent, the willingness
to believe in that woman upstairs, that woman whom

the landlady says has not lived there in months, that
woman
upstairs
writhing on the mattress
pulled to the middle
of the floor
a mess of tears and sheets
on the mattress
too big for her shrinking frame
warped nightly with terrors and sweat
staining the pillowcases
I'll believe
I believe
please
just bring him back
on the mattress
the heavy silver band slips
from her thumb
rolls across the hardwood floor
from the mattress
she fights her way out
of the suffocating cocoon
of damp cotton and hears
the goodbye of smooth metal
against rusted heating vent
and is mesmerized to paralysis
from the last smile
a glint of the ring catching and throwing
the entire world from one stray beam
of light from the streetlamp
before dropping and clanging
through the apartment building
heating ducts
before she screams an unearthly sound
that leaves even Beezlebub on knees
bleeding out disbelief
if only God bent to petition
if only blood could bring her him back.

Rorschach

I typed this in two columns, with what is below - the real poem - in one column, and in the other column, it was typed backwards. A pain in the ass that didn't even really work out because ylfrettuB isn't an exact reflection of 'Butterfly.' The 'B' just isn't really backwards. Blogger won't let me format what I turned in for assignment, but, I'll have you know, the whole things started with the idea of creating a Rorschach poem, structurally. I had something and then was like, this is a terrible poem. In which case the form is just a gimmick. So, I had to rewrite it to make it a poem that could entirely stand on its own. So, this is the poem in plain format, not 'Rorschach.'


Card IX

On intake he whistled at my history
of diagnoses and misdiagnoses, admissions and transfers,
lockdowns and commitments and discharges, follow ups and
crises, medication tapers and medications changes, moods
and delusions and fears and lacerations and hallucinations.

Every PhD and PsyD and MD
wants to play a game with
those cards; wants us to
give them something to hope
for in these fluorescent
and lithium worn halls of Bedlam.

So what if I
see a butterfly?
Butterfly
butterfly
moth
Gene Simmons
butterfly
butterfly
pearl necklace
butterfly
entrance to medieval lost town
butterfly

So what?

Card IV, patient expresses fear of men,
fear of authority. Card VII, patient
with possible narcissistic tendencies
relating to femininity, possible
internalization of archaic gender roles,
possible fear/ love/loathing of mother.
Patient unwilling to expound upon thought
processes. Tangential. Uncooperative.

This one, he wanted me to be the psychotic
poetess of his post-doc Menninger rotation.
An Anne or Sylvia or John; someone he could
give a placebo; someone whose serotonal
misfirings he could save in the name of art
at the cost of her basic hygienic functioning.

Why doesn’t card IX tell him? That
I can’t put an English subject and
verb together when those voices get
me to where I’m naked behind the
refrigerator because threads tell
secrets that make my skin red and
only the hum of the machine is salve
enough to stop me from scratching
through frivolous skin to the yellow
notecards wrapped around my bones.

Who is the psychotic
when he wants those
notecards and I just
want to daily eat and
shower and sleep?

First workshop of the semester...

My new class makes me miss my New School cohorts. But it always takes me a bit to warm up/too long to let go, so I am going to try diligently (not, admittedly, my forte) to be patient and nice and not too shy in class. There are some sharp kids in there, great readers and interesting writers, which will be excellent.

Anyway, this was the first piece of mine workshopped. It wasn't intentionally an ekiphrasis. Degas came in when I was searching for a ballet with a rape scene and that is what Google got me.

Stealing from the Thrift Store

The two-inch tall thrift shop music box

ballerina looked like a whore I worked

the old NW 3rd and Ankeny block with

my first few weeks in town, before I got

clean, before I stopped shaking enough

to find God in picking locks and leaving

prayer books in top dresser drawers in

place of Benjamins and heirloom peridots,

unburdening the owners of empty idols,

unleashing harnesses of familial history.

Missing her right Russian-third-position

raised arm, her face worn like some

little girl wanted luck before each recital

and must have needed it, or must have

danced daily, daily, for years; her little

tulle tutu dirty, torn, showing where

the plastic pink leotard met the plastic

peach thigh. She tried to twirl, the spring

that held her toes together slightly bent,

her two inch frame becoming more and

more like us women and wannabe

women of NW 3rd and Ankeny, ready

to celebrate a Halloween any day we

found enough coal or petals to paint

our faces, dancing any time we were

not pressed with our backs against

bricks or stained by-the-hour motel

room sheets, the queen of us whores

needing no orchestra to raise herself

to relevé on black and calloused balls

of her feet, a dull emergency exit sign

shining red on her worn face, teasing

the frizz of the hair not kept in the bun,

matted at the crown of her head as she

took to the gutter-stage for a nightly

performance, the rat playing the swan,

gyrating and seizing instead of sashaying

and pirouetting, until a businessman,

bored, passed by, wanting to recreate

Degas' The Interior and take our deranged

ballerina against a wall or between stained

by-the-hour motel room sheets. I took all

two inches home in my pocket, leaving

the music locked in another compartment

of the box for someone who loved

the symphony but not the ballet;

needing the second hand charm

between my thumb and forefinger,

an icon to keep my hands idle.

Oh for shame...

no posts since March! Sometimes it just feels a little silly posting, like, who is reading this? And if it doesn't matter, then why go through the effort of posting?

Anyway, so for Kate and Steph and maybe Shannon now and then, class starts tomorrow so I hope to be slightly more diligent. If nothing else, at least to keep me on track.

Fritz

I.

The baby in the backseat didn't seem

to mind that I lay painting my right

thigh, my left hip and elbow a Goyan

landscape of purple, black, pointillated

red, with Jenifer Street gravel seconds

after his father opened the driver's seat

door, seconds after that door greeted

my right brake, commencing a crash

course in the etiquette of collisions with

a chain reaction of door to brake, of rider

to air

to road

to feet

to apologies

to emergency room

to pharmacy

to bed

to morning, waking

with wrist swollen,

waking with wonder

at the speed of swell,

the speed of a door

opening, a tire turning,

of purple and red rising

through epithelial layers.

II.

The bruises and scrapes couldn't care less

about the surrounding skin that survived,

but call out achingly to what is left of scars,

eighteen years old, on the plains of my shins;

fading brands, three inch malformed ovals

boiling white the evening I pressed them

against a still-hot muffler, thinking only

of the crescent balanced on the handlebars

of the Harley even after being told careful;

warnings forgotten when the door closed

and my anxiety-electrified seven-year-old

nerves were left alone in an accusatory flood

light of a purely neon moon, left to confess

like a Lutheran to a nature I might not yet

have believed in, that I was afraid.

III.

Today I called you to take inventory, to measure and memorize

each scrape from tip to blood-crusted tip; I asked you for myths

of each constellation, asked you to stay only until after each healed,

until after I could walk you to the door fully clothed because there

was nothing left to see, because I mind your worship of scars more

than your reverence of wounds, because I don’t know when the other

scars smoothed over and left and I imagine how I would have to learn

to not cry when saying he left and not saying but meaning look how he

left no trace, took even the San Juan landscapes we painted so poorly

and then hung while still wet, the red of the mountains dripping down

the unred wall that I only noticed he repainted after he was gone.

IV.

The ER attending

looked pleased as he

stood at the exam room

door, like fractures and

concussions were forefront

in my still-helmeted head,

when really I was still with

Fritz in the back seat. My

mind - let in, caught in, by

the offending door - curved

around his sleep-reddened

cheek, praying for his scars,

a future of limbs holding

the sacred, showing a love

of the fall.

The Year Riordan Rode a Red One

This is my ode to Kate and her year in Philad.  Sigh.  

*

*

Goodbye Roadmaster Scorcher, my

salvation from SEPTA, my

frustration fieldtripping to Firehouse.  

Please,

don't 

forget 

our eleven months as

that stringy-haired, Freitag-toting,

Ray-Ban, lumbar jack-plaid-wearing

hipster fixes your once-functional ten gears,

reshapes the black seat which, for a time, I

daily molded and melded to make mine.

Would 

you 

recall 

the curves of my ass if

we were fortunate enough to again find our

gears grinding together along the Schuylkill?

Born and bred of the same era, 

could be my

fourth sister   [if not for steely bones and 

inflatable treaded sinew.]  

Could be my 

born-again 

childhood friend   [if not so confrontational, with 

pings and dings and dents.] 

An audacious vixen, you are.

Less audacious, 

less vixenish, 

yet pinged and dinged

and dented am I, too.  

Here, learning the perfection 

of scars:

drivers behind wheels of off-the-assembly-line Fords 

honk and howl exasperated admiration as my helmeted self 

minds the right-of-way in heels and a pencil skirt while 

determinedly moving through jammed traffic from Osage to 

Ayuda with a second-hand, chili-pepper-red tour de force 

as my compass, map and guide.

As you shift and reshape, 

teach new tricks to 

the next import,

chase different boys 

from 

different bars, leaving red lipstick

stains on untouched lamp-posts and bike racks, 

will you 

forget 

the curves 

of my ass?

*

*

You or me?

So this semester I'm learning with the super cool Traci Brimhall. Our assignment this week was to assume a persona, write in a literary or historical voice that is not our own. I'm not sure I succeeded with that, but I kind of like how this turned out. At least it was fun writing.

I'm trying to use form more, and I'm disappointed as my lack of savviness in conquering blogger's tyrannical formatting.
*
*
*
Disney's Insemination of Grimm

Doc says, y-y-y-you mean old s-s-s-son of a bitch,

like achrondroplasia hasn't fucked with his plans

and I'm the only one with a 4'9

problem. I look in the soot-covered mirror in the hallway

and feel God laughing at the dirty dwarf who was made

not in His image, a recreational-sex side-project, a dare

from P.T. Barnum He just couldn't refuse.

He waits

behind

that mirror,

wanting me to ask the question one-time small-town beauty queens and

imported Manhattan models binge and purge for.

He sent her, like an apparition, out of the looking-glass,

her 44" stocking-covered legs, her baggage and the

LPA brochure.

Won't you join? (I am without a home.)

Her smile sweet like the sex I've never had because

I've slept 37 years lying next to a brother, next to a brother, next to a brother, next to a brother, next to

a brother, next to a brother after days standing

shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder mining

diamonds tall women gleefully accept from

tall men on days they decide

filing joint taxes is just more economical.

Won’t you join? (I need a place.)

Her eyes soft like she’d drag a chair from the

kitchen for me to stand on so I might caress

her gala-apple cheek with my coal-pellet fingers.

Won’t you join? (I will do anything.)

Beauty, probably used to selling by the inch, saving

for college so she can study Chem 101 and make a

dead step-mother look like a dead step-mother.

Doc pushes me aside before I can slam the door in her

grossly unblemished face, before I can point out with my

fists and furrowed brow that, she must be too dumb to see:

my chromosomes already signed that petition in 1971.

*

*

*

The Smell of

*

*

*

Learning the smell of my sweat

3 days a week.

Lungs, unattended balloons at the mouth

of a helium tank

filling with the dull sobering sweetness not

of Secret or Dial or Dior, until

lungs, mother's kitchen sink sponge

squeezed dry of last night's 

smoke and frost and sex.

90 minutes a day.

105 degrees.

26-position sequence.

Dew-like drops my traveling companions

forming small creeks

seeping down the rolling hill of each calf, 

the sharp slate of my chest, 

forming small pools in the two fault-line crevices

of my two straining shoulders.

Hesitant to gaze down, 

resistant to hear pools' reflections, if instead I could

stare up at the soft white lights twinkling

just above the sweaty statues on platforms of

purple, blue, grey, green, brown, 

beside

behind 

the flushed pulsing mannequin 

that is the me in the mirror.

Dimmed lights, lowered lids,

only our bodies, our soaked spandex and our laboring confrontational mutations:

Marcus Aurelius, my pulse insists on pounding in my ears even here.

Carla says

something about 

balance, and

the edge,

verbs swallowed by the humidity racing

in and out of my nostrils, a train

passing the platform as you tell him goodbye

for the last time, so that you have to say

goodbye at least once again.  

More than breath in lungs

needing breath vibrating cochlea,

proof of life when your world

aches to stand silently still at the edge

in dandayamana-janushirasana for just one 

out of ninety minutes.

*

*

*

The St. Christopher Medallion on my Chest

I've been having trouble with beginning things that don't lead anywhere, finding myself with a phrase or a line that seems so lovely, but no other words want to be its friend, and I can't seem to coax them.  This feels like one of those, so this might just be phase one until I find something better to do with it.

*

*

Obligation looked me

square in the face

two laser beams locking sightlines

securing antiquities [not worth their weight in bones]

establishing panoptic enforcement like

each hair counted by God himself shone with

a seraphic something where his hand stroked

strand one hundred twenty nine thousand sixty one

strand one hundred twenty nine thousand sixty two

strand one hundred twenty nine thousand sixty three

strand one hundred twenty nine thousand sixty four

[ten year old toast-face of Virgin Mary cost $28000]

[chocolate mold of Jesus sold for $2.25]

[mothers took daughters at $8.25 admission each 

  to be moved by sebum and malassezia glistening 

  behind 2" of glass and fluorescent display lights]

Nightly Ines came to wash the day's fingerprinted smudges

from the translucent tomb, each greasy oval removed with

meditative offering before she knelt to pray for her dying son;

the most living thing between the custodian and  the reincarnation 

Windexed away in delicate circles, 

stroke by stroke to remember his first cough

[Oré poriahu vereko ñande jara]

his first fall

his first scan

his first injection

[Oré poriahu vereko ñande jara]

She brought him to my encased feet

laid him at my bronzed pedestal, before

setting off the alarms

sending in the guards

with one small, tired hand

pounding on the glass she'd just cleaned,

keeping pace with her wails, vibrations

confusing security strategies, beams scattering 

giving my brown eyes a red rest

giving my congealed thoughts a blue fluidity,

flexibility to stay still as they cuffed and carried her away

boarded and covered him up.

Mary in the whole-wheat toast.

Jesus in the chocolate.

Ines in the jail.

Me in the museum.

Only Enzo granted room to breath 

in the Paraguayan ground.

International Exhibit of Rubber and Other Tropical Products

Heart-holes, like James'

can be grown out of,

can be grown into.

He talked of the 1921 World's Fair,

his tongue forgetting the 

picket-fence front-teeth buried

behind the cemetery gate,

beneath the granite headstone,

so that as he "wrrrrr"ed, by the time

he "llllll"ed, it was too late: the unruly

tongue would be punished by the

moonshine in the brown bag he kept poised

just above his bouncing paper-thin brown-trousered knee.

A baby.

His baby.

He, as baby.

My heart-hole expanded and shifted

to make room for James and 1921

the world

the moon

the water

the me

Space for a universe stood

still.  Breath barely moving my

hallowed frame.                          Waiting.                                   My

emptiness starving, its jaw

disconnecting

acrobatically back-bending to encapsulate me with

James

1921

the world

the moon

the water

midnight foxtrots and toddles 

skating on prohibitive ice sculptures

November - December - January - February - until

we lost our teeth

Don't go without ( )

The coffin disintegrated around me, me reborn with

golden locket stitched to sternum: inside

a heart thumping: then, closed and clasped, kept safe, soon over-grown with

woman's breasts, mother's breasts

breasts milking bathtub moonshine to 

infant conductor of the racing, 

desperate jazz band.

*

*

Anthology of Elegies

Should have put this up a bit ago...our last assignment was to write in another student's voice. We drew names. I should hassle the gal who got mine and get that up here. It was interesting hearing other people talk about a style they found in my writing.

I took about half a dozen pages of notes trying to figure this gal's form out; she's super talented and didn't read that much in class, hard combo. The predominant theme I found was vocab, she uses this great vocabulary, but I'm not sure how much she says. This is based mostly on the century she read in class and I remember getting totally lost and had no idea what the point was, but I felt in a very beautiful place all the same.

I still feel like a jackass that 'big words' was my guiding tool to writing Vania.
*
*
Closeted, the anthology of elegies I've sewn on your many sleeves while standing tip-toed to transcribe the rhythms of your chest. These oxygenated eyes see aching groans of inhales and anhedonic cries of exhales beneath woven fortresses, beyond epithelial stone walls, through marrowed prison bars. We pass cacophonic codes through needles, via emergent transfusions, clandestinely; tattletaling guards stand at every gate. The tactility of my tasteful tongue speaks Braille better than I. The shifting tectonic plates, active fault-lines of your otological structures hear signs better than you. What lengths, what languages, simply to ask how your head rested last night.
*
*

Ed and I Chew Differently

*
*
always biting off more than i can chew becomes
hazardous when locked jaw has no key and
i must learn how long egg and hooks take
to disintegrate in cavern of spit and milk and 'spro.

knowledge never wasted.

happy holidays from brownie-blinged grill.
happy birthday from champagne-shined enamel.
aloysius lilius' calendar replaced by
columns and rows of bottles and brews and
bins of dirty dishes. they say 'monday'
some say 'makersday.'

(what is the need of shooting-starry colorado nights, with sheetcake and coffee to rest beneath?)

soft diet keeps jaw loose, keeps

secrets public record, keeps teeth receptive to etiquette tips:

* smaller bites, more food

* swallow, then speak

* back of hand to cover front of mouth when

laugh/sneeze/yawn cannot be temporally displaced

*molars for leafy mastication, not revenge

*tongue to distinguish savory/salty/sweet/sour,

not to lash/discipline/howl/hang

must be his ancient ancestral blood, grace in marrow that

does not fortify my bones,
bones of aryan hand stretching

skin's napkin, porous enough to wipe

renegade sauce from gaping corners of

renegade aryan mouth,

mouth full of half-chewn wisdom and rice.
*

*