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.