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.
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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.