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.