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.

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.