...where is the love?
.
I Was a Young Wife, I Was a Young Mother
There are sixteen of them: inside
the seventh and wrapped around
the eighth, I keep the post-its he
wrote his vows on, even though
at the altar his nineteen year old
nerves took over and his declaration
of love started and ended with shit
girl, you know I won't let you down.
Where Teddy Ruxpin's tape deck
once kept his stories of discovering
Grundo with Grubby, I keep home
video cassettes: reels of the dance
indigenous only to her eight-month
old bones that she kicked and shook
as her first teeth jack-hammered
their way into her head; reels we'd
labeled To Be Watched with Baby's
First Date. In the hollowed handle
bars of his Y-Foil still chained
to the fence in the backyard, I keep
a collage, ransom-note-arranged
headlines of Young Wife Becomes
Young Widow; Twenty-Year-Old
Woman Buries Infant Daughter.
Poorly pixelated black and white
photographs of police and caution
tape and tarped mounds amid
a wasteland of steel and glass
along the 500 block of East
Jefferson Avenue: Small
Town Serenity Rocked By
Raid on Drug Ring: Father
and Daughter's Walk Ended
by Speeding Getaway Car.
In bottles lining shelves lining
the attic walls: things I don't
want to forget: the smell of my
husband's skin after ten hours
sweating with tar and gravel;
the taste of our baby's sleepless
nights and the terror of her first
silent one; the sound of her laugh
with the sound of his mouth
blowing raspberries on the rolls
of her fat little legs; the feel of his
wedding band through the sheets.
In the black ink above my left
breast: two cat claw scratches,
one inscribed 1/19/82-5/28/04,
the other 9/2/03-5/28/04.
In going back to the wild patch
of blackberries across from our
home, taking them seventy-nine
miles away to my home to bake
a pie that I will eat in one sitting,
sitting on the floor so that I am
not so far from the ground
that holds the bodies of the ones
I need.
And now you think
you know me. But you only
know where I keep my love.
.
.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Take Heed of the Man Missing His Incisor
Come close. Close enough that you can't
tell the whites around my neck aren't pearls.
Close enough that I can massage your gums
with my warm milk and bourbon-dipped
thumb and forefinger; that you eagerly open
your mouth for my brown sugar-dipped lips
and let me suck the roots from the sockets.
Now go. I am not the kind to put boys in
boxes and ship them to the bottom of active
volcanoes: I would rather hear how you
whistle your th's, smile a scared and sacred
homage when you tell them, her, that one...
Come close. Close enough that you can't
tell the whites around my neck aren't pearls.
Close enough that I can massage your gums
with my warm milk and bourbon-dipped
thumb and forefinger; that you eagerly open
your mouth for my brown sugar-dipped lips
and let me suck the roots from the sockets.
Now go. I am not the kind to put boys in
boxes and ship them to the bottom of active
volcanoes: I would rather hear how you
whistle your th's, smile a scared and sacred
homage when you tell them, her, that one...
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Postcards from BsAs
.
With One-Third All My Love
I have half a mind
to wire him 2k for transportation:
..-. --- .-.
- .... .
-. . -..- -
..-. .-.. .. --. .... -
- ---
-... ... .- ...
Telegraph: Need you stop
Now stop
Wear your black cardigan stop
Bring the Raspberry Bite
lipstick and matches I left
in its pocket the night we stop
Send to his mother's address,
a postcard, the one with six shots
of six pairs of Argentinean breasts:
For my darling,
Boobs.
With one-third
all the love
available beneath
my own double As.
Between the cardstock and the glossy
photo, slip a map of the city
with a purple-inked path from the airport
to the foot of the bronzed Latina Cinderella
just outside the cemetery: a path dotted
with as many sonnets as it took me to realize
what he'd really wanted; to decide
I wanted that too; to find the vocabulary
and the sense to tell him how I'd like
to be his sophomore year steady: fifteen,
learning to fumble my hands
into the front pockets of his Levis
as we wait for the traffic lights
to let us go; how to stretch my spine strong,
curve my neck soft so he could separate
muscle from muscle with his tongue,
harboring his face and his fingers
in the hair I kept long for no other purpose,
as my own eyes look out over Avenida
del Liberator traffic, begging passersby
for a challenge: to hurt my pride:
to tell my limbs not even Buenos Aires
could seduce my reticence;
planish me into a woman who stands
in the middle of everywhere unwinding,
unthreading the seams of a skirt
to make room for her thigh:
for when the nerves hear the bandonéon
and want to cradle her man's ribcage
without waiting for the notes to fade,
the audience to go away;
without waiting for their own feet
to get them to a back alley or the back
of a car or back into the apartment; without
waiting for another way to say she needs.
.
With One-Third All My Love
I have half a mind
to wire him 2k for transportation:
..-. --- .-.
- .... .
-. . -..- -
..-. .-.. .. --. .... -
- ---
-... ... .- ...
Telegraph: Need you stop
Now stop
Wear your black cardigan stop
Bring the Raspberry Bite
lipstick and matches I left
in its pocket the night we stop
Send to his mother's address,
a postcard, the one with six shots
of six pairs of Argentinean breasts:
For my darling,
Boobs.
With one-third
all the love
available beneath
my own double As.
Between the cardstock and the glossy
photo, slip a map of the city
with a purple-inked path from the airport
to the foot of the bronzed Latina Cinderella
just outside the cemetery: a path dotted
with as many sonnets as it took me to realize
what he'd really wanted; to decide
I wanted that too; to find the vocabulary
and the sense to tell him how I'd like
to be his sophomore year steady: fifteen,
learning to fumble my hands
into the front pockets of his Levis
as we wait for the traffic lights
to let us go; how to stretch my spine strong,
curve my neck soft so he could separate
muscle from muscle with his tongue,
harboring his face and his fingers
in the hair I kept long for no other purpose,
as my own eyes look out over Avenida
del Liberator traffic, begging passersby
for a challenge: to hurt my pride:
to tell my limbs not even Buenos Aires
could seduce my reticence;
planish me into a woman who stands
in the middle of everywhere unwinding,
unthreading the seams of a skirt
to make room for her thigh:
for when the nerves hear the bandonéon
and want to cradle her man's ribcage
without waiting for the notes to fade,
the audience to go away;
without waiting for their own feet
to get them to a back alley or the back
of a car or back into the apartment; without
waiting for another way to say she needs.
.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Expect a Series of BsAs pieces....
No title. A fetal draft.
.
.
.
I think we are supposed to do something
romantic here: at the corner of a 1906
Rue de Fleurus and a 1965 East 47th
Street, beneath a coin-operated moon
made full with nine dimes and a nickel,
the street-orchestra playing a tune only
the paint-can drummer hears as his high
school sweetheart's favorite lullaby that
floats through a midnight mist of a blend
from Mendoza, I think, yes: quick! Take
off your clothes! The moon won't mind.
Quick! Open your mouth I will crawl
inside: skinny dip: swim in, swim out
of the gaps between your bicuspids,
wrap myself in the arugula left over from
the omelets we ate in the bed dampened
by the rainstorm the weathermen didn't
forecast on channel 9, 14 or 37, which
seemed reason enough to open the windows
and push the mattress onto the balcony.
Because that is what we are supposed to do.
Yes, isn't that what we are supposed to do?
Will you still love me if I become beautiful?
Find rhythm, my footing with the orchestra?
I wrap myself strategically in the arugula,
slip seductively from the corner of your lips,
glistening a slightly ashamed Eve for the
knowledge I swabbed from inside your
mouth: for the thought that perhaps the Book
of Chemistry, Spells, Science and Kama Sutra:
A Practical and Proven Guide for Self-Helping
to Find Self-Love, Self-Healing, Self-Improving
from the Hair on Your Toes to the Pimple
on the Back of Your Neck in Order to Attract
Your Perfect Mate and Keep Him Without
Holding Him Down Except for the Nights
When He Wants to be Tied, was written
for some ones other than ourselves; some
ones who know only one good variation on
the theme of things to do with two mouths.
.
.
.
.
.
I think we are supposed to do something
romantic here: at the corner of a 1906
Rue de Fleurus and a 1965 East 47th
Street, beneath a coin-operated moon
made full with nine dimes and a nickel,
the street-orchestra playing a tune only
the paint-can drummer hears as his high
school sweetheart's favorite lullaby that
floats through a midnight mist of a blend
from Mendoza, I think, yes: quick! Take
off your clothes! The moon won't mind.
Quick! Open your mouth I will crawl
inside: skinny dip: swim in, swim out
of the gaps between your bicuspids,
wrap myself in the arugula left over from
the omelets we ate in the bed dampened
by the rainstorm the weathermen didn't
forecast on channel 9, 14 or 37, which
seemed reason enough to open the windows
and push the mattress onto the balcony.
Because that is what we are supposed to do.
Yes, isn't that what we are supposed to do?
Will you still love me if I become beautiful?
Find rhythm, my footing with the orchestra?
I wrap myself strategically in the arugula,
slip seductively from the corner of your lips,
glistening a slightly ashamed Eve for the
knowledge I swabbed from inside your
mouth: for the thought that perhaps the Book
of Chemistry, Spells, Science and Kama Sutra:
A Practical and Proven Guide for Self-Helping
to Find Self-Love, Self-Healing, Self-Improving
from the Hair on Your Toes to the Pimple
on the Back of Your Neck in Order to Attract
Your Perfect Mate and Keep Him Without
Holding Him Down Except for the Nights
When He Wants to be Tied, was written
for some ones other than ourselves; some
ones who know only one good variation on
the theme of things to do with two mouths.
.
.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Hey, I wrote a poem....
Very fresh first draft, although I've been toying with this image for a while, since I got stuck on Florence + the Machine, particularly the song Blinding. I could get out a line or two, but that was it. It is tricky being feeling inspired by something so complete, but staying within that space. The lyric that the title is from is actually 'no more calling like a crow for a boy/for a body in a garden.'
Crawling For a Boy Through The Garden
I keep seeing her: in a garden she made a graveyard:
clawing at the dirt, getting
nowhere;
getting her hair tangled,
her skin saturated with the dew of a sweat less
coolant for the midnight Missouri-August limbs
than expurgation of the spastic heartbeat
from the vagus nerve that won't leave the heart
of her heart, or the heart of her head alone.
Either
way, I keep seeing her in the flowerbed
in a satin and lace nightgown, whiter
than what Saint Agnes always dreamt God
took Mary to bed in, and the heat
of her trenching hands plowing through the ground
leaves her skin lined with Bahraini pearls, nacreous
in the same loving spotlight of a half moon
that gives bats unabashed flight and lets teenage girls
sneak out second-story bedroom windows: makes
half-living repenters into conductors
of a kinesis they and their lovers and their doctors
thought was killed in the questionably successful
exorcism of the guilt that landed them
in the bed, in the office,
in the first place.
I know but I don't know how I know
there is a man dressed from collar
to ankle bones in his marital suit just
a few feet below her dirty knees and nails.
I don't know how I don't know
why she put him there:
sewed his
eyes shut with mismatched buttons,
sealed his lips closed with wax
from their wedding candle
and embossed the drying tallow
with the young family crest
of her own mouth.
I don't know
why I know how he didn't hurt
her and I don't know how I know
why she thinks if she didn't
save him when she raked over
his burial bed,
she can do it now:
wash the dirt off
with rose water and
dry the skin with
Mexican frankincense.
She
can make
him
breath again
if she can get her hands beneath
the grave ground.
Crawling For a Boy Through The Garden
I keep seeing her: in a garden she made a graveyard:
clawing at the dirt, getting
nowhere;
getting her hair tangled,
her skin saturated with the dew of a sweat less
coolant for the midnight Missouri-August limbs
than expurgation of the spastic heartbeat
from the vagus nerve that won't leave the heart
of her heart, or the heart of her head alone.
Either
way, I keep seeing her in the flowerbed
in a satin and lace nightgown, whiter
than what Saint Agnes always dreamt God
took Mary to bed in, and the heat
of her trenching hands plowing through the ground
leaves her skin lined with Bahraini pearls, nacreous
in the same loving spotlight of a half moon
that gives bats unabashed flight and lets teenage girls
sneak out second-story bedroom windows: makes
half-living repenters into conductors
of a kinesis they and their lovers and their doctors
thought was killed in the questionably successful
exorcism of the guilt that landed them
in the bed, in the office,
in the first place.
I know but I don't know how I know
there is a man dressed from collar
to ankle bones in his marital suit just
a few feet below her dirty knees and nails.
I don't know how I don't know
why she put him there:
sewed his
eyes shut with mismatched buttons,
sealed his lips closed with wax
from their wedding candle
and embossed the drying tallow
with the young family crest
of her own mouth.
I don't know
why I know how he didn't hurt
her and I don't know how I know
why she thinks if she didn't
save him when she raked over
his burial bed,
she can do it now:
wash the dirt off
with rose water and
dry the skin with
Mexican frankincense.
She
can make
him
breath again
if she can get her hands beneath
the grave ground.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Decrease in Production
I need to trick myself into thinking I have an 'assignment' due every Monday, so that I keep writing regularly. This was a revision for my final portfolio for last semester's class, but it underwent a lot of much needed revision since then. So, basically, I haven't written a new thing since mid-December.
Candy Cigarettes
Since second grade
I believed my black-sheep blends
bound me for a land
not of the American Midwest Population 319
Village of Nowhere of my birth.
Six years old
strutting Boxcar kids' logic
down Oak Avenue, I was going places, ready
to locate the poetic kin
of my broody little brain.
I was going places:
black stirrup leggings
scuffless black and white saddle shoes
an oversized black sweater stolen
from an oversized tow-headed brother
one candy cigarette snug in the crease of my mouth
another candy cigarette warming between an index
and a middle finger
the rest of the carton swaying
in a faux-leather fanny pack beside
a Walkman rotating Emotions, Side A
getting me to the edge of town.
My bluff
was always called
in the time it took
to flip that tape to Side B.
If only If It's Over
could still make the compass of my feet
reorient the rest of my body to a direction
of where I always seem to find home.
But these twenty years have replaced Long Island
songstresses with Duluth poets, Buffalo babes,
Los Angeles machines, Kingsland currency,
London handguns; these twenty years
have left that tape deck turning only dust,
holding up only a corner of a bookshelf
broken during the move, the exile
of us outcasts to an American Metropolis
of Where Everybody Who Wants to Be Thought
a Somebody Has Got to Be.
And now I swagger
green philosophy:
my blacks all-natural, organic:
cotton grown in a field leeched
of a history of soil fertilized
by slaves, indentured servants,
illegal immigrants;
cotton grown in a field watered
by a river diverted from,
created from
the dirty Mississippi
and run through
solar-sustained filtrations
to rest me assured
my delicately freckled skin won't get rashed
from any mutant roe
when I slip into this style certified cool or
hot or
hip or
raw or
rad or
bad or
bitchin' or
boss or
whatever term in whatever tongue
such decrees are passed down by the kids
calling fashion
the gateway to heightened environmental awareness.
I request permission
to approach,
to enter their sanctuary,
and find myself seated at the foot of a banquet table
covered in produce -
carrots
celery
spinach
cherries
strawberries
pears
apples
grapes -
fruits and vegetables saturated not
with pesticides, not
with algicides
bactericides
fungicides
herbicides
insecticides
miticides
molluscicides
nematicides
rodenticides
virucides
but with the care and concern we
black-clad ex-pats left behind
when we fled countrysides
for cities filled with
windowless rooms, concrete gardens,
steel clouds.
But in this hall of good cheer and satisfied
smiles from our successful bid at an alternative,
an enlightened lifestyle, we
ching ching!
Toast
santé!
Á votre
santé! until
someone spills pinot on someone else's suit.
Grapes' blood shed: all bets off.
It doesn't matter
that red blends into black,
and we could just suck the juices
from the cotton because we read
its certification, know its genealogy
from seedling to shirtfront.
We don't quite know what to do with ourselves,
don't know how to manage this disruption,
this revolution,
now that somebody's been hurt.
Candy Cigarettes
Since second grade
I believed my black-sheep blends
bound me for a land
not of the American Midwest Population 319
Village of Nowhere of my birth.
Six years old
strutting Boxcar kids' logic
down Oak Avenue, I was going places, ready
to locate the poetic kin
of my broody little brain.
I was going places:
black stirrup leggings
scuffless black and white saddle shoes
an oversized black sweater stolen
from an oversized tow-headed brother
one candy cigarette snug in the crease of my mouth
another candy cigarette warming between an index
and a middle finger
the rest of the carton swaying
in a faux-leather fanny pack beside
a Walkman rotating Emotions, Side A
getting me to the edge of town.
My bluff
was always called
in the time it took
to flip that tape to Side B.
If only If It's Over
could still make the compass of my feet
reorient the rest of my body to a direction
of where I always seem to find home.
But these twenty years have replaced Long Island
songstresses with Duluth poets, Buffalo babes,
Los Angeles machines, Kingsland currency,
London handguns; these twenty years
have left that tape deck turning only dust,
holding up only a corner of a bookshelf
broken during the move, the exile
of us outcasts to an American Metropolis
of Where Everybody Who Wants to Be Thought
a Somebody Has Got to Be.
And now I swagger
green philosophy:
my blacks all-natural, organic:
cotton grown in a field leeched
of a history of soil fertilized
by slaves, indentured servants,
illegal immigrants;
cotton grown in a field watered
by a river diverted from,
created from
the dirty Mississippi
and run through
solar-sustained filtrations
to rest me assured
my delicately freckled skin won't get rashed
from any mutant roe
when I slip into this style certified cool or
hot or
hip or
raw or
rad or
bad or
bitchin' or
boss or
whatever term in whatever tongue
such decrees are passed down by the kids
calling fashion
the gateway to heightened environmental awareness.
I request permission
to approach,
to enter their sanctuary,
and find myself seated at the foot of a banquet table
covered in produce -
carrots
celery
spinach
cherries
strawberries
pears
apples
grapes -
fruits and vegetables saturated not
with pesticides, not
with algicides
bactericides
fungicides
herbicides
insecticides
miticides
molluscicides
nematicides
rodenticides
virucides
but with the care and concern we
black-clad ex-pats left behind
when we fled countrysides
for cities filled with
windowless rooms, concrete gardens,
steel clouds.
But in this hall of good cheer and satisfied
smiles from our successful bid at an alternative,
an enlightened lifestyle, we
ching ching!
Toast
santé!
Á votre
santé! until
someone spills pinot on someone else's suit.
Grapes' blood shed: all bets off.
It doesn't matter
that red blends into black,
and we could just suck the juices
from the cotton because we read
its certification, know its genealogy
from seedling to shirtfront.
We don't quite know what to do with ourselves,
don't know how to manage this disruption,
this revolution,
now that somebody's been hurt.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
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?
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?
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