Advice

Pet Sounds played.
Scott laid a hand
heavily on my head
like a gorilla mother
and poured vanilla vodka
in a mug. He said
I should take a drag.
I shrugged so he stuck
the butt in my mouth
with a slap on the back
and that was that.

A Curse

You’ll go for groceries
smelling like wet dog
and cigarettes after
the retrievers find the
weak part of the fence
the day it rains so hard
your neighbor’s car, surprise,
takes down your mailbox.
Try this on for size:

Your wife marries up,
a husband with no need
to compensate, she jokes.
He’s a dietician and
now her folks will
try to set you up, when
they’re not sending chain letters
for ambassador scams.
You won’t be brave enough
to report the spam.

Your kids call you
fat behind your back.
School administrators
sit them down to ask
about their home life.
Your son learned
what sex is from a movie.
He just turned five.

You sigh. Life sucks
and then you die.
Your family laughs.
“Don’t be so pessimistic,
Dad.” You watch your youngest
grannybowl to hit all
but the final pin: three cheers
and then – “Everyone together!” –
a picture you’re not even in.

Another lake where there shouldn't be one

It's been a long time since we've seen you!

Linda and Ben and I wake up almost in unison,

each door's mechanisms signaling to the ones
still in their beds, and Ben is hungover,

but happy with his bowl and spoon.

Linda rubs behind her ear, runs the sink,

looks pretty and sad, the way a cup won't crack
again where you glued it. It's going to be a good day, I think.

Last night we went to the lake,

and fog and light pollution made a lane leading to the lake.

Grass like the joggers see - wet, black-green,

blue-green. The boat house glimmering
like an indoor pool. Everywhere the light
doing funny things. It turned branches heavy
with leftover rain, suspended
the way cough particles hang, if we could see them.

Remember when you said our lake is another lake

where there shouldn't be one?
According to the earth. A man-made lake.
Men raid the fishing stations early, and we were up,
still, our forearms in the water. One of us would not stop talking

about all the living horrors: spiders, scorpions, and seagulls,

rats, and cockroaches, some we were used to

and some like myths, because I haven't once seen a scorpion.

Another moth flew threw the window, and Linda wanted
me to tell you. As big as a bat. It dusted us and the room
with its scales, before we caught it in a bowl against the wall,
thumping against the plastic, harder than you'd think,
like it was trying to break down a door.
At lights off, my room glowed green
from the protection it had shed - Linda had left footprints.
The circle on the wall glowed especially bright,
like a firework or a flare, suspended above the cast-away.

SS Series: North and Kedzie (Seven poems!)

Solstice

On Kedzie, down which no bus ran, I lived
with a beauty, dark and tired as syrup
if syrup were sad all the time, who hated
a roommate selling to cover the rent
of a boyfriend fired from CVS,
who invited the devil incarnate,
Hannah, to crash on our couch… Breath In. Breath –
I gotta get out! I grouched to the man
I loved the first time that winter; I sobbed
If this is my home, I don’t have one.
(The mice hid their muzzles inside the walls;
The moths quit spying through the window screen.)
But everyone loved me from head to toe,
capitulating – Then you have no home.



Living with Delia
“I have lived three years as much alone with God and the dead as if I had been a departed spirit…. But if you will let me know when you are coming I will put on one of the dresses I used to wear the last time I made my appearance in the world…”

She would sleep head in the closet for shade.
Sometimes I found her encased in the sheets,
like a plant cell photosynthesizing
throughout the afternoon, sometimes rising
from the hardwood floor, like she’d been greeted
by her dead mother or by some low-grade
ghost of St. Albans. Theory… she’d mutter.
What’s a theory? Belief without proof.

The neighbors were scared. One saw her ram
through the hatchway to get onto the roof
from the porch for her prayers, landlord be damned.
Do you hear that? Coming from the gutters?
she yelled down to me, as if I could hear it.
She blanched. Shh – It’s the Holy Spirit.




Linda

We railed against the homeless men
who smelled like shit and slept
on the porch if we didn’t shoo them,
feeling like shit because we were homeless
too, alive off the kindnesses of our men
who could fit the sum of our savings
in their fist. We raved about the injustice
of days spent lazing around someone else’s
apartment.
I Praised The Lord the first time I closed
the door to our three-bedroom, third-floor
home, our Malibu dream with carpet
and windows doomed to slam shut
without a prop. Then she locked
me out of her room when a man moved
to Boston and I wasn’t as thankful.

The joke is that she was more beautiful
when she was preoccupied by the cards
she’d been dealt - mother's death, father's
slow, weaving trip across the Bible belt,
their house grey like they’d been hit
by the dust bowl - saying to my face
that she’d lost everything she loved,
even the remote control.
More beautiful by far than I ever was,
even when happiness sat in her eye
like a square peg in a round hole.






Days with Cary Grant

I.

I watched him out of order,
The Amazing Philadelphia
Charade Bringing Up Arsenic
and Old Penny Thief.
I watched them all:
His handsome head in his hands
at his wife’s bedside,
his grayscale mane still gray
in color. Handsome man,
notorious for Grace
Audrey, and Ingrid,
the last weaving between tawdry
and limitless on the set, drunk
and sassing a cop on a lark.
Me? I crashed my bike
riding home through the park.

***

I hibernate on
the park’s fat hills,
a book over my face
serotonin depleted.
I watched a marathon of Cary Grant
and didn’t sleep.

***

The angular sun through the leaves
like a handful of glass.
On my back in the grass.
The sunny holes in the leaves
point to the National Guard building.

***

Without the sun
I could see Linda
if she were standing
at her window.

***

She is trying to sleep,
her room like the inside of a prism,
she wails, in the day.
Like a smashed-up jewelry case.
Put some curtains up, I said.
She sighed and walked away.

***

Each day that is warm I count in my favor.
Puerto Ricans sun themselves
through car windows or smoke in the park,
behavior I observe from Linda’s window,
with a view of the East and the National Guard.
A white man with red hair
moves his arms around his body
like a native, conjuring in slow motion –
ten minutes to reach the grass,
another ten to turn and face me, each moment
prolonged, but not because the motion is important
but because the air is, maybe,
and I believe the time it takes to turn around
is full of it, from where I watch the ground,
three floors above it.


II.


I want to know
how many times a day
you think of me.
I want a number.

***

I’m his girl on Fridays
when he leaves work early.
I get surly when he’s late
and time my shower with his arrival.
You can wait awhile I snarl
to the tile.

***

In the course of a day
I am chloride,
hydroxide, bicarbonate
while you are Na.
I salt or embitter
you or make you rise.
You are not my size
at all but I'd like
to be thinner.
By definition
March ends winter.

***

Grant in a kimono
chases Japanese children,
buys a bungalow
for his wife. Then
an earthquake or tornado
kills his unborn daughter.

I say to him:
The rain through the blinds looks
like someone upstairs is emptying rice
into a pot of boiling water.


***

Come here. I feel like Moses
in the rushes. This floor knows
us but doesn’t love us. Home
sounds nice. Take me there.
Feel my forehead. It’s warm.
From the sun. Except for you
I haven’t seen anyone
around these parts.





Early mornings

My mother gave me her
alarm clock when I learned
to tell time, the minutes
like a mite in my eye,
nights I couldn’t sleep.

The fan had one whir,
the mosquito spray truck
another. Then there
was my neighbor’s
Jeep getting in early.

I could always sleep
in the day, watching the dust
like floating pearls
in the beams of light.
Whirly gigs collected
in the gutters
outside my window.

Nights here, if you are
awake, someone else is
also. Maybe someone surly
is stuttering to your neighbor
across the porch. Maybe
someone you know
is sleeping on the couch.




Luz’s Letter

It is terrible missing you at night.
They all sleep here in individual
beds like the boys at the boarding school
my brother attended until a fight
sent him home. You were never any good
at school – but now you know a temperature
without taking it. You own your own cure.
Come and recover, you’d say, and I would.

It will be a long time before I find you
sleepwalking in the kitchen again
when the blue rose out of the black a.m.
like a witch in the window behind you,
dissolving, and I’d try to send you to bed.
Why don’t I stay? you suggested instead.






Dream

Don’t Look Out The Window – a trick I tried,
a childhood superstition, to get back
to what I dreamed, next to Mark and the cat:
innumerable particles of light
drawn and pooled in a prism and made tight
into beams. I wanted belief like that –
a colorless frequency that would crack
my ribcage open brightly from inside.

I woke to buses gearing up through deep
slush, and his back angled like a boy’s frame,
shoulder blades bare. You there, pull the covers
over your head and over your lover’s
tangled heap of hair, and I’ll do the same.
It’s still early. We can go back to sleep.

stay tuned for senior sem project! so many poems, so many...

Living with Delia

She would sleep head in the closet for shade.
Sometimes I found her encased in the sheets
like a plant cell photosynthesizing,
seventy percent lighter and rising
from the hardwood floor like she’d been greeted
by her dead mother or by some low-grade
ghost of St. Albans. Bacon… She’d mutter,
What’s a theory? Belief without proof.

The neighbors were scared. One saw her jam
a broom apart to get onto the roof
from the porch for her prayers, landlord be dammed.
Do you hear that? Coming from the gutters?
she yelled down to me, as if I could hear it.
She blanched. Shh – It’s the Holy Spirit.

North and Kedzie

On Kedzie, down which no bus ran, I lived
with a roommate dark and tired as syrup
if syrup were sad all the time, who hated
a roommate selling to cover the rent
of a roommate fired from CVS
who invited the devil incarnate,
Hannah, to crash on our couch… Breath In. Breath –
I gotta get out! I grouched to the man
I loved the first time that winter; I sobbed
If this is my home, I don’t have one.
(The mice hid their muzzles inside the walls;
The moths stopped spying through the window screen.)
But everyone loved me from head to toe,
capitulating – Then you have no home.