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.

Debate

When A walks by, all B’s mental
weather vanes signal a change of direction.
The reigning subject: seismology,
then – first round, a jaw turned fast too hard
and there’s a new middleweight in town.
I swear I will not think of you in ways of which
you would approve. B says to A. The ratings spike.
So who gives in? The redwood or the skeleton key?
Doors swing wide for B though A is more admired.
For A to shy from trouble is no fault–
B feels the plates shift and in turn
is tired to not love A’s god
he is so noble. Still, B’s home is a hive
and flies must wonder what to sting is like.
A, are you tired of being nice?

Clarihew

Elizabeth Taylor,
drunk in her trailer,
admitted her contract
made her wear contacts.

Sonnet

Honed, hived, you’ve slept tight as heat
against me, specific, as unfamiliar
as my house in the dark. Here it's Deet
and candles, a past porch life as sure
as a sliver, a four beer slur.
Your mouth opens like a safe, creaks
with yen. Come here and recover.
I come. What another lover
was, you aren’t. Sheets and sheets
of what you aren’t could cover
a library floor. Darling, treat
this as kudos - another
man would buckle under
my kind of esteem.

Morgan

Blonde and round as a tack
and as fond of you as anyone
I know. Shitty days come and go.
To make amends, the world
maps out, closes its gaps,
so she can stand one foot in Russia
and one in Japan. Yes of course
she's one of the blessed,
the precious few, for whom circumstance
bent over for fate -a Helen
young in years but wearing the pants,
not so much captured as advancing
with coolers of beer for the boys
in the horse.

NO SALE NO POEM

This isn't the first day he's woken
to thoughts of photosynthesis and flowers
blooming like the opening of a warm front.
It's Monday and he's not going to work.
Next to him, his girlfriend Sharon
pulls on black stockings.
On Friday a football player at the school
died of something quick and seemingly harmless
until his mother insisted he go to the hospital and now
today is the funeral. She wants to write about it.

On the bed, she leans over him, half-dressed,
describing what she would rather be doing.
But kids won't teach themselves
and substitutes always left rude notes about
more discipline. Her skirt covers the tattoo on her ass
that spells out in small script NO SALE NO POEM -
a meaningless tattoo she got long before
he met her at a bar (a bar, for god's sake)
and saw the kind domesticated animal
in her face. She was always trying to hide
the fact that she was a teacher and loved it
and had never hurt anyone knowingly in her life.
Sharon's parents, and his, are wealthy
Are you bored? Last night I watched clouds
flying up at an angle across a moon
that looked like a coin in water.
I tried to decide if it was tar or flowers
I was trying to spit out, but it got cold
and I got into bed. I hear there
will come a time when I can finish a story,
write about something other than myself,
but who are these loved ones insisting this is true?

Casablanca

I wish we were back in the dim
light, your roommate there on the couch
and Humphrey Bogart looking grim –
a sour cheers and a slouch –
as if we were the slim
broad who’d left him biting his lip
on the platform, cut to the quick
by no hand on no familiar hip,
no Ilsa or her Swedish sounds.
She’s pure love in a slip
and, no question, we’re into it –
your roommate and you and I and Rick:
Of all the gin joints in all the towns
in all the world we say. Rick frowns.