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.

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.

Phone Call

Like a dryer undoes
a bad stitch, you
unravel what I'd rallied -
a bitch of a lesson
I won't learn.
I need some pointers
and a slap in the ass.

What's sass these days
compared to spite?
The man loitering
at the stop light? I think
it's you, until he turns.
My god, this love feels
like hate! Brass knuckles
on both hands -
like skidding into gravel
instead of grass.

Dec 11th (revised) - after Morgan's six words

Already I can see the tart
in my preschooler. The sprinkler
catches her at the end
of its hemisphere each time
and she shrieks like she wasn't
asking for it - I saw her stall
at the edge of the water line,
one leg kept back mimicking
her brother's at-bat stance.
Or when I put away her toys,
she yells Hey from the floor
where she often sits like a small,
colloquial guru hey those are mine.

I can't flush myself out
of her system with good, clear
wisdom. In her lower lip is
her preference for skirts and powerful colors.
She will, she will figure herself into messes
evolved from the messes of her mother's,
paired like helixes, will crash her bike,
her car, her lover's car, will find
herself alone in a dark room
with a man and know instinctively
the movements she should not make,
will leave a Hindi bangle or earring at every
restaurant, unknowingly, like a fingerprint.

I wrap her in a towel. She is small
enough to carry, her weight natural -
a package of bright water.
She wants to watch the movie
about the talking dog, the one
we rented from the library a hundred times.
We love it. She finds the tape
stuck under the couch, dropping the towel,
leaving two chubby damp marks from her shins.
Yesterday, she whammed her head
against the tabletop, where she'd misgauged
her height. At the hospital, my mother
and I compared scars while the doctor
checked for concussion. I think she'll
live, he said and winked.

Dec 7

We visit the polish church down the street
and here the blue dome is so tall
it is bad for my heart.
Distance like that is too much
of a reminder.

Paris, a small farm in Germany,
none of us know exactly where
our friend is going
and neither does he
except for the name of the airport
and that he'll have to hitchhike.
He's used to it, the car pulling off
while he's still got one foot
on the pavement.

Slowly we'll get used to the absence
like a man adjusting the antenna,
circling the signal,
rewarded with a bit of a song,
making do.

He'll be on a highway or
a backroad, singing loudly
to the radio, a song he heard,
originally, in Chicago.

Daniel

The metal of toys recalled to manufacturers
he used safely, removed small pieces
from the palms of other preschoolers
like keys from drunks
as deftly as in the next decade
he avoided the preliminaries of sex -
a wrist of charms terrifying
in its bullet-like fragments,
a gleam of braces in a compact mouth.

Museum

you behind me like religion I don't want
to lose, quiet with muscles I learned from the Greeks...
Now I recognize you in the museums -
arm crooked around a farm girl or a dancer
or raising a scythe. I recognize motions
paused mid-motion like someone else's
passing car window. Either
they've been painting you for centuries
or else the bodies of men now are all
combinations of likeness and unlikeness to yours,
the first to pray through my body
to use it as a messy palette
for your own purposes. Now I've mixed it up -
this room as big as a gallery or your small bedroom,
who stood in front of whom.

On the drive home in the morning

The man who almost hit me
shoves his whole self close
to the dashboard to see my face,
more than my small red car which is
not nearly enough information
on someone who might have been
thirty minutes of his life or even
forty-five, depending on the damage,
even, he thinks to himself mostly
in a joking way,

someone who would
see the bumper - torn
like a smug photo of an old lover
straight down the middle,
in this imagined case between the curve
of the bumper and the actual metal of
the functional part of the hood -

and look up at the sorry face
of this man - late for a lunch with a woman
he no longer wants to meet with for any reason,
much less the one he's meeting her for -

and say here's the keys to this car that you've ruined
take it and repair it
using tools from your garage
and the skills your daddy taught you.
and then we'll talk.

Flood

The inches of rain burst like ink over
the low places and everyone swam
in analyses of themselves in their own broad strokes
as if they'd never seen water or bodies.
(small boys and their father, hands up – you try
and take them to the pool...;
teenagers, swim suits slacking around breasts
like a bored hand; an older sister –
hair hydrated upwards
as the body moves away from the surface –
having given into the velocity
of being at one point against her
boyfriend’s chest and the next
headed straight for the murky lawn
of the retention pond, a throwing that
I recognize as he throws her.
Here I am writing about myself again
while the girl stays aquarium-faced –
the pressure of the solid-looking film over the water
having briefly loosened for her, frozen
yard waste floating at her kneecap,
only to get paused mid-pencil-dive
in the water where I’ve kept her, thinking of my own
understanding of pressure -
how exertion creates heat for the body
so that one can be in water colder than the air,
and the skin - its repositories of sun
collected through seasons of sun like a jar of coins,
and the campfire collected
in the follicles, not lost but shed purposefully -
some kept still in the epidermis, the dermis,
the hypodermis, some layer other
than blood or bones - this rousing
of ember and ray through pores through breath
into water until the water is convinced
to warm the body back like a mutual
handing over of gifts. Ambassador, she's convinced
the water of it, now back -
as lungs unfold pain down the chest like a long scratch -
to the boy on the grass - arms folded,
laughing at her body's talent for immersion -
whom she understands in this exact way
as another unavoidable plan of action.