THE MÖBIUS
STRIP CLUB
OF GRIEF
BIANCA STONE
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for
Grandma
Contents
[Odin plucked out his eye in exchange for a drink]
I
Introduction
Medieval
Last Words
Lap Dance
A Brief Topography of the MSCOG
The Murder
Client
Mama-san
Hunter
All the Single Mothers
Honeybee
Emily Dickinson
Math
I Am Unfaithful to You with My Genius
II
Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother
How Not
Interior Design
Flight
The Reading
Self-Destruction Sequence
Stenographer
Elegy with a Swear Word
Cliff Elegy
The Fates
Dear Sister
The Gang Elegy
Blue Jays
Ones Who Got Away with It
Letter to a Letter to the Editors
The Green Word
Migration
Retreating Knights and Riderless Horses, or Poem with Another Poem Halfway Through It
The Fall
The Woman Downstairs
The Walking Dead
The Lit Club Slaughter
In the Champagne Room with Grandma
Elegy with Clothes
I’ll Be Happy
Historic Flaws
The Dark Ages, Revisited
Bibliography
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Odin plucked out his eye in exchange for a drink from Mimir’s well of wisdom. He wanted to know everything there is to know of the past and future. And so it was. But the weight of wisdom made his face sour. Seeing everything blown to shit. The gods with it. After that, he never ate again and lived on a strict diet of alcoholic beverages at the Möbius Strip Club of Grief.
I
Introduction
At the Möbius Strip Club of Grief, come on in, the ladies are XXX! If you want the skinny ones we got skeletons cracking round those poles. And over at the bar—there’s Grandma, with her breasts hanging at her stomach—gorgeous with a shook manhattan, and murderous with a maxi pad. At the Möbius Strip Club of Grief all the drinks are free. Grocery store rosé in gallon bottles on every table. And the dead don’t want your tips. They just want you to listen to their poems. Don’t do anything dangerous. And call every once in a while. In fact, they tip you at the MSCOG. With checks. With a sigh they’ll throw one down at your feet—We make it rain with checks.
Then the dead are sitting at the back of the club, dying further. Sniffing. Shuffling into the bathrooms, holding their skin in their hands, farting methane and sobbing across the stage with their last meal—it’s the raciest show in town. And ladies, there’s men too, hanging themselves on the bathroom doors and from the rafters, totally naked, with their cocks in their hands, tears coming down their faces. Ladies, you’ll love how their feet smell. How their bones protrude. How they leave no note.
Medieval
At the funeral they carried boom boxes on their shoulders,
blaring Chopin, swaggering over the snow in sync,
in all black, the cloth of penitents and matriarchs.
A hole is free to dig,
if you know how to ask men with the right tools.
Funerals need not break the bank.
Through the yard
like a procession of Danes and Duchesses from Hamlet,
all hired mourners from birth,
punters of rough gods,
women of the salons—
our funerals are like poker games
in the back room
at the Möbius Strip Club of Grief.
The stakes are high.
You have to have pneumonia to get in.
You have to cough and gurgle.
You have to have a cat on your lap.
And refuse to eat.
Last Words
After the funeral was out
Olives, pâté, sardines with soft bones and violent,
flushed organs—too much wine, slouched on a flowery chair—
aperitifs on the porch with the early moon—
I looked at the sky overhead where it said
in the white jet-stream cursive:
dying is awful.
And I lit my head on fire.
Danced a dance for the gods.
Mom pealed out, off down the mountain
like Mad Max
to sit alone in her house,
to play solitaire in the dark
because they’d turned off the lights again;
the pipes were frozen, the wood almost gone—
so solitaire on the floor beside the woodstove,
thinking
about abandonment
about love
about luck
about money—
like a winter songbird
it sang in her head all day:
Who will pay?
Who will pay?
Who will pay?
Lap Dance
I think everyone’s glad I’m dead, said the stripper
with the caved-in face. Her fingers were bone and no
sinew. She flapped her arms at the two wrens
caught up in the rafters, staring down
on the empty dance hall. Chirps rained like sparks
from the electric saws in their hearts.
No one here is glad anyone is dead. But
there is a certain comfort in knowing
the dead can entertain us, if we wish. We line up
outside looking drowned, telling whoever comes
our way that we are falling very fast. And that
we are fine. The dead as wrinkled as jet streams
cutting across the room with glasses lost on their
heads, vitamins dissolving like milk
under tongues, hair still growing, crackling
out of their skulls in time-lapse loops—
and we file in, in ones and twos, clinging
to our tragedies, finding our favorite face,
and it looks back at us with indifference, contempt,
chill disappointment. You never came much
when I was alive, says one with red hair, lying
on her side, a Botticelli on the stage;
and now you want a piece? $20 for five minutes;
I’ll hold your hand in my own. I’ll tell you
you were good to me.
A Brief Topography of the MSCOG
I
Over the door there’s the iconic ice-pick in a human heart. You have to show a scar to the bouncer to get in: the old suture holes, a common kneecap, the shy smile of a cesarean, spattering of long-gone acne—any scar will do. And you have to tell a story about your mother. Something she suffered through. But once you’re in, you’re in forever.
Then there’s only the horizon, lush carpeting through cigarillo smoke, coats on hooks, worried aunts, croquet—grand as a yard sale, a ghost, her eyes like thumbs pointed down, her laugh like an almost perfect test score—
leave your inhibitions at the door. There is no room for modesty.
Your magnum opus will start
in the dim alcoves of grief.
II
Main da
nce room: frivolity, managed by a House Mom, who sits in a high swiveling chair, making sure no one breaks the rules of solitaire.
Lay me out on the floor and win me. I have nothing to give but my songs no one knows, on my album no one bought.
The DJ is the world, spinning and spinning.
On the loudspeakers it’s Rubinstein at the piano, remixed with sick beats.
—and there’s Grandma, half-blind, naked but for an open XL flannel and Birkenstocks. She peers out from behind the bar, squinting into the faces, trying to figure out who is ordering and what, her hand up behind her ear like a sail. Don’t let the cats out! she screams, whenever someone comes in.
III
You want privacy with your dead?
Follow the nameless great-great-grandmothers through the screen doors.
Cross your hands over your chest like a coat of arms.
I will ravish you with songbirds.
You’ll see angels bathing in dust.
Let there be something for you in one room or another.
And there are so many glow-in-the-dark galaxies to look upon.
Like you’re all alone in your childhood bedroom,
but totally restored
in the adult entertainment industry’s moral center.
IV
For the masochist, nothing quite hurts like the truth.
Farther in the cavernous club
where the bend in the strip fakes an edge,
I engrave my lunatic memorial:
The dungeons of the mind, the most defeated cells,
wherein cruelty cums.
V
Let go and there is nothing
tethering you to the stake
that is always driven
into the soft center
of your vampiric world.
VI
The great cosmic cow gyrates her stomachs on stage. The tall grasses sway at her knees. The people moan. The sun sinks. The band wraps up with “Gloomy Sunday”—
Oh, Billie. Billie, do not leave us again—it never ends, it just lies down and weeps, because it can’t get ahold of anyone. HELLO?? Is anyone there?! Why aren’t you answering your phone??—lost in a magazine from 1998 about the sky & telescopes. Let the moths land where they will. Feel their powdery legs against your own. Gloomy Sunday. Gloo-my Sun-day. Would the angels be mad if I thought of joining you? Bright midnight moon, gloomy Sunday through the glass ceiling—better yet, Mars: that raving nipple, that red goddess who demands from the eaves to be worshipped.
The Murder
I ground hemlock across your brow.
Shot you in the head.
Hid the gun in the river.
Looked inside the hole
of your temple—
looked inside
the oak tree’s ragged scalp—
your bosom bubbles
and rots in the field.
I cast you out of your house
but your ghost lies down
in front of the stove
to weep,
to say you’d like a cup of instant coffee,
a piece of toast (that’s all!),
and I bring it to you,
I poison you, Queen Gertrude,
in the center of a tournament,
pearl dropped
in a cup of rosé; lying down to die
again and again
in a tantrum and tempest—
I get the power saw.
Put the plastic tarp down.
Pass along your suicidal genes.
Your voluntary life in bed.
Window monarch—you
whom we fretted over
like superstitious servants
competing among your heavy furs and mantle—
How many grandmothers have I killed?
Some mornings I get up
and walk barefoot down the road
with my tin cup
to shake the tinsel loose from my bones,
to beg the strong winds
to touch me everywhere.
One sad epiphany after another
to survive this—
Oh, I survive this, I say to no one.
Dear, old flesh and blood,
these days I
would not recognize
your face
hidden in the ground
but for the sound of thunder,
the tremor of spring rain.
Client
I’m here, watching the dead spinning.
The dead are twerking and jiggling in my face.
The dead are goddesses, walking around the room
of wasted imbecilic dudes from Wall Street: the Living.
The living are so obliterated, they can barely see.
The dead are shaking our very foundations with their boobs.
And they’re real—every part of them.
The dead are wild apples in your mouth.
They’re all out there in the dark, working it.
Pissing in your belly button. Punching you in the jaw.
Forever.
Mama-san
The strippers tip the House Mom at the end of their shift.
With their life, their time, their sanity.
She sits at the center, conducting order.
She takes each aside to tell her she’s brilliant.
(Too brilliant for anyone to appreciate.)
But the House Mom is trapped.
Owned by sorrow.
Up the back stairs it led them all each night: grief.
It tucked them in. It read itself aloud
in gilt fragments and tapestries fallen apart—
and she made them say it back to her
until they knew it by heart.
Hunter
Erotic dancing takes the place of Greek tragedy
just as the gladiatorial fights did in Rome—but it is a private dance
no one can touch or see. A feeling every day I enter and close
a curtain behind. Sitting alone with it,
looking at it through a tiny hole,
something lithe and naked, shaking in the spotlight
beyond which I can never reach—
suffering cannot do what it did for Christ.
We do not get to go home afterward, cannot be
imagined into the arms of the absent father. See how
I do not rise up or shift the stone, do not
inspire a nation—I sit at the bar
consuming fried food. I put $5 into a machine
and shoot bucks with a long green rifle,
not speaking, not calling out anyone’s name,
just me and the deer
grazing in a digital clearing of the wood.
I can’t tell anymore for whom I grieve.
Something bigger
and more catastrophic has died
but died out of necessity—something that thought itself
into indispensability
something burst from every atom
outward, like autumn fireworks over the lake
and now
I’m just recording its scream and glitter-down,
just making a serial
from its fantastical, dazzling demise—
I can’t tell anymore whether I am grieving you particularly
or I simply find life and death erroneous—this
big expired grief
like limbs people deny ownership of, find
in their beds and throw on the floor, only to be told
again and again, when the
whole body is thrown with it—that it is
attached,
it is theirs, that they were
born with it.
All the Single Mothers
A Möbius strip has a surface
with only one side,
only one boundary—it cannot be
its own mirror image.
Just as a family is
def
ormed by symmetry—
our favorite kind of beautiful here.
When the men came
they came in Doppler shifts,
frequency fading
the moment they passed by.
The rest of their voices’ pitch
was relative to the air—
and when we were born
we listened to them fade away
as if they were never there.
Honeybee
When the male enters a female honeybee
and manages climax
his genitals explode
and break off his body.
It is the most dedicated orgasm in the universe.
His penis stoppers her
like Ali Baba’s boulder at the entryway to a cave of treasure:
she’s sealed with a spell.
Having sired their tragic progeny
and prevented another from entering her
the male bleeds out
and dies in the grass. This really happens.
So it is at the Möbius Strip Club of Grief.
Off-hours, the dead wait at the center of the room, sitting backward in chairs,
lounging in nipple-tassels,
reading goodbye letters that’d been tucked into their caskets.
The disco ball in the center of the room
is like a flamboyant, pockmarked moon
spinning silver acne over the dancing dead.