I walked down the block
in the wrong direction
Stopped.
Back to the intersection, ninety-degree turn
went up the hill, that felt better
until it didn’t
until the houses were the wrong shape to hold
my family.
Stopped.
Back to the intersection, worried, then down the
third street, the wrong third way.
Stopped. Back to the intersection
the fourth spoke of the wheel another mistake.
Last kid in sight, country mouse,
five years old, spinning
at the center of a compass that had lost
her true north
A white glove waved, the guard crouched
wings tucked neatly behind her back,
eyes all-seeing
she wiped my tears and took my hand
and led me
up the hill again, gold and ruby leaves,
farther than I’d dared on my own tiny paws,
until we crested and scurried
down the other side and the houses
changed shape and at the very bottom
of the hill stood my new home
my mother waiting at the curb.
practice
Mr. Irving styled and helmeted my mom’s hair
introduced her to the other ladies, permed,
perfumed, fuming about their husbands
the confessor hairdresser, he knew all
the juicy details. Told Mom I should join
the city swim team, cuz all the kids did
and it would make me tired enough
to sleep better at night, and not spend
so much time in her hair.
There was a slight delay in joining the team
while I learned to swim in water deeper
than six inches. But then I traded muddy ponds
for cement swimming pools in schools
and parks all over the city, tadpoling
backstroking, butterflying, freestyling
until my body leaned, gleamed, hardened
into a core of speed
with a snaggletoothed grin.
Didn’t care much about winning,
but I hated to come in last, my sweet spot
was lane seven for long, slow miles of laps
punctuated by flip turns
boom!
powering underwater, mermaid made real
I felt my gills growing
I could breathe without air.
chum
Underwater, city
swimming pool
a shiver of slippery boys
eleven, twelve years old
with shark-toothed fingers
and gap-toothed smiles
isolate
the openhearted girls
eight, nine years old
tossed in like bloody
buckets of chum.
The boys circle, then frenzy-feed
crotch-grabbing, chest-pinching,
hate-spitting
the water afroth
with glee and destruction.
Girls stay in the shallows
after their baptism as bait,
that first painful lesson
in how lifeguards
look the other way.
lovebrarians
I hated reading. Loathed the ants
swarming across the page, lost
my excitement about school, fought, reduced
to a puzzle with missing pieces.
Once branded, the feeling of stupid never fades
no matter how many medals you win.
But then we rode the bus downtown
me and Leslie, who majored in music
and lived in our attic, Mary Poppins
with a Jersey accent, we rode the bus downtown,
the coins hot from my hand plink, plink
in the box next to the driver, all the way downtown
to a Carnegie library built by an immigrant
so everyone could read, free
and untrammeled by politicians seeking
to bind them into ignorance,
chain them to the wheel.
Leslie promised she’d read me the books
so I didn’t have to be afraid of mistakes
and I wrote My Name in big letters
got my first badge, a library card
I asked the librarian
“Can I take out all the books?”
and she answered quite seriously
“Of course, dear,
just not at the same time.”
And so, with extra Leslie help and a chorus
of angels disguised as teachers and librarians
for years unstinting with love and hours
of practice, those ants finally marched
in straight lines for me
shaped words, danced sentences,
constructed worlds
for a girl finally learning how to read
I unlocked the treasure chest
and swallowed the key.
poem for my favorite teacher
Mrs. Sheedy-Shea
taught me haiku, I word-flew
off the page, amazed
hippos
indoctrinated by magazine covers of skeletal
white privilege like the Kennedys
(only peasants ate, apparently)
my parents, poor-clanned and striving
rose to the occasion and smothered
my hunger
by pinching my hips
grabbing the fat under my chin
when I was eight years
ten, fourteen
twenty-five hungry years old
when they grabbed and pinched
they called me “Baby Hippo”
the insult disguised as
love, they said others would tease
me for being so fat
so I might as well
get used to it
closeted shame
When we were girls we rode horses
disguised as bicycles
though anyone with eyes could see from the way
we leaned, preened their manes, galloped
across the plains without ever leaving
Dorset Avenue, their true equine nature
we were magic-filled girls at large
in a world of pedestrian dullness.
After riding hard, we’d walk to cool
down our steeds, feed them sugar cubes, pump
their tires, straighten the playing cards
in the spokes
that made the thwacka-thwacka-thwacka-thwack
announcing our arrival, knees always skinned,
crusted with scabs from tripping
over the buckled sidewalk that was heaved
into the air by killing frosts and held there
by the roots of long-dead trees,
left broken to teach children
lessons about watching our step.
I used my jump rope for reins and a lasso
for runaway calves, and the whirling dervish
of girl games, sky-jumping, earth-touching,
clap-backing
shouted with rhymes. We got tangled
up a lot and fell,
splitting open our half-healed knees, we licked
our bloody wounds clean
and started all over again.
My bike had a shelf on the back, an ornament,
I guess, but
made of metal. One day,
I let a friend’s little sister ride on the back
of my horse
in the spokes, her leg twisted
at a horrible angle, then broke.
Her screams drove
me to the linen closet, where I hid for hours,
sobbing
burning with the horror
that I’d hurt her, not my fault, but yes,
totally my fault, and she wore a heavy cast for
months.
I stopped playing horses after that.
The taste of shame smells
like stubborn vomit in your hair
lingering no matter how often you wash it
sometimes you have to shave
yourself bald
and start again like a newly hatched chick
leaving the faint rot of broken magic
in shattered eggshell pieces
behind you.
payback
After Charlotte’s Web
but before Little Women,
my sister stole the key
to my green plastic diary,
and blackmailed me
with what she found
We shared a room split in two
with masking tape laid down
the middle of the floor,
and the closet, the lines
never to be crossed
I hadn’t committed felonies
or misdemeanors, yet; I was in fifth grade
but still, she tattled about what I wrote
how I’d cheated in math
and planned to do it again
I repaid her treachery
by telling stories in the dark
while we waited for sleep,
said I was a vampire, the moles
on my neck proved it,
part werewolf, too, casting
stories by the light of the moon
until she cried for Mom
who yelled at me for scaring
my sister, and grounded
me so I never did it again
but I threatened to
whenever she crashed
through the border
Maybe I owe her,
my sister,
for stealing the key, toying
with my secrets, and thus igniting
the slow-fused inevitability
of me weaving stories
in the dark
amplified
1. Daddy loved Jesus, talked about Him so much when I was little I thought He was a cousin, maybe just a second cousin, which would explain why He was never at Grandma’s for Thanksgiving. Daddy was a preacher on a college campus, he worked in the chapel and I could walk there by myself to say hello if I looked both ways before I crossed the street.
2. My job was school, I was really good at recess and lunch, but I failed climbing the rope that hung from the sky in gym. I tried to be sick every Friday so I wouldn’t fail the spelling bee. The playground was a war of girls versus boys and now I feel shame cuz some kids must have wanted to stand with the other team, and some must have wanted new teams entirely, but the world was drawn for us binary in clumsy chalk lines, and we’d try to do better when we were in charge.
3. Protests against the Vietnam War echoed across the campus, our house filled with angry students every weekend, and my mom fed them vats of spaghetti and trays of brownies. Daddy worked all the time because students were getting so high they thought they could fly and they jumped out of dorm windows five stories up, which was awful, and the sadness and the rage and the protests and the soldiers and the yelling and the guns and the FBI tapping our phone and the corpses of Dachau made it hard for Daddy to sleep and he could smell the ashes again and my mom thought he was killing himself and he was, but he was doing it in slow motion.
4. I finally learned to read and they finally integrated our school and the new kids were really nice and long division was impossible and my mother cut my hair wicked short cuz swimming and everyone thought I was a boy which was NOT FUNNY because I wasn’t and I didn’t want to be one. Boys were gross.
5. Daddy was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and he forced us to listen to the Watergate hearings on the radio, he hated Richard Nixon with all of his heart and soul; when drunk, Daddy threatened to kill the son of a bitch because he was destroying the country. I watched the level of gin in the bottle and realized that counting the bottles was more important.
6. Spring of sixth grade, all of us crammed into the music room, sticky hot and stinky cuz we were almost seventh graders and the chairs were too small and our hormones were blowing UP. But we were children. Who smelled. It was a confusing time. Our music teacher, Mrs. Schermerhorn, dragged us through a rehearsal for the Spring Musical Performance That No One Wanted to Hear. We were terrible singers and horrible children, but
something happened
the planets lining up, gods playing cosmic checkers, a butterfly flapping in Bangladesh
she made us sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” yeah, that one, from Sound of Music, when Maria and her family stop in a convent as they are escaping the Nazis, a song about doing hard things, we sang that song without fooling and when we were finished Mrs. Schermerhorn coughed, cleared her throat, warned us not to move, and she ran out
(of course we moved and gossiped and complained and farted and rolled our eyes it was June and we only had a few days left).
7. This all went down right around the time my parents stopped worrying about things like school concerts and report cards. I thought I was the only kid with a house on fire, but I wasn’t.
8. Mrs. Schermerhorn returned with our principal, Miss Hartnett, and she told us to sing again. Nervous, too many yearlings in a small corral, we didn’t want to obey, but we had no choice, we sang
letting go
opening
and ninetyish voices, some cracking, some strained under weights unseen, murmurated, a flock of swooping starlings, harmonizing, resonating, shaking the windows in the pain, bending the laws of physics to the pure hearts of children for the length of a song from a Broadway musical
that made two brilliant, kind, ignored women cry
briefly
and lifted us to a place we weren’t old enough to understand.
first blood
When husbands raped wives
in 1972, it was legal.
Property rights were all the rage
you know.
I got my first period
in 1972 and
I didn’t know why
I was bleeding.
in 1972, it was legal
because bosses
(all of them male)
made the rules.
We girls saw a filmstrip
in 1972, about
hygiene and sanitary napkins,
so confusing because
it never mentioned
the blood.
When women were fired
in 1972
because they got pregnant
in 1972,
it was all very legal
in 1972,
no questions were ever asked.
We learned boys
were dangerous,
in 1972, cuz their pee
could get us pregnant
and kicked out of school.
The FBI spied on women
in 1972, and it was legal.
Men feared the liberation
movement might change
all of the rules.
My mother lacked a mouth
in 1972, so she could
n’t
explain the mystery
of the blood.
She gave me a
pink box of tampons,
directions hidden inside,
then closed the door
between us.
No words.
fencing
Levy Junior High, seventh grade
long, dark walks to school on winter mornings
world deep-bundled in snow, the game
was to scuttle into the street, grab hold
of the back bumper of a school bus
or the bread truck,
let it pull us down the frozen roads
of Syracuse, sliding toward the Eleusinian
mysteries of adolescence. Mom hated
that school cuz of the knife fight, but I liked
it, though my shyness limited me to the sidelines,
you can learn a lot from watching quietly
a great art teacher taught us
how much fun it is to make things
from scratch
Eighth grade, another year, another school
me, the quiet scholarship kid,
Mom was happy cuz there were no knife fights
there, no fights of any kind, unless you count the
upper-school cutthroat competition
for valedictorian
I was a cheerleader, can you believe it?
One-third of the base of a girl pyramid
pom-pommed in modest, itchy uniforms
I learned to fence with an épée
studied sumacs, danced the steps of fragile
friendships, but it was Mr. Edwards
who changed my life,
he didn’t just teach us Greek mythology,
Mr. Edwards ensorcelled us
with stories of gods and wars, mothers
in search of lost daughters,
and girls fleeing rapists
by turning into trees
I wanted to stay in that school
forever
cemetery girl
When not swimming, my middle
school summers played
out in Oakwood Cemetery
where I lay
on a flat, warm tomb
day after day
and
read read read read read read