Contents
Lesson 1 Never Ignore Spam Because It’s Not Always What It Seems
Lesson 2 You Don’t Need a List for a Road Trip
Lesson 3 Never Run from Hitting a Pig
Lesson 4 Don’t Get Cocky with Cops
Lesson 5 Expect Annoying People
Lesson 6 How to Take Lemons and Make Lemonade
Lesson 7 Never Start a Slam Without a Cup of Coffee
Lesson 8 Always Check Out the Judges Before a Slam
Lesson 9 Always Check the Gas Tank Before Leaving
Lesson 10 Never Let Your Best Friend Attack Your Sanity and Your Vanity
Lesson 11 Expect That Some Things Will Be Crappy
Lesson 12 Don’t Look at Your Hair While Driving
Lesson 13 Always Be Ready to Be Struck by the Love Bug
Lesson 14 Always Look Your Best Because You Never Know Who You’re Going to Wreck Into
Lesson 15 Never Wash Your Face in the Bidet
Lesson 16 Be Very Careful When Chewing Hard Cinnamon Hearts
Lesson 17 Always Perform Poems in Public When Someone Wants You To
Lesson 18 Expect Magic
Lesson 19 Never Expect a Marshmallow Fluff Kind of Life to Last Forever
Lesson 20 Always Go Home When There’s Trouble
Lesson 21 Never Let Doctors Blame You for Their Patients’ Problems
Lesson 22 Never Take Your Friggin’ Soul Mate for Granted
Lesson 23 Dream, Believe, Fly
Acknowledgements
For Lola Schaefer:
a spectacular friend, writer, teacher,
critiquer. Thanks for helping bring
Sister to life.
Lesson 1
Never Ignore Spam Because It’s Not Always What It Seems
Sister Slam I am.
I don’t like spam.
Not the fake pink ham
that comes in cans,
or the electronic moronic
supersonic junk mail
that never fails to sail
through your computer screen
like an intruder seen
only by you.
It was the first of June,
and soon, by the next full moon,
I’d be loony with jubilation:
my graduation celebration
would be happening with my
too-little two-person family
in the House of Crapper.
I swear, by every
blood-red hair on my spike-cut head,
or lightning may strike me dead,
that this is my real name:
Laura Rose Crapper.
My lame-brained name
was my main claim to fame
at Banesville High School,
where I wasn’t exactly in
the cool group.
The kids of cool in Banesville School
drove brand-new cars
and lived in fancy mansions,
where I liked to imagine
they had monkey butlers.
These kids lived mostly on Sutler
Boulevard, in the rich mountain part
of town.
Pops and I lived down in the hollow,
just us, in a teeny green
submarine of a mobile home,
and I drove
my mom’s old clunker car—
a ’69 Firebird—
the funky sick color
of rabbit turds
dried in the sun.
Plus, I was way past chunky.
In fact, I was downright
clown-white fat,
and big hippie chicks
in thick-soled
black combat boots
just didn’t fit into
the cool kids’ group
at Banesville School.
I was an Outsider,
a Misfit, a Freak.
“You leak pain
all over the place,”
announced Ms. Nace,
who was a space case.
She was the school counselor,
and a total waste of time.
“Whatever,” I said,
slumped on her dump
of a lumpy old couch.
“Maybe I’m just a grouch,
or a natural grump.”
“Perhaps it’s depression,”
said Ms. Nace.
“The hurt shows on
your face, and in
the slow pace
of your walk. You sulk.”
I just let her talk.
The House of Crapper
used to be happier,
back before cancer
won the war
in my mom’s body.
Mom died when I
was nine, in July.
She was only
thirty-five.
I wasn’t fine, never again,
but I was maybe okay.
So anyway,
it was just a normal day
of formal blue-suit sky
and baby birds
chirping for worms
on the first of June,
and I was checking
my hotmail account,
deleting, weeding out
seedy stuff and junk,
when an ad from Creative Teen ’Zine
caught my eye.
“Come Try,” it said
in the subject line.
“Try what?” I muttered,
then clicked the mouse
and read the message.
“It doesn’t matter
if you’re an amateur
or a pro poet. Nobody knows
until they try it, what a riot
it is to sizzle in competition
in the sport of spoken word.
Sixth Annual Tin Can, New Jersey,
Poetry Slam.”
Well, wham-bam, thank you, ma’am,
a poetry slam! This was the spam
that saved my life.
This was serendipity:
a true whippity-do
of a gift
come straight
from techno-heaven.
Ever since I was seven
and saw the poet laureate
of the entire United States,
just like an everyday person,
eating a Hershey bar
in the local 7-Eleven,
I’d been revvin’
my poetic inspiration,
ignited with the sensation
that someday I’d be
a famous poet.
I wanted to light up
the night with the genius
of my rhyme schemes.
Well, don’t you know it:
this was my chance
to dance in my underpants
with Peter Pan,
the green-jeaned,
flyin’ and rhymin’ man.
I’d always wanted to slam.
And so had
my best friend, Twig,
an indie-goth-hippie chick like me,
only Pringle’s Chip skinny,
whose parents named her for the limb
of a teeny-weeny tree.
Twig and me,
we were a team,
and it seemed
that most of the poets
on TV were like us:
they tended to cuss sometimes
without even trying,
and they weren’t afraid
of crying.
They wore black
and they liked Jack Kerouac
and some were wacked
and needed Prozac.
Poets seemed bohemian:
somewhere in between
what-passed-for-normal
and the lunatic crazies
in the Banesville Home
for the Insane.
Well, right there
on that day of June first,
I decided that the worst
thing that could ever happen
was for me to remain forever
tethered to the House of Crapper.
I’d just get me some magic
and a map, and ZAP …
I’d travel this nation
and be a sensation!
Laura Rose Crapper
would be one happy rapper …
a jazzer, a beboppin’, hip-hoppin’
Beat poet, the Queen of Cool,
don’t ya know it!
But I’d be a fool,
and that’s no bull,
to keep the name
of Laura Crapper,
which sounds like a slacker
or a toilet.
So I changed my name
right there on the spot,
and wow, was it hot,
so hot it sizzled
and blistered my fingers
like Crisco-fried ham.
My new name was Sister Slam!
But damn, Pops got way hot
under the collar
of his Dollar Store
working-stiff shirt
buttoned all the way up
to his neck. (Heck,
Pops puts up with
shirt suffocation
and the humiliation
of dirt-factory work,
all for the perk
of a three-week
paid vacation.
I don’t know why,
but he wears a tie
to make cherry pie
at the Mrs. Smith’s
factory on Sixth Street,
where the freakin’ heat
makes his face
even geek-redder than ever.)
But I never
saw his face
as beet-red
as that day,
when I said that
I’d changed my name
and that after graduation day
I was going away
to take a place
in the Tin Can
Poetry Slam.
“You’re not as big as you
think,” he sputtered.
“And you’ve never
driven farther
than the next town
not a thing
wrong with your name, Laura.”
He was disconcerted,
but I asserted
my decision, mister,
fixing my vision of fame
firmly in my brain.
“Sister Slam I am,”
I said,
and did he turn red.
I thought I was dead,
he was that red.
Father Strangles Daughter
with Dollar Store Necktie
would be the headline
in the Daily Local
(Loco) News of Banesville—
Hicksville—Pennsylvania.
“I don’t like green eggs
and ham,” I said gently,
hoping to joke
his face less red.
Mom and Pops
(before Mom was dead
and I was fat)
used to read
Dr. Seuss books
to me a lot—The Cat in the Hat,
and Red Fish, Blue Fish,
and Green Eggs and Ham—
and probably
that helped
make me into
Sister Slam.
My parents
rocked me to sleep
by reading heaps
of poetry:
Edna St. Vincent Millay
and William Blake,
Edgar Allan Poe
and Van Fernando,
some guy they used
to know in high school.
Mom and Pops
created this
word-addicted
cool-kid-evicted
fat chick
who wanted to be a
butt-kickin’, shit-slingin’
road poet.
Pop’s eyes misted,
and I knew
that he was wishing
that Mom were here,
missing her
as much as ever.
It never goes away:
the ache for what
used to be.
“Do what you want,”
Pops said,
shaking his head.
His voice was soft.
“You’re eighteen,
and you think
you’re an adult.
It’s not my fault.
It’s not your fault.
Do it. I can’t stop you anyway.”
Hooray. Whuppity-do.
Wham-bam, thank you, Pops.
Damn, that was easier
than a spray of
fake grease
in a hot, sizzling
frying pan.
Better than butter
in the sun.
I grabbed Pops,
wrapping him
in a hug.
My new name—
my claim to fame
in life after Banesville High—
was Sister Slam.
Sister Slam I am.
Lesson 2
You Don’t Need a List for a Road Trip
Twig and me,
we were getting ready
to take our show on the road,
in my toad-colored bedroom.
It was the day
after our graduation
celebration, and
we were eating
leftover red velvet
cake with white cream frosting.
“That was awesome,
how your pops
made the cake
and decorated
it with the colors
of Banesville High
and a graduate’s cap,”
Twig said, dropping
cake crumbs on my bed.
I nodded.
Pops was
a great baker
of cakes.
That’s one thing
I’d miss
when I was away.
“Let’s make a
list,” I said,
“of everything
we need to do
for the road trip.”
“We don’t need a list,”
Twig said. “Pack clothes.
Write poems. Eat, sleep,
pee, breathe.”
“Okay,” I said. “Time to create.”
Sprawled across
my sloshy waterbed,
we mulled alone then
what we could yank out
and put down on paper.
Vapors of poems,
ghost poems,
floated in our
brains, part of us,
but not yet out of us.
Twig broke
the quiet diet of words.
“Remember what you called
your pillows,
when we were little?”
she asked.
“You don’t expect
me to forget,”
I answered.
“Gloom pillows.”
My pillows,
like weeping willows,
had seen gallons
of tears through
the years, so I know
it sounds weird,
but I called them
gloom pillows.
They were as gray
as doom, the shades
of tombs, and some days,
soaked sopping wet.
“Maybe I’l
l write me a poem
or a sad, sad song
or a long sonnet
about my gloom pillows,”
I mused, pulling off
a blue pillowcase
and burying my face
in the gray.
“Hey,” said Twig.
“Don’t start
excavating your heart
and feeling sorry for yourself,
Laura. This is no pity
party. Sorry if I got
you started, but now stop.
This is going to be
one fun summer, and our first road
trip ever. Pick yourself up!”
Twig pounced around like a pup.
I sighed, looking at
the photo of Mom
on my closet door.
I’d gotten it blown up
as large as possible,
hoping to make
Mom life-size again.
“The Zen of death
is that she’s with you,
big as ever,
every breath, every step,”
said Twig,
guessing my thoughts,
messing with the
depths of my head.
“Stop reading
my mind uninvited,”
I said.
“Quit trespassing
in my brain.”
“Okay,” said Twig
with a grin. There
were red cake crumbs
on her chin. “Let’s write.”
The silence returned,
and our muses churned.
The cool thing
about Twig and me
is that we don’t need
to talk.
We can be quiet
at the same time.
No-Obligation Conversation.
I was writing poems.
Twig was writing poems.
My lava lamp rolled
slow and relaxing
like the melting wax
of an old Christmas candle
lit for the Fourth of July.
“We might be white,
but we can write
like soul sisters,
man,” said Twig, doodling
and chewing on the eraser
of her pencil.
“Listen to this,” she said.
“The title is ‘Revolution.’”
Then she read:
You say you want a revolution,
but the Constitution
and John Lennon are dead.
Yoko Ono’s alone in the bed,
shaking her head over something
John said Yesterday. What a mess today.
I Want to Hold Your Hand,
somebody or anybody’s hand.
Do you have a Ticket to Ride?
I lost mine, when John Lennon died.
I applauded.
“It’s just like you,”
I said. “Political
and totally cynical.”
“Well, you know
I’ve been a Beatles
groupie since I
was a fetus,” Twig
said, “thanks to
my mother playing
records to her
pregnant stomach.”
Twig’s parents are
eccentric. Way flaky.
Her mother does Botox
and her dad’s always in detox
for one substance or another.
“I’m beside myself
for this gig,” Twig said.
“Can you dig it?