New Shoes on a Dead Horse
a collection of poetry
by Sierra DeMulder
Write Bloody Publishing
America’s Independent Press
Long Beach, CA
WRITEBLOODY.COM
Copyright © Sierra DeMulder 2012
No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.
DeMulder, Sierra.
1st edition.
ISBN: 978-1-935904-96-0
Interior Layout by Lea C. Deschenes
Cover Designed by Matt Maust
Proofread by Jennifer Roach, Stevie Edwards, and Sarah Kay
Edited by Jamie Garbacik, Courtney Olsen, Alexis Davis, Sarah Kay, Dylan Garity, Gabrielle Dunkley, and Derrick Brown
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Printed in Tennessee, USA
Write Bloody Publishing
Long Beach, CA
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To contact the author, send an email to writebloody@gmail.com
This book is dedicated to my parents.
NEW SHOES ON A DEAD HORSE
The Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity who [lived] in the walls of an artist’s studio [and] would come out and invisibly assist the artist with their work.
—Elizabeth Gilbert
Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius!
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
A poem is a naked person.
—Bob Dylan
THE GENIUS AND THE SOUP KITCHEN
On opening day, no one showed up.
Same with the next. And the next.
And the next.
Finally, he unplugged the Open sign.
He waited for it to cool before bending
the letters, forming new words
with electric yarn.
You Will Find Everything Here
now glows in the window. At first,
only a few questions crawled
through the door. Soon, unfinished
sentences. Eventually, herds
of priests, atheists, whole families of
extinct animals.
Today, there is a four hour wait
just to stand inside. Starving,
they ask about winning
lottery numbers, lost family
recipes, the necessity of exercise.
Is there a God? Why doesn’t he return
my phone calls? Where did I leave
my car keys? When a tree falls
in the forest, does it suffer?
He serves bowls of bubbling
Compliments. Slices of Financial Advice.
Entire legs of Answers, fresh cut
Answers, baked Answers served
with butter and garlic.
When they leave, he hears them
use words like full, content.
He has stopped sleeping at night.
He lies in bed and watches the hours
clock in and out of their shifts.
I am a dumb doctor.
A Novocain prescription.
I am new shoes
on a dead horse.
THE PERM
The first time my mother stood up
to my father, she got her hair permed.
He had told her not to—said it was
a waste of my hard-earned money.
My father tells me this story while crying.
He is softer now, a treadless tire.
My mother came home from the salon,
and I’ll be damned, Sierra, if it didn’t look
terrible. It killed me, I swear to God.
This perm, the first mutter
in a soundless room, the swing of the bat
only to find the piñata is a real dog.
Now, thirty years later, I am a poet
and I am telling this story as if it were mine.
I am harvesting this splinter.
This embarrassing toothache.
I am dragging my father’s temper out of storage
by the wrist. I am making my mother drive home
from the salon over and over and over.
THE ORIGIN OF BREAST MILK
It began after the rape of St. Agatha,
a woman of God imprisoned in a brothel
for a month for rejecting a suitor.
She did not cry, even as
the shade was drawn on the first night
and the worst, most tired
parts of men found
themselves at her bedroom door.
Her first lover was a boy,
no older than fourteen.
Her second, a blacksmith.
Her third tasted like wet stone
and looked like her brother.
Her fourth, a drunkard, a widower.
In the morning, while Agatha slept,
women throughout Sicily
suddenly dropped their baskets of fruit
and pots of boiling water, their hands
grasping their chests—a wetness,
spilling, soaking through
every blouse. The doctors were called,
even the midwives. Women
began fastening cloth
around their torsos with twine.
Months later, months after
Agatha’s breasts were cut off,
one woman weary with a colicky babe
untied the twine, pushed
the angry mouth to her nipple.
The child coughed at first,
then quieted, and it was all
so familiar. It was the way
it had always been but gentler,
the taking, the giving.
ON WATCHING SOMEONE YOU LOVE
LOVE SOMEONE ELSE
You will be out with friends when the news of her existence is accidentally spilled all over your bar stool. Respond calmly as if it was only a change in weather, a punch line you saw coming. After your fourth shot of cheap liquor, leave the image of him kissing another woman in the toilet.
In the morning, her name will be in every headline: Car Crash, Robbery, Flood. When he calls you, ignore the hundreds of ropes untangling themselves in your stomach; you are the best friend again. When he invites you over for dinner, say yes too easily. Remind yourself: this isn’t special. It’s only dinner. Everyone has to eat. When he greets you at the door, do not think for one second you are the reason he wore cologne tonight.
In his kitchen, he will hand-feed you a piece of red pepper. His laugh will be low and warm and it will make you feel like candlelight. Do not think this is special. Do not count on your fingers the freckles you could kiss too easily. Try to think of pilot lights or olive oil, not everything you have ever loved about him, or it will suddenly feel boiling and possible and so close.
You will find her bobby pins lying innocently on his bathroom sink. Her bobby pins. They look like the wiry legs of spiders, splinters of her undressing in his bed. Do not say anything. Think of stealing them, wearing them home in your hair. When he hugs you goodbye, let him kiss you on the forehead. Settle for target practice.
At home, you will picture her across town, pressing her fingers into his back like wet cement. You will wonder if she looks like you, if you are two bedrooms in the same house. Did he fall for her features like rearranged furniture? When he kisses her, does she taste like new paint?
You will want to call him. You will go as far as holding the phone in your hand, imagine telling him unimaginable things like�
�You are always ticking inside of me and I dream of you more often than I don’t. My body is a dead language and you pronounce each word perfectly. Do not call him. Fall asleep to the hum of the VCR. She must make him happy. She must be—she must be his favorite place in Minneapolis. You are a souvenir shop, where he goes to remember how much people miss him when he is gone.
THE GENIUS GOES TO THE ART MUSEUM
He enjoys the entrance the most, but not because of the gift shop. He already owns hundreds of magnets and an impressive coffee mug collection that crowds his counters and windowsills. He started collecting mugs to hold his other collections: pennies dated before 1943, capless markers, lithium batteries, hundreds of marker caps. He is particularly proud of his denture collection, which he found makes an adequate calendar. Every morning after breakfast, but before shaving, he retrieves his current pair. Before fitting the smile into his mouth, he pulls out one tooth per day. Plastic gums, like pink half-eaten sandwiches cover his bathroom floor. Each with only one or two teeth left, depending on the month. Today, he has seventeen teeth. He is sitting on a bench outside the coat check at the art museum and does not intend to go any farther. It is not that he doesn’t enjoy art. He believes it is just like masturbating. Sometimes you have to do it and sometimes you just do it because you’re bored. He even paints occasionally, but not as much as the other thing. He visits the art museum every 8th tooth not to look at beautiful things but to watch beautiful things come and go. A toddler drawing a koi fish in the air with his finger. A purple-haired teenager pickled in angst humming a tune she has never heard before. A woman searching for a pen. An old man who cannot stop crying. He is watching art in its purest form. The moment of inception. The shaken soda can. The blister.
YOUR SON HAS A BEAUTIFUL VOICE
After Sharon Olds
Once, outside of an ice cream shop,
he told me of how you got sick.
How he was ten years old and how
he used to fall asleep in the backseat
during the long drive up north
to the better hospital. How he knew
the end was near because that week,
the preacher spoke of how God giveth
and especially of how God taketh away.
How he woke up in the middle of that night,
in the middle of a dream, and walked into
your room. How you passed right then,
as if waiting for his permission to teach him
all that you could about life. How the crying
seemed to go on forever. How suddenly,
one day, it stopped and how he has not
cried since. I fall asleep beside him now,
itself from the day, like you must have
when he was small or still do. He speaks
of you, but with the delicacy of recalling
a dream: not dwelling too long on the details,
as if fearful the memory might fade completely.
Your son has a beautiful voice. I am afraid
I love him enough to listen to it forever.
I am afraid he loves me enough to cry if I leave.
THE ORIGIN OF THE BATHROBE
Queen Mary stopped bathing
after her first miscarriage. She refused
to change her bedding, damp
with the wetness of labor and loss.
It was a compromise, at least,
to air them out to dry. They hung
like huge watercolor paintings on the trees,
plumes of sweat, blood, the spill
of what did not come.
By her seventh, the chambermaids
began wrapping scented scarves
around their faces. The Queen’s nightgown
now stuck to her belly and thighs,
stiff, more red than white.
She seemed always pregnant
and always not. The ladies-in-waiting
were not foolish. They understood.
If a man were to see the Queen, soiled,
pacing ghostlike, no woman
would wear the crown again.
The ladies pulled down the curtains
and bed canopy and measured their bodies
by lying like dead angels on the floor.
Twelve matching housecoats
adorned with pillow tassels
and petticoat lace. Twelve
matching housecoats strolling
through the garden. Under one,
a tapestry of grief.
BEGINNING WITH AN ORGASM AND ENDING IN SLAUGHTER
After Kim Addonizio
The moment he made my body
pulse like the crack of opening
a soda can, I thought of her: the woman
who climbed out from the cellar
of his infidelity. Her face came to me
as if our sex had summoned her, as if I had
been calling her name the whole time,
warning the town of her approach. Behold!
She will come at nightfall.
She will ride a carriage pulled behind
two drowned horses. She will set fire to
the houses. She will slaughter all the calves.
She will slide her bloody shadow
into my lover’s bed to sleep, as bright
and shivering as a newborn
babe, between us.
THE GENIUS VISITS THE PSYCHIC
He went to see her not because he really needed to
know something, but because he once sat next to her
in a bar and drunkenly put his hand on the counter
next to her hand and she did not slap it away
or stab him. He also heard a rumor she worked
part-time as a stripper downtown. She charged him double
and smoked vinegary cigarettes in the walk-in closet
where she read tabloids of the future. YOU
WILL TRIP OVER A BANANA PEEL AND INTO
A GARBAGE CAN OF MONEY was one she was
known for. She dug her acrylic nails into the meat
of his palm as if scratching a coin for copper.
SHE WILL FIND LOVE. Good one, very original.
SHE WILL FIND HAPPINESS. I know,
I know. Now get to the good stuff.
I wanna know about heartbreak.
Show me the lies. Tell me
the tears are coming, those wet
necklaces, those pretty little thorns.
After Rachel McKibbens
My sister told me a soul mate is not the person
who makes you the happiest, but the one who
makes you feel the most. Who conducts your heart
to bang the loudest. Who can drag you giggling
with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in.
It has always been you. You are the first
person I was afraid to sleep next to,
not because of the fear you would leave
in the night but because I didn’t want to wake up
gracelessly. In the morning, I crawled over
your lumbering chest to wash my face and pinch
my cheeks and lay myself out like a still-life
beside you. Your new girlfriend is pretty
like the cover of a cookbook. I have said her name
into the empty belly of my apartment. Forgive me.
When I feel myself falling out of love
with you, I turn the record of your laughter
over, reposition the needle.
I have imagined our children. Forgive me. I made up
the best parts of you. Forgive me. When you told me
to look for you on my wedding day, to pause
on the altar for the sound of your voice
before sinking myself into the pond of another
love, forgive me. I mistook it for a promise.
II
COL
OR
In second grade, I sit next to Preston
because his name starts with P
and my name starts with S and no one
in our class has a Q or R name.
His skin reminds me of the wet sand
in my driveway, like a birthmark
spilled all over his body.
My grandmother told me I have a birthmark
because an angel kissed the inside of my elbow.
I watch Preston color his name tag
and imagine an angel
swallowing him whole.
One day, our teacher does not come to school
and the principal tells us her skin is sick
and the doctor will cut off the bad parts.
That day, we paint construction paper
to send to the hospital. Someone asks Preston
if he is dirty or sick. I spill brown
down the front of my dress and
cry in the bathroom. That day, Preston
is picked last in gym class,
after the boy in the cast.
THE NEW KITCHEN
After the divorce, my mother moved
out of the house my father built from lumber
he cut and stripped and varnished. She bought
different furniture. She framed
all the photographs. Her new kitchen
is small. The plastic cupboards
are painted to look like wood grain
and the counter is a shade of red
only found in nature. The dishes match—
something I can tell comforts my mother,
the woman who wore flowers in her hair
on her wedding day. Who can charm
bread to rise. Who taught me
when to pick a tomato off the vine.
I still find old parts of her lying
around the house. Frayed scraps
of quilting fabric. Mismatched silverware.
For a while, I imagined
what would have become of her
if she had stayed with my father
at the top of that hill
with the wood stove smoke
and the swinging screen door,
how fast she might have wilted.