I have one memory of her
in the old kitchen. She is standing
at the stained sink and I am not tall enough
to see over the counter. She is crying
as she plucks the feathers
from a sleeping chicken.
Sometimes, I whitewash
this image. I choose not to
remember the smell.
In this one, the bird is bathing in the sink.
In this one, she still has flowers in her hair.
THE GENIUS COMPLAINS ABOUT HIS BOSS
She just sits there at a fucking coffee shop
(real original) and somehow it’s my fault
she doesn’t write The Poem.
I have my own life, you know. I’ve got kids
at home. I’ve got things to do. She doesn’t
care. It’s not my fault she’s cooking or having
sex or driving and she can’t stop to write it
down. Shit, girl doesn’t even know
what makes her tick. I swear, she edits her diary.
DEAR DIARY,
I AM SO DEPRESSED DROWNING
IN AN ENORMOUS ENDLESS POOL OF MISERY.
I LOVE DO NOT LOVE DON’T CARE
ABOUT HIM HIM HIM ANYTHING ANYMORE.
ALSO, MY MOM SENT ME A CUTE BIRTHDAY CARD
I AM ALONE.
How’s she gonna write a poem without me, huh?
What’s it gonna be about? Flowers? Sadness?
Good luck. Good fucking luck.
BAPTISM
The twins who found the dead body in the river
stopped coming to school the last week of fifth grade.
We rode our bicycles to the payphone,
dialed their number, swore we smelled their mother’s cigarette
smoke through the receiver. They never came out. By July,
they were a ghost story we told the younger children—
how the river swallowed their voices, dulled
their eyes into four dry stones. All summer,
we swam in pools, savored the clear chlorine.
The twins returned for the first day of sixth grade
in matching silk blouses. Their breasts had unwrapped
themselves from under their skin. Their legs no longer
childish planks. We tried not to stare, to whisper.
They sat alone at lunch and we gossiped about what happens
to girls who look like women. That night, one by one,
we snuck out of our homes, unplanned, to swim naked
in the river. To baptize the closed rosebuds of our nipples.
To float amongst corpses. To drown the child in us.
GIRL
After Jamaica Kincaid
This is how you bend over in the front row of the classroom so he can see your thong. This is how to know the answer but not raise your hand. This is how to giggle like a dinner bell. No, not like the emptying of a gutter. Like a dinner bell, like you better come in before it gets dark. Better make him walk you home. This is how to make jokes about your breasts. This is how to make cleavage outta small tits. This is how to spill into his lap like a plush blanket. This is how to expect him to rip off your dress. When he doesn’t, this is how to do it for him. This is how to press and squeeze his hand against your nipple. I don’t care if you feel nothing. Don’t tell him you feel nothing or you’ll walk home alone in the dark. This is how you moan. This is how you say Yes. I don’t care if you feel nothing. Spit in your hand. Pretend to be wet.
THE GENIUS PONDERS HIS MUSE
He spends 4 hours in the delivery room.
The poem comes out, as they always do,
dressed in black, always on the way
to another funeral. His friends
and family rush to the hospital
with bouquets of pink and blue
balloons and an oversized teddy bear,
Proud Father sewn into its stomach.
After hearing the poem, after holding it
swaddled in their mouths, they leave heavier
than before, some crying, some shredding
bits of paper in their coat pockets.
—
“Why are they always so sad?”
his mother finally complained
at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
—
Was it the Elliott Smith song
or, maybe, the coffee mug that dropped
on the carpet? How beautiful it was
that it did not shatter
but bounced. Perhaps because the clock
on his stove runs 4 minutes fast
which makes him feel like even time
doesn’t want to be with him.
Sadness is the bathrobe he wears
when he is expecting company.
It is his eldest brother. It has been there
as far back as he can remember.
THE GENIUS SHARES HIS OPINION
OF ASTROLOGY
And you know what else? She’s all proud
to be a Gemini. She tells everyone,
as if crazy was a prize
show horse she wants to tie up
in the front yard. Why would anyone
want to feel things twice?
Like yes, I’ll take the electric chair
and the spear. I’ll have the food poisoning
and the arsenic. May I please fall in love with
two different people at the same time until
love is peeling itself away from me
in all directions like I am a fucking banana
or a wishbone. Some days,
I feel sorry for her. I really do.
She doesn’t realize it, but she is starving.
She’s got too many mouths to feed
on that head of hers. She’s got
too many heads on that vase of a neck.
Must be like making love
to a puppet show.
FENTANYL
I
At night, you took pills that costumed death
in a warm summer dress.
It was only then that you would reach for me,
so I took my share like a Pavlovian dog
and we fucked like floating in dishwater.
II
You asked me not to write about this.
III
Numbness did not exit your body
quietly. It clawed at the tiles
as it was dragged out. Trying so hard
to hand-feed the rabid, I did not understand
the nature of withdrawal. I would ignore
your foaming mouth, let you suckle a sleeping pill
or nipple, my body a worthless anesthetic.
I dreamt of snarling dogs, a dried worm on the sidewalk,
a mother nursing limp, blue lips.
THE GENIUS PERFORMS TAXIDERMY
He did minimal research.
He fell asleep reading How To
Stuff The Dead and dreamed of a child
throwing up forever and did not read anymore.
He knew it must be dry, so he hung it
like laundry from the pipes.
He knew to remove handfuls of it,
fists of slugs, the stomach of a pumpkin.
His workspace was not ideal.
There was sawdust on the floor. The light
was yellow and tired. The whole room
looked seasick. He heaved
the Love onto the butcher’s block,
lifted its limp neck. He knew from the sloppy
twine stitches and the mismatched eyebrows that
this was not its first time dying. The eyes
were taped open. The mouth was agape,
drooling strands of hay. The skin like a pillowcase
stuffed with newspaper. This poor beast
he thought as he threaded
the needle with fishing line.
III
WAKE UP
2005 — A
girl is born with four arms and four legs. She resembles the multi-limbed Hindu goddess Lakshmi, who is worshiped as a deity of wealth and good fortune. The baby is named after the goddess and revered throughout India as the reincarnation.
2007 — 2-year-old Lakshmi survives an extensive surgery to remove her “parasitic twin” that stopped developing in her mother’s womb.
I am waking up.
I am waking up wrapped
like a new cut from the butcher.
I am the flower and the bulb.
I am the tree and the reflection
of the tree in the river. Wake up
reflection. Wake up shadow.
Make me a sea creature
or a Rorschach painting.
Make me a temple. Wake up
foundation. Wake up sleepyhead.
It’s time to dance. It’s time to hold—
to do what humans do best.
Some sleep through it, when the gold
yolk pours from the crack
in the sky. I am here
to remind them. Make me
a grocery bagger or a masseuse.
I am the wind chime and the music.
Why so quiet, music? Why so cold?
What is this tricky wrapping paper?
THE GENIUS HAS SEX
or tries to. She is rolling on top of him
and he is struggling simultaneously
to unhinge her bra and not swallow
her too soon. She is crawling
into his mouth with her tongue.
Her breasts look like small cakes
and he is cupping them, groping
a dark room for sharp edges.
She is moving her hips faster
and he needs to close his eyes
to stop himself from collapsing
the house of cards. From deflating
the tires. From melting every crayon
in the house. He imagines sad poems, hundreds
of gray hats turning black in the rain,
but she drags her hands down his chest
as if motioning the beginning of a race.
He opens his eyes and it is over.
THE GENIUS HAS SEX
They try again. This time
he moves quicker. He is inside her
before she is half-undressed.
The rocking begins, the quick
knocking of a stranger to be let in.
It is over soon and it does not remind
either of them of dreaming, of opening
your eyes after and it is all still real,
still breathing heavy beside you.
THE MICROPHONE
For Guante
The emcee does not make eye contact.
He raps facing the speakers. His left side,
his good side, in profile—a portrait
of a dead president. He grips
the microphone like a teenager
jerking off to his record cover.
He speaks to the beat, tells it
how to keep its shit together.
The audience is staring at him
but not really watching. The audience
is nodding their heads but they aren’t smiling.
They aren’t dancing or clapping or weeping;
they are just nodding their heads
and he is holding the microphone
not like a cock but like this is
the kind of pleasure that hurts.
Like this is the last thing his grandfather
said before unplugging himself.
Like this is the hottest pepper picked
from the vine with his teeth. He is hurting
himself for this. This is the chorus he woke up
choking on. This is the American dream:
to scream at the deaf. To sell your autobiography
for five dollars and a handshake.
This is the most romantic stroke.
His whole left side is numb,
just nodding their heads.
THE GENIUS CONSIDERS THE PROS AND CONS OF PORNOGRAPHY
It’s not always pretty. I have seen
the botched surgery of sex,
the amputation. I have seen things
done with spoons I cannot unsee.
But all this mess, all this sweat and daddy
and fetish: this is the textbook of the body,
the instruction manual.
To exchange the gift for the cash.
To compose the jingle to fucking.
This is the dumb cousin of love making
who taught you to forget your table manners.
To eat with your fingers.
PRAYER TO THE SAINT OF LEAVING
Let us no longer wake up
sweating in a summer bed.
Let us never eat grapefruits
from each other’s laps.
Let us stray quickly
into this Garden of Sleeping Alone.
This Garden of Heartache has found itself
a labyrinth inside me.
Let this be easy.
Let this be the last time
my heart is wrong.
Let his hands not surrender
up my thighs. Let him not
unwrap me. Let him
not find in me a new body
again and again.
Let him not love me.
Let it not be so.
THE GENIUS LEADS THE CONGREGATION
IN PRAYER
Let us call the White House.
Let us lie down in the middle of a crowded
dance floor with our ears to the concrete.
Let us ask the dealer to Hit Me. Let us ask the dealer
to heal our mothers, to deliver unto us better jobs,
to crown us fertile enough to have a baby.
Let us beg for a better hand.
THE GENIUS DISCUSSES SUICIDE
To carve your name onto the trophy of the noose
and the floorless. To spit-shine it for eternity.
To become not why your father drinks, but what
carries him on a chariot of tremors
to drink again. To sign up for the obituary
circus: Come see the magical, the ones
See the Exhaust Swallower.
The Dangling Acrobat. The Blue-Finned Mermaid
who floats face down in a tank
with gills on her wrists. To stare and be stared at
forever. The unsaid word. The forgotten
dream. The poem she will
always write and never finish.
ODE TO UNADILLA, NY
After Kevin Young
I want my homeroom
to be the same
as my parents’. I want
illegal fireworks
on the 4th of July
lit by the sheriff.
I want to skinny dip
in the Susquehanna River
behind the old folks’ home.
I want to lose my virginity
in a tent. I want sidewalks
as crooked and broken
as teeth. I want venison,
cut from the deer
on my front porch.
I want hand-painted
business signs. Pete’s Garage.
The Village Variety.
I want to always ride shotgun
in my father’s pickup.
I want the trees
on Main Street to fold in
around us like the ceiling
of a chapel,
like he is walking me
down the aisle.
THE GENIUS CRIES
He imagined what would happen
if he let his bathtub overflow.
He pictured the ocean
that would fill his bathroom
and leak into the rest of his home.
The sea creatures that would squeeze
out of the faucet and into hi
s living room.
The shells that would collect like cobwebs.
The seaweed clinging to his refrigerator.
He let himself cry.
Open. Gulping for air.
When nothing happened,
when no whale birthed itself
from his tear ducts, when
the downstairs neighbors
did not complain of flooding,
he realized he was not
the unnatural disaster he once was.
His pain was no longer something
one could drown in.
IV
THE GENIUS SWIMS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
or THE GENIUS EATS AN ENTIRE TRACTOR
or THE GENIUS TELLS THE TRUTH
or THE GENIUS LIVES IN A CELLAR
FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS
is the name of the autobiography he wrote last summer.
He has never done any of these things.
He hasn’t even written the autobiography yet,
but he believes he can. He believes he can
tell her the truth one day. He will clear his throat
and straighten his bowtie and she will lean in
like a hungry bird. He will say YOU
DO NOT NEED TO SUFFER ANYMORE
and she will laugh and laugh and her hair
will bob up and down like an excited puppy.
Because suffering is the bible she was sworn in on.
Because self-doubt was the ferry she took to get here
and yes, it did get her here, but she never
knew she could swim.
AFTER WE BREAK INTO MY APARTMENT BECAUSE I LOST MY KEYS
We joke about what we would actually steal
if we were breaking in for reasons other than carelessness.
A nice quilt. A DVD player from the nineties.
Week-expired milk. I am rich, I tell you.
It has been a week since I’ve been in my apartment.
I want to touch everything. I want to wash every dish
in the kitchen sink like a newborn.
I want to pull you to the floor to make love
among the ticket stubs, the bobby pins,
the evidence of living.
BEST MAN
Inevitably, my father will cry at my wedding.