Copyright © 2015 Trista Mateer
2nd. Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review.
Editing by Clementine von Radics
www.clementinepoetry.com
Cover & Interior Art by Krystle Alder
www.krystlealder.com
for S.—
I read somewhere that dedications
are like coded love letters,
but I always seem to lay us out bare.
Sorry for the poems.
Bite
I Am a Runner
I have been told that girls always fall
for men like their fathers,
but I found it a hard concept to grasp
when he was always gone
and I grew up on radio static
and blackberry preserves.
I remember having smaller hands
and looking at him through wider eyes
like everything
was so much grander
just because it was so much bigger than me
and he was so much bigger than me
so he must be grand too;
for a long time, I thought that he was,
but now words like sweetheart and princess
make me straighten my back
and shuffle my feet: back and forth, back and forth
always on the move.
I am a runner (just like my father)
only we prefer leaving
to lacing up sneakers and hitting the track.
The first boy I loved used to start our mornings
kissing my forehead in the high school lobby—
until one of his friends laughed and said:
“What are you? Her father?”
and I realized why I liked his careless mouth
so much.
I used to bury my face in his clothes
because I liked the smell:
cheap beer, cigarettes, Old Spice cologne.
And I knew it from somewhere,
I knew it from somewhere,
I knew it from
the way my father used to lean in
and smooth back my hair,
plant a kiss on my forehead
before he left for work.
Sometimes the noises of mouths still make me upset:
kissing, chewing, breathing, slurring speech.
Shouting makes my insides jump up my throat.
Once my mother said to me,
she said: “You’re going to fall for men
like your father; I’m sorry—”
and I wanted to ask her if that meant
I would fall for a fighter
and a hard fist and a fast car,
boys on motorcycles,
people who ran from their problems,
midnight phone calls from the beds of other women,
slippery mouths with tongues that twisted truth
like cherry stems
or if that meant I might just be comfortable
with absence.
For the One Who Loved My Hands
More than Anything Else
You saw only what you wanted to.
There were flowers blooming between my teeth,
promises wrapped around my hips,
handstands in the gangly corners of me.
There were blades in my hands.
I was carving my name into your side
and you were calling me soft,
calling me gentle.
I do not think you were paying attention.
Texts I Shouldn’t Have Sent to My Ex:
can we say goodbye again? i miss the way you rip me open.
i know your mother never liked me. i hope she knows we drank her wine and fucked on the living room couch. i bet she’s where you got your stubborn mouth from.
you were supposed to write me a song for my eighteenth birthday and you never did; do you remember that? i remember that. i don’t know why, but it’s the first thing i tell people when you come up in conversation.
sometimes i think i resented you so much it felt like love.
you’re the only person i didn’t mind sleeping next to. i could never fall asleep next to the one after you. i still can’t sleep.
i saw a photo of you holding a baby this morning. it fucked up my entire day. thanks.
i hate that i never hated you. i tried really hard for a long time.
do you still love me?
every time i delete your number from my phone, i write it down somewhere because i have no self control. sometimes i miss you and i don’t mean to.
hey, me again.
How to Not Forgive
When I was small, I remember my mother saying that she believed aliens helped build the pyramids. She used to keep crystals around. She used to carry healing stones. She used to believe my father would always come back to her.
Now that she is older, she prays to the nail marks in someone’s palms but I don’t think she believes in forgiveness anymore. She sent me to Sunday school in little floral dresses, not to torture me but to learn this.
Hurt me once: shame on me. Hurt me twice: shame on me. Hurt me three times: shame on me but fuck you. Hurt me four times and we’ll get severed-head biblical. We will pick up stones.
And now that I am older, I don’t give a damn about sin. I will be the first to cast one.
I Was Nineteen Years Old
When I found out that you could cry
“please no, please don’t, please no, please don’t”
loud enough to wake the neighbors
and they still wouldn’t turn on a porch light.
And I never wanted to tell anyone
but the poems
because I was the one with the pink garter belt
and the thigh-high stockings. And I was the one
with the little black dress.
I was the one
who still tried to kiss him afterward
because I thought that might
make it okay.
It didn’t.
The Poem That Begged Not to Be Written
For the one who broke me like bread
at the dining table and then left mid-meal.
For the one who called himself an animal
so I didn’t have to.
For the one who cut me in half and scooped out
all of my nice, all of my forgiving, all of my trust.
For the one who cheated
and for the one who bruised
and for the one who left.
I learned the word fuck from my mother’s tongue,
as in fucker, he fucking left me,
he fucking left.
I learned the word no from myself.
From somewhere deep in the pit of me,
it rose like some ancient thing
and slunk its way out of my throat,
heavy-handed.
Will I ever let this guard down long enough
to learn anything new?
Fuck no.
When I Was a Little Girl
In the bone-white basement of a church, a woman
told me that I was made from the rib of a man.
I tried to count my brother’s ribs because I wanted
to ask why he had the same number as me and
shouldn’t he have one less? Or maybe two less,
depending on how many little girls God wanted to
make when my brother was born?
Instead I asked, if I were a little
rib girl,
then what was my brother made of?
She told me that man was created from dust and
breath in the image of God; and I tried to imagine
that God looked like my brother when he lost his
two front teeth in a bicycle accident and ran
screaming into the house, crying for my mother
with his bloody mouth.
I asked why God couldn’t be more like Mom instead.
And she said to me, “women are sinful.”
Years later when I taste my first one, I agree with her.
This Is How New Religions Start
Waking up too early because your breath
is heavy
in the bed next to me:
wide-eyed-awake early morning reveries.
I could probably make a sermon
out of the way your mother looks at me.
I could probably make a sermon
out of the way you mouth words in your sleep.
Light slipping through the curtains,
every part of you looks saccharine.
I want to wash your feet with my hair.
I want to rinse my mouth out with soap.
I want to wash your feet with my hair.
Violets, Violets, Violets
Girl like a flower that bloomed only at night,
I spent months unfurling by your bedside.
In the beginning
the empty wine bottles on the bathroom floor
seemed flirty, somehow mysterious.
But when the sun came up, I looked stark by contrast.
Everything looked bright, so bright
laid out next to the bags under my eyes.
Violets, violets, violets.
And you with your lungfuls of hope,
teeth like slick wet promises
every time you opened your mouth.
We used to do so much talking
before things got quiet here.
We used to do so much not-talking.
You with your doe eyes, you with those lips
that could almost suck stubbornness out of anybody.
You with your wishful thinking.
You with that hope.
After a while you started to resent the color purple,
the way my apologies
surfaced like bruises after the fact.
After a while it was those violets, violets, violets.
Girl like a garden you never volunteered to tend.
Dirt all tracked into your front hall.
Picking New Sheets
When I replace these, there’s no
going back.
When I throw these out,
the only thing that will remember
your small ragged-breath sleeping
will be me.
No more touch memory on my pillowcases.
No more “I can almost smell you.”
I think the walls
of this room have already forgotten
you used to breathe here.
For Brittanie
There will always be men
who have fishhooks for fingers.
There will always be women
with wet, sharp mouths.
It is okay to get caught up in them.
It is not okay to drown.
Don’t you ever let another human
being tear you apart.
Remember that you have claws
and teeth, too.
Remember that you are better off
whole.
Apartment #9
I am not going to miss you.
You are not going to miss me:
the filler conversation in your empty bed.
I know we both said some nice things in the end
but I already forget the shape of your mouth
and the night you cradled my face in your hands
and said, “You’re so pretty, you’re so pretty”—
almost, anyway. But I swear
in a week, I will not remember how
I moaned for your hands
or spent an hour on public transit
just to get to your front door
with a careless grin and smudged lipstick;
in a month, I will not remember anything.
Not even the scent of your skin
after a whole day in bed
with me.
Not even the way we said goodbye.
Barbed Wire
Boys are always trying to fix me:
taking me home like a weekend project,
all pursed lips and furrowed brows
when I don’t snap out of it with a kiss.
Approach me like I weave caution tape into my hair.
I will greet you with a mouth full of barbed wire
until you learn to stop coming after me
with your hands.
4/23
I don’t know how to exist properly
I don’t love anymore.
I Want to Be Sorry for This
I wrote our breakup poem
two weeks after we started “going steady.”
I wrote our breakup poem before I ever said:
I love you. I wrote our breakup poem before
we moved in together.
My hands are still shaking from
nights spent not knowing
how to want you.
Sorry I Stole Your DVD When We Broke Up
We sat on your couch in your basement apartment
that had somehow become our basement apartment
with the dim lighting and the wet air.
The pages of my books curled.
My dresses smelled like mildew.
We sat on our couch in our basement apartment
for the same date night that we had every Wednesday.
With bad Chinese take-out
and a movie that you already owned,
we sat for an hour and forty-two minutes
before I ever dreamt of leaving.
We sat on our couch in our basement apartment
while the credits rolled
and you expressed your frustration with the ending;
and oceans parted inside of me with urgency.
Looking around at dirty clothes and empty bottles,
I got seasick for the first time in my life.
We sat on our couch in our basement apartment
while you ejected the movie and tucked it away
and I hung my Y’s back up.
Your couch. Your basement apartment.
Your complacency.
Not mine.
Keys on the Coffee Table
I had played the string-along game.
I had done my fair share of pushing away.
I was all tease and no follow-through,
all want me but don’t depend on me.
I was an evader of intimacy.
I sought out commitment until it came knocking.
Then I was diving out of first-story windows
and hiding in the bushes.
You were the first person I ever really ran from.
Bags packed while you were at work,
phone calls ignored.
I took off wordlessly,
effortlessly.
I planned it for weeks
and still kissed you goodnight.
It was so goddamn easy.
I thought I’d feel guilt wedged up
under my ribcage somewhere.
I thought I’d feel remorse.
But I took that first step out the door
and all I felt was
free.
You Will Teach Her to Spit Out My Name
When you fall into the arms of someone new
I will just be the mess of a woman
who left your love notes on the floor
and ran off.
When you
bring up the past,
I will be the monster you could never outrun.
I will be the fear in the back of your throat
and nothing more.
I will be an unfortunate thing to overcome,
not a person with a handful of fuck-ups
and a mouthful of apologies.
The Poet
After Caitlyn Siehl
The poet can’t stand the quiet. She can’t stand
the buzzing in her head. The murmur of memory.
The poet picks up a book of poetry. It is not her
writing but it reads the same way. It is not her
story but the ending is similar enough to pass.
The poet tries to read a verse out loud and only
tastes blood in her mouth.
The poet worries she is writing the same poem