POEM 27: MYTHICAL CREATURES
If we were characters in someone else’s plot,
the audience would certainly understand
that despite the obvious perils
of placing a Klingon woman
and a Vulcan man in a love affair,
we’d make it work somewhere
in only the type of frontiers
that stars and planets are made of.
If the Bard had written of us,
I might be something like the shrew
meets Lady MacB.
All cheek and bloodstains.
And you would end up with a rapier
in your gut from defending our love.
Or we’d both be in disguise,
me as someone’s manservant
and you--Enter boy DR.essed A.s G.irl.
But we’re no Titiania and Oberon.
However, I might appear as the real Queen Mab.
And you would be my publicist, my Mercutio.
You could play a unicorn or a wizard or golden fleece.
I will always own a magic halter, fly in as a harpy or as Artemis.
I am magicked dragon, or gorgon, churning
with molten flame and snakes for hair.
And behold, my visage of riddle-maven sphinx.
You could defeat me without all your charms,
but what could you possibly live to fight for next?
One way or another, I will be the death of you.
On the page, say we are secretly poems.
You are a sonnet.
Consistent, predictable, and wedded to your iamb.
I am a bop at times and a slurry of haiku at others.
Together we are contrapuntal.
Together we are found poem.
We are free verse.
What I mean to say is,
when the first purple moon of a new Eon
shines onto the surface of a rippling golden lake,
when time slows to a spindle and stars waltz
to the Blue Danube, and we can see another like cats
in the dark, that is the life where we will find
one another finally part of the same myth.
POEM 28: SEPIA SIN
(from the national prompt: 'write about a tattoo or birthmark')
An expensive vice, to blend inks
into a darker-than-my-own melanin or henna
and then stain it like destiny into the skin.
Of all of them that transformed me the most,
it was this one, this first one,
a faded cat on my lower back
all shaded and stylized like I’d plucked it
from an Egyptian catalogue of pyramid hieroglyphs
rather than the stock art right there in the shop.
A Russian man and his tangerine-haired girlfriend
in London’s Camden Market, at the same parlor
where I got my nose pierced by a banshee
of a woman, not two months before
spoke in staccato, accented English
as they debated over the type of brown
it would take to make this look
like I was born with it.
You can barely see the place
anymore where the needle stuttered
over my spine and I jumped
at my first sensation of surgical steel on bone.
They laughed and reminded me
that what I was feeling wasn’t pain.
Pain was just a mirage with pleasure
waiting its turn on the other side.
POEM 29: WHEN THE POEM IS NOT ENOUGH
“Open your windows and stick your head out and yell, ‘I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!’" -- Network, 1976
Like a haint, the woman comes to me--a spirit walk apparition.
Almost everything about her is monochrome,
from her muted clothing to her faded parchment face.
The eyes behind her glasses glare like the dead glass of blue
marbles and are leaking from the corners, their pupils engorged.
She strides over after the poetry reading with the determination
of a person who’s finally decided to come to altar call because
they’ve caught something incurable and are willing to turn zealot
if conversion will save their life.
And so we meet in this revival room of peacemongers and poets.
She is all but panting, “What can we do? What can I do?”
Then she refers to the poem where I’ve written to a Haitian woman
who was raped in Southern Florida. She wants to know how we stop
the suffering. She leans in, waits.
I have never met someone in an audience who required more of me
than my poems. She has been baptized in her seat and is impatient for tongues.
I do not tell her that forget the movies, the windows most of us wish to run to
shouting out our malcontent, have bars on them or are painted shut.
Where then, are the words to cure her life of mediocrity?
What pheromone might I pen to replace whatever she’s feeling
now when it wears off?
Finally, I press her hand, like she is an old friend. I will her to believe
that despite what I say, nothing exists in me that doesn’t already belong to her.
I search my gut, begging for something prolific and settle on, ‘We do what we can.’
I can see I have disappointed her. Her pupils deflate.
She withdraws her hand. She thanks me, her breath,
and quite possibly, her heart rate along with her reason, returns.
She will not be tithing any more of herself tonight, not after gambling
on a poet, mistaking me for more than just the universe’s scribe.
Here is the part where I was supposed to deliver
what my poem promised: purpose.
The haint woman dissolves, leaving only her afterimage,
daring me next time to say more than the quiver of poems I’ve prepared.
Should the riddle come again, wearing another’s face,
I will know the entire answer:
What we cannot write, we remember.
Where we cannot quit, we slow down.
If it is not time to act, we wait.
If we do not have the answer, we put our hands into those of a strangers’.
When we cannot open our window, we break the glass.
When the poem is not enough, we do what we can.
POEM 30: OUT OF BODY
"I may be black, I may be poor, I may be a woman, and I may even be ugly! But thank God, I'm here" -- Celie, The Color Purple
The personal narrative my Liberian student turns in
renders me to ash at my desk. The woman he writes of,
was, like him, netted at a refugee camp some time before
he fled, so much easier for a man.
The militia men who sometimes held guns to their heads,
who sometimes fired, made bets in an attempt to decipher
by how high she was carrying, the gender of her seed.
One of them with too much invested to not know any longer,
offered to get his machete so they could all find out.
Agreement all around.
She was worth more dead than penned behind the barbed wire
with just one more bastard kid on the way anyhow.
They were careful with their impromptu C-section.
The more precise they were with the rusted blade,
the less likely to swipe off any important genitalia of the unborn,
rendering the wager moot.
And then, a slush of embryonic fluid and intestines tangled at their feet.
None of them noticed when the woman’s screams became notscreams.
The result was anticlimactic, but no real waste.
Just a womanchild lying curdled in the dust
still connected umbilically to her mother’s gut.
The men exchanged their winnings: cigarettes.
Walked away, smoking.
I set the essay down; the vapors of mother and daughter
phantoms that remain rise from the page.
I take them into my living arms and hold--
hold.
Thanks to my compatriots this month who wrote their fingers off and to the readers for the comments and encouragement. To say the month flew by is an understatement and I didn't even get to half of the stuff I had in mind. If you're local and are interested in a reading showcasing the NaPoWriMo enclave, hollaaaaa.
POEM 16: PRAISE SONG FOR A WOMAN
“I’m striving to be one of the best, period. Not just one of the best with breasts and a period” -- Invincible
Praise to the ecstasy of a circle
that will provide a woman
with shoulders and backs and applause.
Praise to a sister girl phone call,
a friendly letter, a night out,
each one a goddess delivering
its own aloe of praise to a woman’s
injured id and bruised knees.
Praise to a woman when she
is her own promised land.
Praise to her body.
To the pearlescent fluids
and dark matter of her.
Praise to her dome and vale.
Praise to a woman’s tongue
when it begs of the universe
neither leniency when she falters
nor recognition when she triumphs.
Praise to a woman when she exists
beyond the framework of her
mammary glands and genitals.
To the vaporous space
where she transcends her sex.
Praise to the ecstasy of a woman
whose own shoulders are enough,
whose own back is enough,
who will clap her hands
at her own truth.
Praise to the woman
who seeks only to best herself.
POEM 17: ASLEEP BUT NOT DEAD
for Veronica on her 23rd birthday
Sister, something happened
the year I turned twenty-three.
I began enjoying hot sauce
as a condiment and quite possibly,
a beverage.
As someone who had never before
considered letting Tabasco pass her lips,
because Dad had always said
it’d put hair on my chest,
a latent hot sauce gene sprang to life
on my palette, in stasis no more.
It wasn’t just the heat,
it was the flavor.
So what if when it was too hot,
I’d get the hiccups, rendering me
barely able to speak?
At twenty-three, there is no agreeable torment
like a slow burn on the tongue.
I see you do not enjoy roller coasters
unless you are coerced and sometimes deceived.
You don’t like to go 0 to 60 in three seconds.
You don’t like to go backwards.
There will be no Son of Beast rickety wooden
railway dangling your unborn sons and daughters
before your eyes, as you hurtle at 75 mph
towards uncertainty, loop after loop.
Just wait until you turn twenty-seven.
POEM 18: MISTRESS OF DREAD
“He was the ocean and I was the sand” -- Lauryn Hill
And then I am Sakhmet’s daughter
and the sandstorm scorching my gut
tells me the desert it blew in from
is not so readily resolved
with salt water.
POEM 19: WEREWOLF
“I’m either a werewolf or I’m crazy, but I’m not boring” – Anonymous Graffiti, Ohio State University
At the climax of a lunar cycle,
a poem stirs,
some dark tempest in my chest.
It cracks my ribs to get out.
The poem is aroused
and certain it smells blood.
The poem grows teeth.
It hunkers over paper
like it is meat.
It flees my fingers,
desperate to hold it,
and snaps at shadows
cast like die by the moon.
I do not bother arming myself
against my poem with anything
plated in silver.
Once it runs loose,
there is no accounting
for every howl and bite.
There is no accounting
for every person it will turn.
POEM 20: REDBONE CAROUSEL
Attention.
Pick one.
White face/black features.
Passing? Passing for what?
“White girl.”
“We don’t carry products in that shade.”
“Cut all that pretty hair?”
Status.
Outcast.
No red lipstick, you’ll look like a harlot.
Pink tones.
“White girl.”
Pick one.
She doesn’t act black.
She doesn’t sound black.
House nigger.
Blended.
Motley.
Mutt.
Half-breed wet dream.
Black face.
Status.
Marry dark so you’re kids will have street cred.
Marry light or white so your kids will have a chance.
Light eyes.
'Good' hair.
Muddled.
Light skin/big ass.
“Stay away from my man.”
Too straight, now you look white.
Too kinky, now you look like you’re trying too hard.
Jezebel.
The other woman.
Oreo.
“White girl.”
“White girl.”
Video ho.
“She’s still black so she can’t date my son.”
Pick one.
Outcast.
Freckles.
Passing?
Optical illusion.
“You are so exotic.”
Pick one.
Mutt.
“All your people look like that?”
“Your mom run around on your dad?”
“I just like looking at you.”
Attention.
Attention.
Attention.
Pick one.
POEM 21: LIKE KNOWS LIKE
after John Lackey
For me, it is just another afternoon
of trying to get work done at the cafe
where no one comes to get any work done,
not really.
We are having the longest conversation
we’ve had yet beyond hello and goodbye
and amiable waves.
You know my husband
and have heard me read poems.
I’ve seen your posters
and we own one of your woodcut prints.
It is just another afternoon
until one thing leads to another
and we start chewing the fat
about studio space
and being strung out
on too much TV.
And then I see your paintings
for the first time on my computer screen.
Something, not unlike gusts of air
pumped from a bellows
swarms my organs.
How is it every point of light and pirouetting branch,
every ripple of water, and leaves, leaves, leaves
can suddenly summon the characters
stamping in place and pulling at the tether
in my drafts?
How can a painting be an oracle
and a shaman?
How is each brush stroke
a place I’ve never been
but have always known?
(to see John's work, log on to www.homegrownpress.com)
POEM 22: EIRE
At a pub just outside the Cliffs of Moher,
an old Irish storyteller
with shock white hair and thick
black glasses, a red nose,
regales an American wedding party
and our motley busload of tourists
with shanties and ballads and gruff wit.
I am twenty and am missing home.
I’ve sampled the local fare in every city,
I’ve walked up the cliffs listening
with one ear on the sea and one ear on Bob Marley.
I reminded our tour guide she owed me
a Guinness (hold the black currant syrup)
because I remembered the Gaelic
she taught us on the way in,
I kissed a man in Killarney who swore
he’d leave his woman for me that night.
I attended Mass in Dublin and made a trip
to the Guinness Brewery on Easter Sunday.
In just ten days, the ocean, the steppes, the mountains,
the flat lands, the people lock me into a bear hug,
bid me to stay, stay, stay.
The Irish hills remind me of Kentucky
and the night sky is impossible,
what we are told to make wishes upon,
dream that someone we love is looking up too.
My brain is addled with all of it,
and I stop the storyteller on his way
back from the loo.
Right there in the hallway,
I burst out with Sam Cooke via Lauryn Hill,
Change Is Gonna Come,
my voice, suddenly stronger than on any open mic back home.
Perhaps he senses that what I need is public confession.
He leads me into the main room
where there is a fire burning
and people with sweating, happy faces,
clinking glasses, are waiting for more.
More of anything.
More of what they already have.
He motions for me to sing again.
I tell them it’s a Sam Cooke song
but don’t say Lauryn sang it to me first.
I don’t warn them that my voice
is not soul-stirring the way they might expect,
I’m not classically trained like my roommate
who sang airy Latin during Mass.
I do not warn them that I am more suburb than homegirl.
I’ve never lived in tenements,
I was never born by any river.
I wasn’t forged in the streets, but in the pews.
But I sing what I was built with anyway,
I sing until I regain consciousness
and stop and someone shoves a glass
of black gold in my hands,
and there is cheering just like at the end
of a made for TV movie
“She crossed an ocean just to find out she was home.”
Then the night becomes a blender
of music and drink and skin.
What I take back resounds louder than their applause.
POEM 23: MINERVA, GIVE US STRENGTH
In Bath, England, the Romans
discovered a local hot springs
and dedicated it to healing
whatever ailed them.
They appropriated the area
in a bout of ancient gentrification,
and committed its mineral waters
with stone columns and priests
to their goddess of poetry and medicine.
I take an empty black film capsule
and fill it with clear water that is
disappointingly more lukewarm than hot
and imagine ancient Romans
sitting in these waters of a conquered
people, their flesh made opulent
with sores and sickness,
soaking until someone tells them
for the amount they paid, they are cleansed.
They toss in coins and jewelry to Sulis Minerva
and pray to her brass head for a long life free
of disease.
I just pray no one catches me
stealing from these holy waters
that someone is still charging for
at the museum gift shop.
I wonder, how potent can an element be,
if it was never yours to own or give
to begin with?
POEM 24: CHILDREN OF BAST
Paisley, demure calico
of a stately six years,
stops licking what she can reach
of her flank’s fur and looks up.
Typhoon, an olive tabby six-month old
badass has sauntered into the room,
that little son of a jackal, and is staring again.
Part little brother, part son,
Typhoon doesn’t know how to say
“I like you,” any more than a little boy
does to a girl he’d like to get to know.
He doesn’t know how
to do anything but chase her, ambush her,
steal her food, and try and lick her
when she’s not looking.
He commandeers her toys, rolls around
in her catnip, and climbs her cat tree.
Paisley is not completely convinced
she shouldn’t lay open his jugular in his sleep.
Before Typhoon, there were just slow days
of sun-bathing and blinking at insects
and birds on the outside.
Before Typhoon, there were no kitten farts,
no empty bowls, no need to growl or hiss or run.
Why Bast has cursed her with this little one,
with his ten-pound body and too-small head,
his close-set eyes, and soft stomach pouch
dangling as he runs, Paisley will never know.
She continues to lick, monitoring his oblivion
as he stretches out in her kitty-tent with the crackly floor,
mentally measuring him for how much shoestring
it would take to mummify him alive.
POEM 25: AMERICAN DRAM
It’s usually a circle of five.
Only the scenery changes.
Today, we’re in Louisville in the mezzanine
of the Galt House hotel overlooking the Ohio River,
with an aquarium for a bar behind us
and an assortment of prom dates
and tourists and Shriners hurrying past.
We are huddled over a round coffee table
on five sedan chairs like surgeons, our pens,
scalpels splaying open poems on their sheets.
We stop only to grab a coffee or a sandwich;
we stop to take note of a coal barge pulling
the intestines of a mountain down the river.
We are there for hours, enjoying the process,
enjoying the theory and speculation, the company.
We, like the barge, are in it for the long haul.
Afterwards, we will make port in the bourbon bar
downstairs, to fill up on fish and burgers and fries,
Knob Creek, Pappy Van Winkle 15 year, and Blantons.
We laugh freely.
We invite our loved ones to join us
from whatever corners they have waited us out.
We don’t need to clink our glasses,
to know what spirit is among us.
POEM 26: ANGER MANAGEMENT
All the uncertainties
and regrets, all lack of focus
or control that boils untended
over into an argument
about something
completely unrelated,
like buying another secondhand
desk, will dissolve like lumps
of soil under water
from an old kettle,
when you’re turning the earth
to plant marigolds in the front yard.
POEM 14
HOMEGIRLS AND HILLBILLIES
after Majora Carter
“I have always tried to keep my glass full, sometimes with whiskey and sometimes wine.” -- Sunday Valley, Sometimes Whiskey Sometimes Wine
Can’t a woman be both?
Who says I can't wear a pair of fresh
new silver Vandals and toss back
knot after knot of amber Buffalo Trace,
with a Kentucky’s Best hanging
from my lower lip?
I can bump East Coast hip-hop and
Dirty South honky tonk on the same
mixtape without missing a step
on the catwalk of my mind.
I might wear a batik print caftan
with a matching head wrap
and stacked heel cowboy boots,
golden hoop hearings that graze
my shoulders and light a tree
from a corncob pipe.
Although I’m not precisely from
the hills, I have more in common
with the women whose mountains
were subjected to mastectomies
than with women who pound
the pavement in the South Bronx.
But, there are women
and then there are women.
There are women like us, who keep
the swell of green and water
in their periphery no matter
what surrounds them,
no matter what pollutes their air,
trashes their backyard,
and pokes holes in their horizons.
There are women who will drink
and drink well
no matter what’s in their glass.
POEM 13
WHERE X'S AND O'S COME FROM
“A love supreme, a love supreme” -- John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
Just when I suspect I might have fallen
for the man, right there on his pink Goodwill
couch, in an apartment that appears
as though it were being held up by books
and albums instead of walls and roof,
in summer, the air simmering
with lentils and rice and incense and storm,
not long after our first kiss which was not unlike
kissing into a plum close to the pit,
he introduces me to Coltrane.
POEM 12
THE WAY
“Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light” -- John Milton, Paradise Lost
There are things in life
I wouldn’t get out of bed for,
let alone travel through the night
not because I don’t desire them
badly enough, but because once
I have what I want,
I will have what I want.
But what if what you want most
you will never have, no matter
how long the night?
I couldn’t have cobbler
from Richie’s around the corner
on Georgetown Street
and Claudia’s mama’s pancakes
and plantains which are nine hours away.
I can’t have East Village Cafe’ Rakka
falafels and a vermillion hued Paris, KY hootch
to wash it down and expect for either to stay fresh.
In theory, I would traverse every night
just to get home to my love
and go just as far to unravel myself away,
to prove I'll never be tethered to any man.
I might have traveled all night for just one
more Sunday Valley show at the old Dame
with Cowboy Dave behind the bar
if they hadn’t razed the entire block
and the fellas hadn't gone their separate ways.
You know, I’d go all night for Pappy Van Winkle
if someone had the Twenty-Three Year on sale,
and I’d go just as long and as far for a good
tent revival on a Wednesday night in summer
like the kind where we’d go so late,
my little sister would fall asleep on my lap
just as ladies were falling out in the aisles.
Possessing a thing is just one kind of hell
and pursuing it is another.
There is no place but Paradise
to have it all spread before you,
in a feast of plenty with no need to travel
through the night.
POEM 11
GIRL TALK
When I meet a girlfriend’s boyfriend
or husband for the first time,
I don’t see the man
who owns his own cafe’,
the self made partner in a law firm,
the actor who’s regaled thousands
of people in hundreds of audiences.
I don’t see the poet, professor,
the world traveler, or the linguist.
There is no M.D., no Ph.D., no M.B.A.
There aren’t enough letters
or books in the world to cover his tracks.
What I see are dozens of woman to woman
conversations made manifest.
Here is the man who uses her lady soap
and leaves curly hairs in the sink.
The one who makes a laboratory
out of their fridge.
The trail of Q-tips and socks leading
her on a Hansel and Gretel trail
with no candy house at the end
as a surprise, just more dirty ‘draws.’
The same guy who manages
an entire office and administrative staff,
makes tummy-monsters in the mirror
and goes out of his way
to use her hair brush.
There is no not seeing the kinky sex move.
Sometimes I see in the same man, someone
who made her a gift on her birthday.
The vegetarian who cooked her a steak.
This is the man who never learned
how to say, I miss you, so when they’re apart,
he just talks her ear off on the phone
until she falls asleep.
The guy who can’t not pick something
shiny up from the ground.
The same man who can hand-deliver
an offhand comment so obscure,
it leaves her bemused for days
was the same one who was the first to ask
‘Sooo, what are we?’
When I meet a man after knowing
his partner for so long, I know
somewhere under there
is a man worth loving or focusing on
enough to swap stories with a girlfriend,
knowing good and well
she thinks the same thing about mine.
POEM 10
YES, IT WILL HURT
Yes, tattoos hurt.
Even after the first
three, they still hurt.
Same goes for piercings
but not as much as you
might think.
Ditto, first penetration.
I couldn’t personally speak
on childbirth, but so many
women can’t be wrong.
It hurts to leave
some people; it can
also hurt to love them.
It hurts to stand
over a burial plot
when you knew
the person going in.
Hurts to throw someone
under the bus if you can’t
avoid it.
Sometimes, it hurts to breathe.
Sometimes, it hurts to look.
Sometimes, it hurts to move.
Anything that opens
the body is bound to
leave a mark
in some small way,
even if it heals,
(that is, if you subscribe
to the Heisenberg Principle
of Uncertainty).
SENTINEL
When Dad found a snake once while mowing
the lawn, he strode purposefully into the house
with grass flecked shorts and penny loafers,
not even stopping to pop open a beer. He was
looking for the gun or a blade to hew the snake
down. I was very impressed by drawers in our home
that kept such secrets. I didn’t know he had a gun
and he didn’t know what kind of snake he was
dealing with. It might be the kind to hurt his children
or our small dog. Better not take the risk. Not too long
after, a pool took up the entirety of our backyard
where I pretended I was really part silke, and never
wondered about snakes again. Onward, onward,
fifteen years. A drunk man who says he loves me
and only me has followed me home to my father’s house.
He rings the doorbell and throws pebbles at the siding
where he suspects I may be waiting for him like Rapunzel.
My skin drains of heat when I hear the clamor from bed.
I call for my sire and there the mindportrait slowly pivots
and stops, as I am peering from the top of the stairs just
before 5 AM to see my father staring down the door, older,
wider, and slumped with exhaustion and age, but still
armed with the same face he wore when he knew
there was a gun within his reach.
POEM 8
“Once you reach what is inside it is outside”—Frank Bidart, The Third Hour of the Night
Find it at a microphone
or before a mirror.
Between keys and frets
and pages and legs;
their secrets
are the same.
On your knees.
At a crossroads
selling your soul for a song.
Find it in a lover.
A messiah.
An afterlife.
Seek it in aspiration.
In compassion.
In giving.
A bud poised to bloom.
Skin.
Breath.
Heart.
Time.
Call it by its name
when you meet it.
Find it first inside yourself.
POEM 7
COSMOSIS
In the Chandra nebula, a satellite camera
captures Star PSR B1509-58 in the act of
being consumed with the spectacle of its own death
as if the star fancies itself in the last Act
of a celestial version of Othello, spurning itself
with the spirit of high drama and sensationalism.
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—
It is the cause.
You can almost see the other points of light
rising as PSR B1509-58 regales them
with a crimson display of histrionic bloodlust
in the final scene as the Moor of Venice.
And then, right when an overture should play
the star off into curtain call,
a cerulean hand emerges on the film as well,
slowly pirouetting in translucent and interlaced ribbons
to catch the inflamed pixels splaying
from every orifice of PSR B1509-58.
PSR B1509-58 is in its final death throes
lamenting in the way only a star can
who was never part of any major constellation:
I could have played in Equuleus!
I could have played in Orion!
Ursa Major!
Perseus!
I could have been one of the greats!
Yet, PSR B1509-58 continues to play
its own demise, the only fifteen minutes
of fame an ordinary star possesses worth watching.
POEM 6
BODY TALK
My body reminds me after a walk
on a warm, sun-sodden day
that I still own calf muscles
and my skin will flush before it browns.
I am reminded that my lungs
will always strain in new warm air.
Before it rains, my body tells me
the sky is about to let loose
through dull temple ache,
so no amount of pressuring
the webbed, nervy skin
between my index finger and thumb
will move it along.
My head throbs, hackles rising
from tremors of wind and lightning,
the scent of ozone and spores
weighing down the air.
My hands know how to strip
fronds of kale greens on their own
and prepare a Sunday supper.
They remember piano keys
and knitting needles from other lives,
and paintbrushes and good pens from this one.
They know how to knead men and dough.
These hands tell me they will know
how to turn the earth one day,
they will know how to tame a squalling child,
they will know—
they will always know more than me.
So much of my person speaks on its own.
From hairline to waistline,
from breast to gut,
elbow to ankle,
heart to hamstrings,
every pore is either a mouth
or an eye, seeing and speaking,
breathing and singing.
This is what the body knows.
This is what the body says,
Alive, alive! Can’t you feel you’re alive?
DAY 5/POEM 5
KENTUCKY SHOWER
for Jessica
On a Saturday in Versailles
just before the wisteria comes
into bloom, women collect
to celebrate a baby belly.
We alight on chairs and poise
on couches nibbling like does
at decadent lady treats,
exchanging the only currency
a woman can barter at a shower:
When _____ was four, he ______ all the time.
When _____ got to be eight or so, she finally______.
When I was six months along, I ______.
Don’t ______ if you can help it.
Keep ______ around just in case.
I play the games; I name nursery rhymes
and baby animals; I descramble words
and crossword puzzle my way into a prize.
I watch her open boxes of baby clothes
and toys; the women are a soundscape
Chorus proffering approval and advice.
I have brought her books
and a formally handmade card,
wishing I’d thought to gift her
an heirloom chenille blanket from Berea
like the woman to my right.
I do not tell her I became a summer storm
in Spring in the parking lot of the book store
before entering to find her a gift.
I do not tell her I fell apart a little
because she is so brave.
I smile at my friend.
I smile at her mother.
I smile at the guests.
Oh, oh, oh, what a time
to ______.
RUN TO THE ROCK
“The rock cried out, ‘I can’t hide you.’” -- Nina Simone, Sinnerman
When finally we allow the mountains
to uproot, the fields to glare with flame,
and we bump the Earth from her axis,
who, then, to run to?
Where to run when the rivers boil
over and seethe, and the seas bleed
with the offal of our negligence--?
Who’s bosom to bury in
and keen our errors free?
What legacy will be left
to wreathe our fortunes?
By then, we will have let the snowcaps
dissolve and the atmosphere be
pockmarked with chemical curiosities.
When tectonic tides swell
with unabated tirades,
will even the Devil wait
for revelation?
Distraction is our gospel,
destruction, our sermon,
retreat, our amen.
And we will run,
we will run,
but we will not cry out.
EXEUNT ORFEU NEGRO
Orpheus returns from Hades’
Carnivale alone and turned out
only to spend another life cycle
below ground seeking an entry
to the underworld and for his beloved’s
satyr-harried specter drifting always
beyond his reach.
He wanders,
his acoustic alive in his hands;
he strums and tongues
of the type of love
that could raze the dead
if their ears were not stoppered
by the droning of their own regret.
Orpheus would die if he could
in this unending sepulcher.
He floats on his back
in the watery ether of the Acheron
alongside bouquets of Persephonean black orchids
waiting for destiny’s lottery to select
him again for some new light.
Again, he endures a womb,
a soaked and traumatic birth,
suckling and swaddling
at the brown, freckled breast of a woman
who has never heard of Hades.
Orpheus is reborn and reborn
and reborn, until the name Eurydice
becomes merely another lyric to his song.
ANTIDOTE TO WANDERLUST
for Jason and for Wolf
A man can wander beneath both
wretched and luminous skies
his entire life searching
for the right war to win
and villagers to liberate,
or for the paramount phrase
and pinnacle image,
but what will conquering
either of these do but gentle him
and turn his whole self into a home
worth never wandering away from again?
*
Say I am the oracle or shaman
from one of your pages.
Say this is a spirit quest
complete with walking stick and totem,
and the face of my soul
is as wizened as a walnut shell
both illuminating and concealing the Way.
Say we are comrades in arms.
Say we are not ever alone.
Say on, say on.
*
Know that the griot and the ronin are
crafted from one spectrum.
A quiver full of proverbs and praise songs
and a Tamagahane sword may each incite and quell.
Only the wearers cloaks are different
yet their calling to serve remains the same.
Okay, a brief intro to this challenge....
So for those of you who haven't caught on and a refresher for those who have, this is, to my knowledge, the second annual National Poetry Month writing challenge. A poem a day for thirty days. We're to post a poem every day during April on a public forum like a blog or Facebook in honor of our craft. Last year was revelatory, transformative, and humbling. So many of the poems I read from around the nation last year were astonishing, brutal, and above all, inspiring.
This year, we're at it again. Expect to see me experimenting with a few different forms and explaining the inception of poems. The nice thing about this is it's a rare opportunity to see behind the curtain and catch a small, but poignant part of the 'poet process.' We're giving you mostly very raw poems which will later be edited or even discarded. The point is to not just manufacture poetry, for those of you who are convinced that art is spontaneous and doled out in rations.
The idea is to get to know one's voice the only way you can, by MAKING time to write. MAKING time to get sick of your stories, fall in love with them again, experiment, move on, rejoice, and celebrate this little miracle of so many poets marathon-writing together day after day.
Also, feel free to comment on any of these! Enjoy!
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEIRLOOM
I never told my mother that
when I was not yet twenty,
I wore my favorite pea coat
to the movie theater--
her most impressive brooch,
a dark amethyst bloom
with its veined and curling silver leaves,
the one her mother gave her,
made me feel a little fancy
when I pinned it to the lapel
of my pea coat
just to go to see a movie.
I don't remember the film.
I don't remember who I was with.
Now, I just see myself,
on the floor of the theater,
on all fours, sweating,
glasses sliding down my face.
Under the seats I probed around
the shoe-print gum, the deformed kernels
of unpopped corn, receipts,
and godknowswhatelse for her brooch
until the next crowd came in
and the next movie began,
and an usher gestured me out
with a flashlight, promising,
one day they'd call
if it was ever found.
The day they called
was the day I’d tell her, I swore;
I haven’t breathed a word since
of what I’d never be able to replace.
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