Philosophy (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} judas_mordred) wrote,@ 2008-03-27 13:57:00 |
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MY THESIS
I finally chose In Vivo, substantially due to its warm reception here. Thanks to everyone who commented!
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...
In Vivo
Poems by Philosophy Walker
Senior Composition Thesis
Paul Kane, Advisor
ab Term, 2008
Poems by Philosophy Walker
Senior Composition Thesis
Paul Kane, Advisor
ab Term, 2008
To Adam,
for loving me anyways,
and to my mother, Nesha,
la persona migliore.
This thesis was printed in Bell MT font.
“My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.”
–Mary Wollstonecraft
This is a Poem Titlefor loving me anyways,
and to my mother, Nesha,
la persona migliore.
This thesis was printed in Bell MT font.
“My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.”
–Mary Wollstonecraft
This is the first line. It must feel weighty.
This poem is in decasyllabic
verse, not in blank verse, though many people
get them confused. The point of this poem
is to explore the inconsistencies,
tragedies, tragic inconsistencies,
and inconsistent tragedies within
society, my life, your life, and God.
This is the second stanza. It is not
part of the first stanza because I am
saying something different in this one.
This stanza relates a story from my
childhood, which was a dark and troubled
time featuring cruelty, disappointment,
and heartbreaking parental disapproval.
You will wonder how much of it is true.
I won’t say. You must assume it all is.
This third part is very significant.
With this, I become very lyrical.
I use metaphors comparing people
to ants, or society to a morgue.
Perhaps humor enters in here, as well.
My mordant, razor-sharp wit
lulls you into a false sense of safety.
Then comes the raw, hard-hitting conclusion,
which feels exactly like an ending must.
The significance of everything else
in the poem becomes instantly clear.
You are ready to stop reading. You turn
the page, look out the window of the train,
make a phone call, have lunch, go back to work.
The last line is the one you remember.
Supernatural
Maybe a noise did it, my sister snoring
or a car door’s slam, but somehow I’m awake
and looking out from my top bunk
at our apartment porch, the light on at three a.m.,
a woman standing there, long hair down.
It’s not my mother. She’s pixie cut,
after all, and goes to bed at ten.
But just to be sure, I slip to the bedroom
where the landlady’s sister died and watch
my parents sprawled on opposite pillows,
playing dead. Mom there’s someone here,
I think, trying to get in. She’s up
and to the door in seven seconds,
never sleeps for real since I fell
off the balcony and split my skull,
goes to the porch, light off, no
woman there to speak of, the cat
sleeping on a chair. It’s a good ghost
she says to me, her eyes already halved
and going down, absolute, like sunset.
Purity Ball
It’s a new thing, here in Ohio.
The father and daughter dress up—
he, a nice tux; she, a white dress,
white flowers for the corsage.
There are twenty-one girls tonight,
some as young as three, some in college.
They arrive at seven for the ceremony.
The couples stand together, hands joined.
They exchange rings. Like a marriage.
Fathers promise: I choose before God
to cover my daughter as her authority
and protection in the area of purity.
The daughters promise, too.
Silently.
Later, there’s dinner, a dance.
A seven-year-old twirls in her
princess skirt, singing along
with the standard DJ songs:
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Time After Time.
Her father watches from the table.
Twins are being interviewed
in the lobby by local television.
“I’m never going to kiss a boy
who isn’t my husband,” says one.
The other, slightly shorter,
says, “I won’t even think about boys
until I’m married. Because that’s a sin.”
Their father stands behind them,
his hands on their shoulders,
his eyes on the camera, smiling.
After the party, the younger ones cry.
They don’t want to leave, to go home
and take off the pretty dress, the white gloves.
That night, after prayers and tooth brushing,
a thirteen-year-old girl dreams of a husband,
rosy children, and double beds.
In the Fetus Room
It was not a secret. A secret is
something hidden, but this was just not told,
apparently not important enough
to warrant a warning. We stood
in the fetus room at the science museum,
staring down into glass jars, and you said
That’s just what mine looked like
as if you were not my grandmother,
as if my mother was not your first child
born alive.
I didn’t have to imagine. You sketched it all:
the bathtub, the warm water,
the glass bottle a friend had sent from Vermont
with a woman in a teddy on the side.
It was the forties. You were married,
college educated, comfortable.
I wonder what it must be like, having a baby.
The heaviness, thickness of body, swollen feet.
Something living, growing inside you,
living off your bloodstream. A parasite.
It came out, you said, all of a sudden.
Nothing hurt, you said.
You sounded as though you had expected
agony, some kind of trade-off, a test.
Saul Steinberg, Three Liberties.
Three Liberties
It’s hot on the bus—
middle of July and packed
full of schoolchildren,
old men with senior
discounts, and midday shoppers.
Three women stand close
even in the heat,
feeling the weight of their hair,
the press of their clothes.
The sticky closeness
of sweaty skin and handbags
makes them each drowsy,
they shift from foot to
foot, they long to be elsewhere,
bodies bursting out
of their thin dresses,
desperate for cool escape,
lost for a second
as they sway through town,
each one sure she’s on her way
to something better.
First Offense
I. My Boyfriend Goes to Jail
It’s November, a month of waiting:
for gloves and snow days,
or a plane to arrive.
The thing is, he’s too beautiful for prison;
we’ve all seen what happens
to beautiful people in prime-time prison dramas.
I don’t want him there, even if he did
drink a whole bottle of Wild Turkey
and wreck into a parked car.
I envision him doing the things people do
when they’re in a jail on T.V.:
he lifts weights, he reads the Bible,
he pays some societal debt,
intangible but clearly required;
he talks to men with hard names
and bicep tattoos, and he showers very,
very quickly.
I have trouble imagining his face there—
his eyes like a boy’s, expectant,
but with darkness hidden, and fine pupils
that contract like startled fish when
they see a favorite something:
an old dog, a painting, or me.
II. My Teenage Sister Is Arrested
My mother, tired from the birth,
lying in a yellow-trimmed room
in an old house in Pittsburgh,
let me name her. I chose my
favorite name, Sarah, which I used
when playing princesses.
Perhaps there is a secret law,
a principle of nature, something unknown
in biology but lurking there in our genes,
or in the very fibers of dimensions,
which somehow prescribes that on the eve of a girl’s
fourteenth birthday, she must be abruptly
transfigured into a bitch.
Suddenly: too much makeup, slamming doors,
the whole tired formula, complete with greasy
teenage boy lurking around, calling the house,
fleeing the doorstep when I call him a hoodlum.
Even I didn’t know what would come next.
Corporate policy was to prosecute. We don’t have
a lawyer, so I suppose the judge will appoint one.
She’ll wear a dress, something our parents
will pick out. She’ll plead guilty. Maybe just
probation, six months, and community service,
whatever the minimum is for petty theft.
Love can’t fix this. Every way I play it, she’s still there
in handcuffs, telling me: God, just leave me alone.
Back Seat
We’re coming home from the horse races—
you told me to bet on the one that bites,
and I won twenty dollars with the meanest
brown I saw, drank ‘till I jumped up
and coached each chosen jockey to the gate,
and still you loved me. I’ll never know why.
We’re driving in the sticks, my hands
on you, my voice sexed up; no choice
but to veer left into a cornfield, lay down
and watch the ceiling of your truck intensely,
more pleasant than stars. Things unsaid
fit in the small space between my face
and your shoulder, curl up and incubate.
They wait for us to press closer. We’ll say them soon.
Long Day
Stand behind the counter, stare
straight at the door, first customer
of the day wants a large cappuccino,
double shot, make it extra hot
she says, winking, and you think to yourself:
only dishonest people wink.
Stand behind the counter, lady with a
baby asks for a skinny latte, she’s about
five six and weighs one hundred pounds,
use 2% instead because, hell, she won’t notice,
her used-car-dealer husband comes in,
wants a large house coffee, three shots of
espresso, buys a bag of chocolate-covered
espresso beans too, you look at the baby
and think, poor kid.
Stand behind the counter, ten-year-old
gets an Irish Cream latte, takes out his
cell phone and starts talking, five college girls
with matching purses come in, sit down,
yell for service, you point to the sign
by the door— Place All Orders At Counter—
they get huffy, order raspberry lattes
and complain not sweet enough,
couple comes in, they act married but
look like brother and sister, order two
decaf coffees, you wonder what is the point
of coffee if you don’t want the caffeine,
coffee is about the energy, something that can
carry you anywhere.
Stand behind the counter, old lady
comes in eight minutes till close,
says you spelled that wrong and points
to a sign advertising today’s muffin flavor,
swallow your angry well your face is ugly,
smile, take down the sign, spend ten minutes
making a new one, lady says
much better and looks dully satisfied.
Imagine her alone at night,
drinking warm milk through a straw.
Wink at her as she leaves.
Civil Rights March: Orlando, 1958
My grandmother (whose father, in his youth,
threw orange peels at the Catholics)
took my mother out of her crib
and put her in the stroller.
Six blocks they walked, past
five-and-dimes and soda fountains
and all the other features that
nailed the fifties down,
and gradually more joined them,
till the parade was six hundred strong,
all marching, singing, chanting rhymes,
ignoring signs that said “No Coloreds.”
But the center of town blanched
until each side of the street held
its own soldiers, pale like fright,
or like beds stripped down to
sheets with holes. My mother,
a white toddler eating a popsicle,
pointed at them and laughed, saying,
“There, mama! Ghosts!”
T.S. Eliot Comforts Me in the Paris Métro
I was in Paris, and the weather was shit,
all mushy leaves and backed up drains,
and someone’s guilt had made him spill—
he told me of her and it made me ill,
so I spent the whole day riding Métro trains
and thinking of him, which I’d never admit.
But my head held your poems, while we
lurched past Gare de Lyon and the cool
female voice warned us all not to trip.
You soothed me with death; at 22, my grip
on life was slipping. A respite. I’d be a fool
to ignore the rolling of the silent sea.
Obsession
At seven, I knew there was something wrong.
Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back!
we sang, and Avi and Lil skipped over
concrete breaks till they got tired and stopped;
I saw death in each fracture of the sidewalk.
I couldn’t, I couldn’t stop for six years.
First I was special. Wise beyond my years,
that’s all, able to see secrets, not wrong
or crazy, but unique. I’d wonder, on a walk
to school or the store (step forward five, back
two, the whole way home), if others had stopped
seeing hidden things: over and over
the patterns in walls, over and over
the insidious design. Then for years
I was mad, knowing others hadn’t stopped
but had never started, that it was wrong
to give yourself a headache rolling back
your eyes every five seconds, or to walk
as though the chance occurrence of sidewalk
cracks could portend ruin, or skip over
every third carrot on your plate, or back
up to avoid certain floor tiles. Count years,
count minutes, count seconds. Count sheep. If wrong:
disaster. If right, perfectly right: it stops
until next time. It will never stay stopped,
and next time could be on a Sunday walk
with your mother (who won’t see something’s wrong),
or during a talk about poems over
dinner with someone beautiful. Or years
later, in a Volvo, kissing in back.
We are scholars, of sorts. In going back
along each well-traveled path, in stopping
at the same stops in our tired minds, each year
we map more perfectly the cracked sidewalks,
the patterned ceilings, the bridges over
deep water. We’re experts. We’re never wrong.
We memorize the world, backwards. It’s wrong,
but unstoppable. Over and over,
year by sad year, we learn sidewalks by heart.
Oven
I baked my first pie
for you with the blueberries
I’d picked. Then I knew:
I am becoming
slowly a little loaf, warm,
rising, soft mouth still.
Geography
The continents all fit together, once,
clung to one another like wet snowflakes
until some argument, maybe over
climate or the direction of water
around the drain, caused a seismic splitting,
and each chose a side: the Americas
stuck together, though they’re barely speaking,
and Australia and Antarctica
both decided just to go it alone,
while the rest remained together, seething.
When you are away, I want to fit them
back together like an old broken plate.
I feel each fault line that lies between us
till you cross the world, return to me— then
lines on the map disappear, mountains fall.
You fit around me like layers in stone.
Documentary
At nine a.m., I meet the man outside
my apartment. Do whatever you do
normally. Pretend I’m not here, he says.
I do laundry. He films my underwear
moving in dull circles in the dryer.
Afterwards I go to the gym, run ten
minutes on the track and do twelve sit-ups.
I look straight ahead. There is no camera,
I think to myself. He walks outside and
makes conversation, smokes a cigarette.
I take a shower. He can’t film me there,
right? We drop by the library, and I
pretend to browse the stacks while he zooms in
on me through book spines. I am framed by
Stendhal and Schopenhauer, caught somewhere
unfamiliar. I try to choose something
flashy for filming, block lettering and
the author’s name looming large. Why this book?
He asks. Is it for one of your classes?
I lie. The book is in Esperanto.
We part ways outside. I try to make a
joke about The Real World: Vassar. It’s not
at all funny. He says something about
editing, how they’ll cut it up so that
I seem smart, like a girl you’d want to meet
at college, or at least one you’d expect
to meet. I imagine soon there will
be an inundation of adoring
fans searching for me. I’ll disappear, hide
my face. No one here will recognize me.
Last Choice
We are waiting for her to die.
She’s deaf and blind and can’t move well.
I don’t know how to say goodbye.
We find it hard to meet her eye.
Does she see the end? Can she tell
we are waiting for her to die?
She doesn’t know we see her cry.
She thinks she’s ended up in hell.
I don’t know how to say goodbye.
I asked how it feels. Her reply:
Like a long leaving. Like farewell.
We are waiting. For her to die,
we’d need a method. Would she sigh
before she went? Or would she yell?
I don’t know. How to say goodbye?
It’s up to her. The sun is high,
and she can hear the warning bell.
We are waiting for her. To die—
I don’t know how to. Say goodbye.
Judges
Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do! (Jgs. 19:30)
I. The Levite
We didn’t have to stay in Gibeah.
We could have gone to a Jebusite town,
stayed in an inn, a real inn, with a bed
and a hot meal, and hay for the donkey.
But I was afraid, I suppose. Nothing
frightens me more than strangers in the night.
So we kept on. She was angry, I knew.
I didn’t care. She’d played the whore with me
for the last time. When the old man
took us in, she looked at him with her eyes
like clear water. I hadn’t seen them so
since we’d left her father’s house. When she looks
at me, they become like the cool smooth stones
in the bracelet I gave her last winter.
When they knocked on the door, I was ready.
We had heard the riot forming outside
for the past hour. If I were a brave man,
I could have barred the door, waited it out.
But I’m afraid of hiding, and besides,
here was a perfect sacrifice, a woman
as proud as Lilith, as meddling as Eve,
who threw herself at any man who said
she was beautiful. Just like a woman.
If I were a woman I’d dig out my eyes,
cut off both my breasts, and live in a cave.
It’s the only way to stay pure from sin.
If the devil hadn’t struck her face with
beauty, none of this would have happened.
In the morning, she was on the doorstep.
Her face was bright with blood. I said to her,
“Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer.
II. The Host
I had to let them stay the night—
the man was from Ephraim, like me,
born and raised in the hill country.
I could hear the tribe in his voice,
you know, sibboleth instead of
shibbolth, the way we pronounce
vowels. They were there all alone,
and Zohra loves to have company.
I wasn’t sure about the crowd.
I thought maybe they’d come, I guess,
but I’d hoped they might understand
that sometimes a man needs to talk
with a man from his own homeland.
I didn’t realize what it meant,
taking in a man and his wife,
until the crowd came to the door.
Zohra doesn’t look at me now.
She used to help me in the fields,
walking through the wheat, touching stalks
with the tips of her small fingers,
nagging me to marry her off
to some farmer’s son or other.
Now we have dinner in silence
and I can’t hear her pray at night.
I’ve tried explaining it to her,
the ancient code, the host’s duty.
She’s mine to give away, as wife
or as harlot, whatever’s best
for us, whatever keeps us safe.
But she’s stubborn. And when she heard
of how he cut her into bits,
she wouldn’t leave her room for three whole days.
III. The Concubine
when at last everything was quiet
and i knew he would never come
i thought of how the first time i saw him
was like a sandstorm rising around me
and i stood like a pillar of salt
After Hours
Come home, kick off my shoes,
drop my coat into an awkward pile on the floor,
pour some water in a glass,
brush my teeth, read a magazine,
pull myself into soft things:
pillows and blankets, pink fuzzy slippers,
a mismatched set of old pajamas,
the shuttered dark of my bedroom.
Outside, the snow is weighing down
the roof, pressing the beams, causing the house
to groan softly, the windows to contract,
the driveway to shrink beneath the cold.
Inside, there is a space beside me,
I dream that you are under
my pillow, next to my cheek,
hidden, like an untold secret.
A Family Story
i.
She’s born in Slovakia, in a small town
blown up by Nazis in the Second War,
but by that time she’s off in America,
and by then her son is American
and crews submarines in the Pacific.
She was sixteen when she left from Europe,
sailed to the States with no money, no job,
just one ticket, across the Atlantic.
She came here to marry a mystery.
ii.
My great-grandfather was Slovak as well,
worked in shipyards and knew other Slovaks,
and one said, “Why not get married, Michael?”
and another one had a sister named
Elizabeth: quiet, pretty, wants to
come to America, too, just the girl
for you, Mike, so Mike sent her a ticket,
waited at the docks with his parish priest,
and watched a girl with short hair walk to him
down the gangplank, and afterwards she asked:
“Now, what did you say your name was again?”
iii.
They never loved. Love was a luxury,
something they fought for, for their children. When
my mother and my father met, that was
a luxury, like having a big house
or a desk job. My great-grandparents lived
in a house by the mine where he found work,
with dirt floors and no plumbing or heating,
and no windows. At nineteen, the age when
I first fell in love, she had already
had three children, and one of them had died.
iv.
They never learned English, never made it
past grammar school, could never read or write.
The last few children she never wanted,
but Mike had needs, and she had needs, and they
were good Catholics, nine children were a gift
from God. Mike felt the mine settle in him,
wrap thick fingers around his fragile lungs,
and the squeezing made him bitter, made him
curse in angry Slovak the land that was
killing him with every sharp, labored breath.
v.
And in the end, what good came of it all?
Nine children were Americans, and went
to ball games, had school dances, and drank Cokes.
Two of them died in the war, in Europe,
closer to the old country than the new.
The rest of them went to school, got married,
even did important things, like my own
grandpa, who designed rockets for NASA,
and built the Space Shuttle. But for this, two
people spent sad lives, doing hated things,
in a country they never understood.
vi.
What if they’d never come over the sea?
They might have been exactly as happy
or sad as they were in America,
but closer to parents, closer to home,
and further away from each other.
They’d have stayed unsuspectingly apart,
each in a separate life, living out
their time instead of providing a place
for me, their great-granddaughter, whom they never knew.
Alba
We wait as long as possible to wake,
now and then pulling tired eyes open
and peering sleepily through the window
to watch the progress of the still morning,
or rolling towards the wall and glancing
quickly at the clock, then counting time left.
We’ll get up in ten minutes. Five minutes.
Three. Entangled soft, immobilized by
love, we shut out morning sounds: birds, neighbors’
good mornings, kids outside going to school.
In less than two minutes, you will get up,
take a shower, put on a shirt, give me
a string of kisses leading to the last,
and the last on the doorstep, me in sweats,
the way you’ll remember me for three months.
But until then you hold me suspended,
protected from daylight, like delicate
moss. Block out that sun with layers of sheets,
hide me behind closed doors, behind shutters.
I’ll be your secret for just a bit more.
True Story
Guess it all started with that Kool-Aid.
I was over my friend Michelle’s,
and she got this brother named Joe
who is like six years older than we are,
and he was having a party that day with a buncha guys,
some just home from the Marines.
Michelle went to go pick up her cousin Jen in Steubenville
and she told me to make myself at home,
so I lay down on her bed and took a little nap
and when I woke up there was this kid there by the bed,
looking at me. I think he’d been there awhile.
I can’t even tell you what he looked like,
he was that unremarkable.
He said hey, I said hey. He asked if I wanted to party.
I didn’t know if he meant like the party downstairs
or like a party in his pants
so I said no thanks. He offered me a beer,
but I said no, I gotta be off, I gotta kid at home
and it’s almost eleven. He said then how about Kool-Aid,
got some orange Kool-Aid from downstairs,
it ain’t spiked, I ain’t an asshole. I wanted him
to go away, so I took it and drank it and said
thanks, see you around.
I woke up five hours later when Michelle came home,
found me naked, and called the cops.
That’s not our feature presentation. That’s the preamble,
the lead-in, the preview— the main event
is after that, and after I found myself pregnant
for the second time in two years,
and me only sixteen. Shit, I’d just made up my school work
from the last time, when I’d had Trinidy and I couldn’t go to class
for the last month or so. My teachers always said I was smart,
but there’s a point where there’s no catching up. So school was out for me,
and my mom said no to abortion cause she’s a Catholic,
though I laughed because my sisters and I
all got different fathers, and she never married any of those suckers.
We found out that it was a boy. Before he was born,
I thought I’d name him Percy, after Shelley, y’know.
I’m not trying to be a show-off, I just really liked him
when we did his stuff in school. Everyone else said
he was really boring, but I liked Ozymandias,
how the guy in that poem was a total prick,
and then his statues were all crumbling and gone. Ha!
I liked all those Romantic guys, Shelley
and Coleridge especially, although Byron was never my favorite.
Anyways, my mom said Percy was a dumb name.
She probably named him Wyatt or something.
I felt bad leaving, specially leaving Trinidy
cause she’d been sick last month with pneumonia
and I knew her, really knew her, and I loved her.
The boy I didn’t get to know, just saw him twice,
once over the stirrups when they pulled him out
and once when they brought him in after the shots,
the inky footprints, the weighing and measuring,
and all that shit. He looked like my brother Jesse did
when he was born, and that was creepy,
felt kinda incestuous, like the baby I’d had
was really my brother, some kind of soap opera mix up
on Days of Our Lives. They took him away,
my mom went outside to smoke, I tried to get up.
The nurses said no, Dana, you can’t get up, lie down and rest.
I said it’s my second, I’m used to it. They tried to give me the old
do-what-you’re-told-little-girl act,
and I said I’m a mother of two, I’ll do what I want.
I took a shower, I put on some clothes,
I walked out into the hall, I walked past the nurses
but none of them were my nurses, so they didn’t know.
My nurses were busy reporting my bad behavior to the doctor.
I was busy starting my car, pulling out of St. E’s parking lot,
heading west on I-80 in my Geo Metro, out of Ohio,
whose official motto is The Heart of It All.
Damn, I’m sick of being in a soap opera. You see things
on TV— teen pregnancy, rape, runaway mothers—
and you forget that they happen to people sometimes,
people who aren’t acting. I get so tired of pretending
these things are shocking anymore, like my life is something
sensational. It kills me that there were probably nurses there,
nurses who heard about me running off,
who went home that day and told everyone at the dinner table
that some poor scared kid skipped town and left her mom
to take of her toddler and her newborn,
in addition to three sisters and a brother. It kills me
that people are listening to this and thinking,
how awful, how sad, how strange.
I drove to Nebraska first. Big mistake.
Nebraska is so wide and empty that your sadness
seems wider and emptier than before, being there.
Driving through Lincoln, I wondered what the suicide rate was.
I didn’t mean to get that far, I guess
I just wasn’t thinking till then. I can’t even remember
Indiana and Illinois, and Iowa is still a little hazy.
I can’t believe I drove that whole way after giving birth.
Shit, I was barely awake.
I think when I got to Lincoln was when I realized
I hadn’t slept in almost three days, so I pulled over,
shut off the engine, and passed out. Fifteen hours later
some guy knocked on the glass, asked how I was.
I said I was tired from driving. When my eyes focused,
I saw the guy was a cop. I heard him tell me to get some sleep,
find a place to stay, he wanted me to be safe.
I pulled my car into the nearest motel, paid $49 for a room,
and went back to sleep on the steering wheel.
Eventually I got hungry. I hadn’t really eaten in three days either,
so I grabbed me some Wendy’s and sat in my dirty little room
and ate my square burger and watched Platinum Weddings.
It’s this show where really rich people get married
and show off all their sweet decorations and shit.
I can’t see the point of having eight bridesmaids.
And then on the evening news they had a story
about the unemployment rate rising some percent
and I realized how fucked I was,
like totally, completely, and hopelessly fucked,
no friends here, no family, no job, no food,
about ten dollars in my bank account, and I couldn’t use it
unless I wanted them to track my card. I’d paid for the room
and the Wendy’s with all my cash, I had half a tank of gas,
I hadn’t changed my clothes since I’d gone into labor
days ago. All I had in my car were some pennies,
a lint roller, an old Wal-Mart bag, and my copy
of Great Romantic Poetry I stole from school when I dropped out.
I took a long shower and thought
about how fucked I was, I let the water pound into my face,
I said fuck over and over, calmly, fuck fuck fuck,
then louder till my throat hurt,
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.
I considered my options. 1:
be a hooker. I still couldn’t stand men,
not after the orange Kool-Aid,
I would smell them and feel suddenly sick,
I would see them hold hands with their girlfriends
and I’d wish I had a Taser, even little boys made me nervous
just knowing what they’d one day become.
The demand for lesbian hookers isn’t as high,
so tricks were out of the question. 2:
be a stripper. Strippers have long legs,
flat stomachs, sweet thighs. I’d just given birth. 3:
be a drug dealer. I didn’t know where to get drugs,
how to get drugs, or how to do drugs. Shit.
The dresser drawer had two books:
Gideon’s Bible, a Yellow Pages.
I tried the phone book first, found a hotline for unwed mothers.
Hello? someone answered. Hello, I said. My name is Dana
(I don’t know why I told her my real name)
and I’m an unwed mother.
She didn’t say anything. I was hoping she’d say
Oh okay, come on down to our unwed mother house
and have some hot chocolate, we’ll find you a job.
Instead, she just said, Can I help you?
I said, Probably not. And I hung up.
Then I saw a Plasma Collection Center in the Yellow Pages.
I grabbed the Gideons Bible
(never know when you’ll need it)
and drove to the center,
and got $55 for my plasma, not a bad price.
It didn’t hurt, only took two hours.
Felt nice to drive again, though, nice to be moving,
so I drove all the way to Denver, every couple hours pulling over,
taking a nap until a tire squealed or a car beeped nearby,
grabbing bites of fast food, pumping a little gas,
sometimes stealing, though it felt bad to do,
and then I was in the mountains, and things were looking up.
I’d never seen mountains before. The Appalachians, sure,
but those are more like hills, really,
you can just tell they’re wearing down.
The Appalachians are little round swellings,
like my belly, still not deflated. The Rockies
are more like broken bones.
I liked the mountains, big fence posts keeping me safe,
keeping things out, so I stayed for awhile. I lived
in the Titanic Cooperative, which was run by a Turkish woman
named Necdet who was very very very teeny,
only four foot ten, with small hands like little kids’ hands,
fairy hands my mom would say.
I’d stopped to buy a bag of dried pineapple,
and Necdet asked me about myself, and I told her,
and she gave me a room. There were fourteen of us—
we cooked and cleaned together, and we had some chickens in the yard
that laid brown eggs. I didn’t know they came in brown.
I stayed for three weeks, and every night I was there
Necdet brought out an old pack of cards, cut them,
shuffled them fast like a dealer in Vegas, and dealt out
poker hands to see who would do the dishes.
That’s how I got the idea to go to Vegas,
maybe I could be a like a waitress or something, and maybe
a show girl someday, if I ever got over the manhate.
I guess I took some of Necdet’s stuff or whatever,
just another bag of dried pineapple and a couple juice boxes.
I don’t feel too bad about it, I think she wanted me to have them anyway.
I went to the library and used a public computer
to Mapquest some directions, then drove down
through the dust of New Mexico till my directions told me I was there.
I looked around. Old metal buildings leaning to one side,
cattle leaning on the buildings, farmers leaning on the cattle,
everyone looking sleepy in the desert sun.
This was Las Vegas, New Mexico, with no showgirls,
few waitresses, and nothing shiny or neon.
It took a couple minutes for me to get that I’d fucked up.
Then I crashed the car into the side of a mesa.
I sat on the busted-up hood of my car for about two hours,
till this guy pulled over and asked if I was okay.
I said sure, just a little confused is all.
My name is Incendio, he said in this weird accent,
and I told him my name was Debbie—
the only “D” name I could think up then.
He drove me into town, called a tow truck for my car,
had it taken to a shop. I can’t pay for this, I said.
He said don’t worry about it, I like helping people.
I noticed then that he was the first guy I’d met
in a long time who didn’t make me sick.
After awhile, he asked if I needed somewhere to stay.
I said yes, I really really really did.
He said I could crash at his place, warned me
it was a little messy. I said, trust me, I don’t judge.
We ended up kissing on his roof
when he took me up there to look at the stars,
which I’d never seen without the haze of the Northeast
over them. In New Mexico, so many things were clearer.
Incendio. Turned out to be a Colombian activist
living down there and working with some Santa Fe peace group
on the weekends. He went to Harvard, so I guess he was smart,
though he didn’t know how to do lots of things,
like make fresh chicken noodle soup or play I Spy.
He at least knew how to find me a job
as a waitress at IHOP, which I loved
because waffles are my cocaine.
He had kind of a unibrow, but otherwise
he was the hottest guy I’d ever met, made me all tingly
when he spoke Spanish in the mornings while he made coffee.
We lived together for six months, and he even took me to White Sands,
which was pretty disappointing cause it really was just white sand,
but it was still a nice trip. We sang along with the radio
on the way there, and he played me a CD of Spanish songs
and told me some stories about his grandfather,
who had been chosen as the president of Colombia once
but then fucked it up by shooting a Congressman
in the leg. When we got there everything was so bright
and the sand was so hot that I wanted to keep driving
all the way to California, to the Pacific.
He said we were gonna go to the Grand Canyon someday.
I guess I should’ve figured out what would happen next.
My whole life I’ve been trying to get shit done,
just live in peace, and people keep fucking it up.
His friend Mary came to visit, and she went to Harvard, too,
so of course I come back one day and they’re fucking on the couch.
He was such an asshole that he tried to reason with me,
told me it was natural, that he needed a woman with
class, with brains. I told him that just because I’m a dropout
doesn’t mean I’m stupid, because if I had been cheating,
I’d have at least gotten a fucking motel room, dipshit.
I told Mary to enjoy his small dick, it was all hers,
I told Incendio guess what, my name’s not Debbie,
and I walked outta there, hurting but in one piece,
not all cracked inside like how I felt after the Kool-Aid.
I figured on going to California then, because in movies
California is always sunny and full of cute guys,
and that’s where a broken-hearted girl oughta be,
so I got out my IHOP money and I took it slow,
drove through Arizona and admired the view
from the tops of all these plateaus and stuff,
and at night I camped out in my car,
reading bits from the Bible and my Romantic poets
by a keychain flashlight until I fell asleep.
California really is beautiful, but you get so lazy
there from the sun and the surf that you can’t focus,
so I started getting slower and slower,
and spending more and more time asleep.
I didn’t really know where I was going, and L.A.
seemed so tired that it made me tired,
so I kept going up the coast, ignoring whole cities
of people, until I got to San Francisco, and then I could stop,
because the air was fresher there, somehow.
I stayed downtown in a hostel called the White Elephant
with beds in rows and a room called the Ballroom,
which had probably been a fancy place in the old days,
but now the wallpaper was rotting and the marble busts
were all scratched up. College kids in town for spring break
would buy cases of beer and drink them in the Ballroom,
and sometimes one would start dancing on a table
while the regulars, who were older and creepier,
would smoke pot and watch in hopeful silence.
I met Aina there, eventually, though the first time we met
she was too fucked up to really talk. She was an actress from Spain,
although she wasn’t Spanish, she was Catalan,
and when I asked what the difference was, she got mad.
She spoke Catalan a lot, hated wearing bras,
and didn’t have a job because she was too busy
with the drugs to go to auditions.
When she got really fucked up she’d do her monologues
for me in the Ballroom until something made her start laughing
and then she couldn’t stop until the next day.
We were pretty good friends most of the time,
except for the times she was so high she got me confused
with Eduardo, a stray collie she fed in the alley.
It was Aina who convinced me to man up
and call Michelle. I didn’t want to talk to my mom,
didn’t want to hear her cuss me out and tell me
that I’m some slutty, busted up bitch who left her
kids like the deadbeat dropout she is. But I’d like to know
how Trinidy is doing, if she even notices I’m gone.
I’d like to hear about Michelle, too,
not that we were sister-close or anything,
but we were always friends, and I liked her voice.
So I let Aina badger me, saying child, you’re too young
for this kind of isolation, and I bought a phone card
and hunched up around the payphone in the lobby.
Hello? said Michelle.
I said hey, it’s me. It’s Dana.
Michelle said oh my fucking God.
We talked for exactly an hour, because that’s exactly
how much I had on my phone card, and I kept asking her
how she was, but she’d just sound really annoyed and say,
me? who cares, what are you doing,
what have you been up to, where are you going, what are you
doing? And I didn’t want to tell her straight, so I said
I was in Canada working as a maid,
and she said oh my God you need to come home
because the police called yesterday
and they said they might have found that guy,
the one who put roofies in your Kool-Aid.
I got a buzzing feeling all over when she said this,
like a hundred bugs were underneath my skin
and wiggling all around me. I said I don’t even know
what this kid looks like, how can I prove anything?
She said she heard the guy got caught doing the same thing
to two other girls in town, and one girl out in Campbell,
and they thought it might be the same guy,
I bet it could be the same guy, she kept saying.
Aina gave me two presents for the trip back home:
one was a pair of shoes that someone left at the hostel
and never came back for, a little too small for me,
but nice-looking, gray with pink stripes.
The other was a brand-new book of Shelley’s poems,
travel-size, with a leathery-looking cover
and a picture of Shelley on the first page.
She bought it new, I could tell by the price sticker.
She must have been sober for days to afford it.
I packed everything up in the car, not that there was much,
and headed out at around six in the morning.
Everything still smelled cold and fresh,
and the sky was clear except for a line of clouds
that, when the early sun hit them, looked like
a long carpet laid out above me.
I had some coffee. I put on a CD.
I drove for about ten minutes. But the whole time
I couldn’t stop thinking about the ocean,
so I stopped by the beach and walked in the sand
and tried to remember how to breathe, but all I could remember
was Trinidy with her pale face
and the boy only a weight in my belly,
and his daddy, his daddy, there was a man who had done
this awful thing to me, and he was someone’s father,
I couldn’t stop thinking about that, how this boy
did an evil thing but someone new and tiny came out of it,
and I couldn’t stand the two things in my head
at once, the awful thing and the beautiful thing,
they just didn’t make sense at all,
not in this world or any world I know.
And the tide was going out, it was all going out,
out was the only way to go for anything,
away, towards anyplace not here,
so I lay down in the sand and looked up
and let the sky and the ground pushed me flat between them,
preserving me between their pages like a pressed flower—
brittle, but finally completely drained.
Impact
When I came to see
you in lockup, a sheet of
glass was between us
and I remembered
the robin that crashed into
our window, and lived.
A Very Bad Poem
This is going to be an awful poem.
I know it. I don’t want to be writing
as I lie here. I want to be kissing my boyfriend,
or taking a nap. This poem is a chore.
I’m a pretty bad poet. I can’t make myself write
when I don’t want to write, and I never
choose writing over something else,
like sleeping, or fishing, or playing cards.
At first glance, I’d seem to have the makings
of a natural poet. I wear lots of flowing skirts,
and I’m awkward, and when I don’t take my meds
I lock myself in my room and stare out the window.
Someone once told me that, to be good at writing
about life, you need to be bad at living it.
I suppose this explains why so many poets
had sad, short lives. Shelley, and Byron, and Keats,
Dylan Thomas, who died of too much beer,
and Sylvia Plath, who killed herself.
A study done a few years ago
proved that poets live shorter lives than others,
mostly because they drink themselves to death
or throw themselves out of windows,
or sometimes just let themselves rot until
they have nothing in them worth keeping alive.
And this brings us to the crux of the matter:
there are lots of reasons why I’m a bad poet—
I’m not very smart, for one thing,
and I don’t read enough, for another—
but also, I’m not willing to spend this afternoon
pressing keys on a computer,
when I could be doing things
to write about.
