To catch everyone up, here are the first 11 poems. I will continue to post them on Mac Attack, but will try to remember to post them here as well.
1. Burning Leaves
Burning leaves
flash me back to Mexico
where the fields afire
scorched my young lungs
flash me back to Mexico
where I walked picked clean
my young lungs scorched
by incendiary male attention
where I walked picked clean
by every male eye
their incendiary attention
floating me between them
every male gaze
smoking over me
floating me between them
a tender fifteen year old
eyes smoking over me
their tindered regard
for a tender fifteen year old
with paper white skin
their frictive regard
making me ignite inside
under paper white skin
with a sense of precarious
ignition, this fire inside
caught from fiery fields
and a sense of precarious
anger on the verge of implosion
catching from fiery fields
I’m trying to find air to breathe
on the verge of angry implosion
in this country where I don’t belong
trying to find air to breathe
the spring fields still smoldering
this country where I don’t belong
burning my tender leaves
2. Knit Wit
The string through the fingers
sliding like thought, like time, and
the new weight of the blanket
cascading, newborn, invented,
in my lap, its warmth building like
a layer of snow, the dark ball un-
raveling over the sofa, and rolling
toward its edge, then hovering,
hiding its snarled end in its belly,
and the cats, circling, eyes gleaming
neon, claws flexing in their sheaths --
this is how I write down the hours,
one stitch at a time, in tight rows
perfumed with my skin and sweat.
3. Tea Bag Proverb
To be calm is the highest achievement
of the self.
Tell that to the young woman I was
27 years ago -- the one whose blood
frothed under the whip of maybes and whatifs,
the one whose brain cycled faster than
a hummingbird’s wing as it recreated
the past, single moments bounced infinitely
back and forth against the mind’s twin
mirrors. That woman created an aura of
emotional disorder in her wake, trembling
hands and shaking heads,
frowns and shutups and fortheloveofgods.
That woman found another woman’s hands
wrapped around her neck.
Even in sleep, that woman tumbled
haphazard through tidal waves,
found herself trapped in the funhouse
of a thousand alternate futures,
and ran from blankfaced gunmen,
only to open the door to
a bullet in the face.
It would be a mercy
to forget that woman
in an unmarked grave,
to let her, finally, rest.
But she visits me, still,
in dreams, talking soundlessly and
wringing her bloodless hands,
pacing the confines of her skull cell,
promising the end of this
tenuous peace,
promising bankruptcy,
cancer,
Alzheimer’s,
abandonment,
and the sweet oblivion
of apocalypse.
4. Dying Body
It’s becoming more and more difficult
to navigate -- overnight, the streets
change names, switch north with south,
dead end in sudden rivers or stone walls.
Personalities, likewise, slip sideways:
the gentle man you married 20 years ago
develops a seething temper, boiling
under the surface like a hot spring,
and your own (once legendary)
sneaks off to leave you
muddled and slap-happy, sipping
herbal teas by the kitchen window.
Gray skies now and always, no sun
to light the way, no stars to pinpoint
the direction out. And the bedsheets,
too, strap you down, twist you
into sweaty knots, straitjackets
of hot, violent dreams: car crashes,
houses burning around you,
exitless mazes to trap you in your
5. Easter Morning
Rises as usual, dragging dull lawns
into matte light, outlining bare branches
on maples, brittle sticks shifting in a
soundless breeze. A sparrow flits
past the front window, psychopomp
plump with official spring business.
I half-fill my body, light-headed as
last night’s alcohol etherizes in me,
lifting me up and pressing me down,
painting the spaces in my blood with
dank images of my dead father’s smug
smile: A hangover, m’dear. What if I
become a drunk, like him? What if, under
this woman skin, I'm my father's ghost?
6. Almost Here
Can you feel it? How everything right now
trembles on the lip of something big?
Some epiphany? Some sudden surprise?
I shiver from the inside out. The air is
thick with this anticipation, stagnant, as we
hold a thousand thousand breaths.
Inside our stale houses, we wait and
tremble, looking out our dusty windows,
standing alone in our bodies, as if it might
saunter up the street at any moment,
kick the mud off its boots and ring the bell,
grinning at us with big yellow teeth.
7. Violence
Today I am infected with silence.
It wells up in me from some unknown source,
plugging me with its passive violence.
This internal blankness feels quite serious.
I’m used to a stream of images, of course,
not suffering the infection of silence,
where that stream seems used up, spent,
drained of an essential force,
plugged up with some passive violence.
Could I blame the loss on age and travel? Miles pent
up in memory, overfilled, bent, lost, the worst
piled up to infect the (blessed) mental silence?
No. Blame takes too much energy. Silence
slams me against its mental dam. I am hoarse with
not-shouting, plugged passive with its violence,
drowning in nothing, breathing cold silence,
sinking to the bottom of a soundless river, cursed
with the fatal infection of silence,
plugged passive with its frozen violence.
8. Fish and Birds
In that house on Elmer Street, as the sixties
slid into the seventies, our pets could not be
touched. Cold blooded animals, close to the start
of the evolutionary chain, they swam to and fro
in bubbling tanks, through purple seaweed
over whitish decorative rocks,
waving chewed tails like flags,
languid in their glass prison.
The fat guppies regularly spit out
clouds of babies,
which they and the angelfish --
open mouthed and wide eyed --
probably ate.
Neon tetras zigged and zagged, fluorescent
arrows
through herds of nameless silver fish,
while the Siamese fighting fish (male)
dangled mute
in his separate tank, dark blue turning
black,
observing us with
prehistoric hatred
through the scratched plastic.
These were Dad’s animals, and he tended them
with clinical affection,
cleaning their aquariums
til the glass glowed,
moving them from one tank to another,
replacing them as they floated to the top.
We wanted mammals -- dogs or cats, hamsters,
rats -- furry beasts with palpable beating hearts.
Dad’s concession was a blue and white parakeet,
Bill, who sharpened his beak on a cuttlebone,
who chirped and shrieked in the kitchen,
scattering seeds and droppings on his slab
of old newspaper,
whose heart beat wild
when in our enthusiasm for touch
we reached chubby fingers into his cage.
It wasn’t long before Bill died,
turned up one morning stiff as a comma
on last month’s news, claws
curled around nothing,
eyes wide.
Dad theorized that our bedroom,
cold by the window
where the wind wormed through the old wood,
did the deed,
but perhaps we killed him with our fevered and
childish need for petting,
or that house, so long steeped in
antiseptic waters, filled with
the exhalations of those glass prisons,
couldn’t support a
touchable beast.
9. Hanging Out with Mark Twain
I have been living lately with Mark Twain
or at least a voice actor inhabiting Mark Twain
as he burbles through day after day, week
after week, month after month of his latter days
here on earth, April, May, June, July, August,
1906, offering thoughts on a series of
incompetent investments, his bone deep
laziness, his conviction that the gods we’ve
invented are not worth believing in, that
the god who exists is so amoral and cruel
that all praise for it is misguided,
that to die is to cease, completely,
and thus not give a shit (my translation)
about those left standing -- his children’s
children’s children -- listening now to his
voice from the grave, “because I am dead,”
he says, “and long dead, I can happily tell you
exactly what I am thinking with no fear of reprisal,
no moral complications, no need to lie or bend
the truth to suit social conventions, no need
to spare my friends any embarrassment or
my enemies the excoriation they so richly
deserve.” Mark, or Sam, as I’ve come to
think of him, is a great friend -- he tells me
everything he’s thinking -- and if he doesn’t
really have the talent of listening? Well, so
be it. Mark walks with me and the dog
around the block, keeps talking as I scoop
her warm droppings and twist their stink
into a Festival bag, muses further as I kick
the dust off and wipe Willow’s paws,
holds forth while I make an omelet and put in
holds forth while I make an omelet and put in
a load of yoga clothes. He might have an opinion
about my domestic chores, their mundane
orbits, but he keeps that to himself, amused
by the waters of the past, inspired by ancient grudges
and moldy mistakes. He offers, he says,
dictation, he is open (as we all are) to suggestion
from his surrounding environment, he is an idea
antenna, bringing in signals from his dead present
and his further dead past, and I am happy to take
all of him in as I wash the dishes and wipe the sink.
10. Hiding in the Library
I am currently imagining
that my office is not a 3 minute walk away
but instead in another country
where human animals do not sense the fact of Friday
but scuttle hither and yon with their heads
buried in their shoulders
and their eyes fixed on the abused carpet
where a 100 years of such traffic
looks like a trail of bloody tears.
Instead of joining that Protestant parade
(all the more pathetic ironic for the Catholic walls
that contain it)
I am sitting in the library cafe with a latte
nursing what feels like the start of rebellion
against the tyranny of busywork, of paper
pushing and paper grading, of make-meetings and
theoretical readings, of emails and assignments and
break room cabals over translucent coffee,
I am tapping this poem out on my iPad
like a neo-bohemian,
smacking down autocorrect
and the evil first line capital letter default
with impunity, with decision, with a kind of
flamboyant disregard for authority,
word by word leaving that office
further behind in that dusty country
where PhDed peasants toil in the academic fields
plucking intellectual cotton from the gnarled vines
til their fingers weep metaphorical blood.
11. Dear Dad
Now that you’re dead, well and truly, I can love you
the way I never could when you were alive:
I can admire your once-upon-a-time dashing good looks,
the way dark hair curled over your clear brow, your
penetrating gaze and dimpled movie-star smile, and your
luxurious waxed Zapata mustache.
At your funeral, Lizzie said, looking at old photos:
“Wow, Grandpa Schorr was a total babe,”
and even your wistful baby pictures excited in us all
nothing but sympathy and a little good heartache
for what we knew would be a hard and lonely life.
Now I can admit that you were an artist with the camera,
that -- looking through your telephoto lens --
you captured souls --
dreams of escape, achingly exiled moments, pleas
for recognition, for scraps of fellow feeling or
just a moment of human kindness
that somehow you must have provided.
Now I can thank you for taking us out of the States,
for teaching us another language,
for pushing us past the usual, for making us
despise that usual, and even
for forcing us into pain and sometimes shame
as strange strangers in a land that
smiled at us but didn’t really want us.
Like you, it made us stronger, forged our anxieties
into chainmail.
Now I can admit that you loved us all
the same, the best you could,
broken as you were by your bent life, your
secrets, and that you loved me
as your own child,
because (as you might’ve said) I belonged to you,
you’d put your defiant stamp on me,
you’d clipped and twisted and pruned me
the way you thought any good father should.
You’d given me your name,
and defended me against my enemies,
swelled with pride when I won awards and
ranted and railed against me when I failed.
And when we’d all abandoned you
to your rat-infested apartment,
when you were slowly dying,
lost to the bottle, drifting in false
memories and ancient accusations,
writing down what was left to you
in scraps and fevered dreams,
you still loved me enough
to write my name,
to say (to my shame) that I was good.
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