| Transplant |
| Suicide |
| You Are Dangerous / (Audio) |
| Dropping Hints |
| In The 6th Month |
| Origami Girl |
| Paralyzed Night |
I cut myself out of your landscape, Albuquerque, because you thought you had me all mapped out. There was no canyon or Village Inn, no major intersection that didn't know where my fault lines rested. So I packed my suitcase and let the longitude of my grief pull me across the country. Of course I missed you. At times it was hard to keep breathing without your mountains around to mirror the white crested peaks of my heartbeat. I don't know if it was mistake or grace that brought me here. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World, their boot soles were heavy with dirt from the mother country. This is how seeds of chickpeas and wheat made their way across the Atlantic. Maybe I arrived here stuck to the bottom of God's great invisible shoe. Or maybe, I am more tumbleweed than free willed woman maybe I docked into the arms of this city, my husband, byway of a careless wind. Either way, it hasn't been easy to trade in the Rio Grande river that rolled across your body like the Spanish rrrrrrrrr on the tongue of a Native New Mexican, for the Missouri. The flora of chile rellenos, frijoles, adobe, the fauna of nightly tangos between police sirens and Mariachi, don't grow here in farm country. But, Albuquerque, have you ever seen a field of fireflies? My first summer night on the plains, I thought I was having a seizure or witnessing the synapses of God's brain. It was so beautiful I cried out. And that's how it started--in the lungs, it moved through the heart, went to the liver, the joy spread like a dandelion until all my major organs were playing a hymn inside the church of this body. Albuquerque, I'm going to stop talking now so you can listen to the sound of a woman taking root in her skin.
Suicide,
Like silence,
Like prom night,
Like sugar,
Like butter,
Like sleeping in on a Sunday morning,
Is a luxury.
At 13, I followed suit like every young lady,
Wanted to widow my own body:
Ask any woman and she'll tell you,
There's only a two - letter difference between
"Emaciated" and "emancipated,"
I thought I had to buy the farm,
So to speak,
Slit the river's throat
If I wanted to feel the breeze and sail the boat.
At 16, I was so bored of standing my ground,
Grave stone or tulip but not dangerously a live woman,
Tired of boys names in my mouth like hooks
Always fishing for compliments;
I swallowed gills and grew prayers and threw myself over board:
Sylvia Plath,
Only woman willing to pickpocket god,
With her veins steady as German night trains
Taught me
How to stick my tongue out at death,
Graze on the water's breath
Until I could get back to the shore and stand amazed
Wearing gazes like
Car crashes.
And eventually Miss Dickinson-
Emily- gave me my own morose
Code to follow. Alone and quiet
Maybe was altogether better than crowded by
A man and his violence.
I imagined her with
Her lover he saying,
"Darling, do you find me dashing?"
All the while her pulse stuttering,
He bows, "How do you do?"
She replies,
"Smashing."
Heart crashing like a flock of birds against a glass sky.
By 21, I had French kissed socialists and communists and
capitalists,
I was the only witness as each man I met
Kissed the forehead of my dreams,
Unfastened their yellowed wings,
I crossed myself as they doused them with gasoline.
I kept dying my hair red,
Calling my mother collect,
Trying to build fire escapes with my tears.
I spent all my young years coo coo cooing with pigeons
Out on the ledge,
So there was never a whole lot of room for holy things like
Dancing and
What I failed to understand
Is that the craving for breath must always come before death.
What Sylvia failed to pass on to me,
What Emily maybe meant to say before she was cut off,
What at 25 my gut tells me
Is this:
A lady must pick her tragedies like her flowers,
Carefully.
Tie yourself up in the walls of your room,
Go half cocked at the nearest moon,
Paint your silly toes,
Pick the wrong man
Once,
Yawn in the face of a perfect dawn,
Wallpaper the basement
With monarch wings,
Wear white dresses while eating spaghetti,
But don't
Leave your sisters
Hanging.
Because you look like my father And you taste like water. Because in this circus You do not juggle flame or paint your face but Pitch the tent; Your sweat falls Unnoticed on dirt; Planting salty seeds to grow whole oceans For the women you love to swim in; So that When you come to them, Towel in hand They will tell you, Honestly, Lungs at half mast in half Sleep: "I am doing swimmingly," And you'll both go under, breathless. You are dangerous, Bent on one knee, hell bent on loving me While the earth around us spins about, Drunk on its own neon sermons and nursery Rhymes, You wait, Full of silence, A piano in the palm of a wheat field at dusk; This is hardly common, And you have everything in common with dreams; It is thus your eloquent bones Startle me. For now, I am miles from you. By day, I wade through strange cities; By night, I sit in motel rooms In the company of bad art and unsent postcards; And if all I can be to you is a memory: Remember me, A still life of woman in want of your company, Return to me again and again. Because tonight, even the moon Is on your side; Persistent, she wills her light into my window, A floodlight burning your skyline into my heart.
The FBI is dusting book jackets for fingerprints, Their gloved hands man-handling a copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, looking for the prints of A Communist, A Leftist, A Romantic. When I'm not at the library, I'm with you, Love: Leave an eyelash on your pillow; Strands of hair in your shower; And when they leave my body, My dreams are not in an undisclosed location- No they're right there at the base of your bed. So, if I keep writing all this anti-war poetry And the FBI comes looking for me, They'd do well to check out a single, hardback Copy of You: Dust your skin as you sleep, Lift my lip prints from your cheek. Turn the other one and I'm Tangoing again, with my laundry basket, my Books, my computer, Trying to get out of your front door and back to My apartment. And if the FBI put a tap on this poem, They'd trace it back to two minutes earlier When I "accidentally" dropped my ring on your Bathroom floor so you could "accidentally" find it And take it out for a fitting; We get into the car and you say "Do you have Everything?" and I say "Oh, I do." For weeks, I wait in anticipation, Everything is infused with new meaning, Even pigeon droppings on statues are beautiful, Become a thing to behold as I say "Baby, did you know those birds mate for life?" And at night, when I look up at the stars, My eyes following those breadcrumbs of light, It seems plain as day we'll spend the rest of ours Together. Eventually you find my ring on your bathroom Floor You trace it back to me- your footsteps follow You to my front door And you say, "Did you lose this?" I say, "I do---I mean yes- I did. I've been looking All over the place for that thing." And if the FBI had any sense, If the FBI had any capacity for feeling, They'd stop dusting book jackets for prints, They'd stop lifting ink-colored men out of Airports. I suspect that our situation is so grave, I suspect that we've all been running laps around Our fears Until even our shadows break into a sweat, I suspect that Washington D.C. is poring over Maps of Iraq While wedding dresses hang in windows, Because it's terrifying In these times To ask for things, To open up, To say what we really mean. We would rather leave it up to others, Feed our imaginations bread and water, Sit back, cross our fingers, collect dust, look up to That guy on the cross, And imagine that nothing is up to us As God and Fate arm-wrestle against the horizon. So I'm turning myself in Side out, Because this is a prayer Disguised as a poem Which is expressing an undercover desire to be Your- I do. I do. Want to be your, well, you know- No, you don't know: I want to be your wife.
Your inner ear has fully formed. You can hear now. I've heard of mothers playing their unborn babies the movements of Bach and Mozart because studies show that classical music makes the brain's spatial connections arc towards one another like the fingertips of Adam and God on the ceiling of the Sistine. I've played no such music for you and maybe, some day, when the girl you pine for is majoring in architecture, or when you're brain goes cumulous and gray as you stare at your pop quiz in geometry, you will hold this against me. Truth is, I cannot bear to wear headphones on my stomach and force you to sit in the front row seat of your mother the auditorium while Pachelbel's Canon fires off the synapses of your brain, for the same reason I cannot bring myself to have your father recite French or fractions into my belly. No sonata or tongue or equation could teach us what we are learning already: that to be human is to be heavy, to carry more than one heart inside of you. Without speaking, you and I are two melodies co-existing peacefully. Israel and Palestine ought to blow up their road maps and speeches and tanks put down their cymbals and put their ears to my womb-- take notes on how our pulses negotiate, listen to how this belly stretches like an accordion, a peace accord making room for the song of you.
They say you've got a thing for heroine They tell me things have changed that I wouldn't recognize you They say you're an origami girl Hardly know your own name Guided by strange men's hands Yesterday, you were a fish Today, you resemble a rose. Tomorrow, your mother will knock on the bathroom door Knock knock She'll find you blue in the face The tiles will look on white knuckled and terrified And With your legs askew, Your arms outstretched, Your clothes not on, The medic will forget you are a woman Will mistake you for a swan. Though you are swimming in some ocean I don't want to know the name of I won't ever tell you to pull yourself together Because I remember Our small chests Rising and falling as we chased each other round the yard And in my mind - in girl-time I hold you origami girl I unfold your lungs origami girl untie your tongue origami girl Take the needle out of your arm Pick your dreams up off the ground Dust them off on my jeans and pin them back onto your dress where they always belonged.
That paralyzed night there was no light. The angels were pissed--they wiped their hands of us humans, slit the throats of violins and cellos, fired bullets into the guts of pianos and stole all of my father's old records, painted the doors and windows of heaven shut. Tuesday night, 2am, with too much time to think, I prayed for a music to soothe this, I made deals with god, I even sealed them shut with an amen, but all I heard was the slow moan of church bells turning themselves inside out, then into concrete; there were whispers as the river wrote goodbye letters to an ocean that had already been already welded shut. Were there enough room, I would shove the whole world back into my womb because half way across it, little boys throw rocks at the moon to try to knock out that night light, their lives are invisible, an echo--a shot in the dark. And along every American block, our houses are luminous; like soldiers in trenches, we lie on our bellies in front of the television, so close to the screen waiting for those flames to warm us; fear in full bloom, the newscasters swoon and warn us; but there are no words that could sew wings onto the backs of those concrete buildings and make them rise again. I am not innocent, I won't tell more lies again, no bombs falling or guns clearing their throats will resuscitate that broken sky line gone flat line, I won't stammer through numbers that only make the dead climb down those stairs over and over I won't pretend that lighting a candle and sticking it in the belly of night will make everything all right. Not when every day before, I was so quiet; not when every day before, I lay on my side looking on the world with a mute face, a phone off the hook; was I ever living, or have I just been another lame limb on this last leg of a century; was I ever breathing, or have I been pretending to bleed a body tattooed with veins? Were the men who've loved me just kissing a silhouette? In the basement of my dreams, I've begun to rip through boxes of my own dusty words; there was so much I could have said.
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