[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Rupture.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

The girl had been cycling home from evening tuition, a thing she did this time of day almost by habit, without thought, without worry, her path always taking her down those same, quiet one-way streets with low walls and lonely old women hobbling home. The sun had sunk fully down but the sky was still lit, the houses and their walls still glimmering with the gold light that adheres a while to surfaces once the sun has fallen away. A light breeze was blushing by in gentle surges, the leaves of plants and trees shaking and stirring in the warmth. In the darkening sky stars were making themselves brighter, and beneath them bats were waking from their slumber, tired crows settling in heavy flocks upon the twisted boughs of rain trees. Long-awaited by their mothers and wives, weary men were also returning home, removing their shoes and aerating their feet, settling heavily into sitting-room chairs before radios and TVs. The movement and struggle of the day was finally over. Everyone was finally back home, and like a cloudy suspension shaken and swung and at last allowed to rest, life was beginning to settle once more into place, the fine white powder collecting along the bottom and the crystal water weightless above, silent and still. The men took out smeared bottles and spilled cheap liquor into their ginger beer, discussed the little details of the day with their wives and mothers as their sons and daughters sat listening on the floors. The furrowed eyebrows and creased foreheads began slowly to unfurl, to smooth themselves out. That brief moment of the day had arrived, nerves loosening and tensions dissipating, all petering out and silencing, as when the carriage of a Ferris wheel reaches the peak of its cycle and time seems to slow, and for an intangible moment stop, when, from the street outside, muffled through the moist evening air, the slow, cyclic cry of an animal began to reverberate through the walls of each house. At first it could be heard only in the silences between speech but it grew soon to submerge all other noise, a rhythmic sound, rising, falling, rising and falling, a moaning or howling or wailing growing louder and more sweeping, its urgent quality steadily sharpening. The children were the first to look alarmed, having fewer explanations at hand for the irregularities of life, but soon the adults noticed too, and they looked from one to another with a kind of confusion but also a faint glimmer of recognition, saying nothing in expectation that the sound would at any second cease while instead it only grew louder, more urgent, rising higher and higher till finally it hit the ceiling and froze into high-pitched screaming. They looked at one another in worry, stood up uncertainly from their settees and chairs, for the howling was surely a voice, and the voice surely a woman’s. House doors began to open and slowly, as though in trance, families began to stream out into the lane. The wailing, still rising and falling, was coming from a point in the middle of the street around which a few people were already standing, their feet rooted, their arms stiffly by their sides, a radius of three of four meters between them and the source of the sound. As the newcomers drew closer they discerned words in the howling, the word “where” and the word “teeth,” these two words, muffled and gargled, rising and falling, repeated endlessly in the slew of indistinct screaming. They joined the circle, and stared wordlessly into its center. A girl was lying in the middle of the street, blood dripping thickly from the two hands she cupped tightly to her mouth, her bicycle a mangled mess besides her. Scattered in pools of blood over the gravel were several tiny white trinkets which shone in the light of the streetlamp, more than twenty, almost thirty glistening white pebbles: incisors, molars, canines. Each time her tongue rolled over her toothless gums she felt the sensitive and slightly ticklish void and her terrified wailing, reinvigorated, rose higher, its meaning now clear to all. “Where are my teeth,” the girl was wailing, “where are my teeth,” rocking back and forth, on and on and on. It was a motorcycle that had hit her, people were whispering to each other, arms stiffly by their sides. The police had been called, and an ambulance was on the way. Some of them recognized her but no one knew her name or where she lived. A woman was kneeling down next to her and cradling her head in her arms, stroking her hair and repeating, softly and calmly, that she would be alright, that the ambulance was coming and that everything would be okay. The girl kept howling. She was inconsolable, deaf to the soothing voice, her howling was filled with terror, frantic, for somehow, no matter how much she screamed, she was unable to reach those who had gathered around her, the woman in whose hands she was being held, the families in stiff and silent rings around her. A dark, gaping void had grown between them, like a sheer cliff of sleek rock, devoid of footholds, like a sheet of perfectly polished glass by which their worlds were set apart. The crowd could hear the rising and falling of her screaming and they could see her sparkling teeth on the bloody street but there was not a thing they could do, not a single way to help. All they did was whisper to one another, that it was a motorcycle that had hit her, that the police had been called, and that an ambulance was on the way, and they looked around anxiously for new arrivals with whom to share this news. In the ambient background of her pain the girl could hear their hushed voices, could sense the buzzing of their confusion. They were all of them there, all together, in the same world, the same city, the same street, their bodies all in proximity, inhaling and exhaling the same air, and yet, even as she tried to reach them by howling louder, by calling out to them as if they did nothing only because they somehow could not hear, the void between them only became deeper, the pane of glass dividing them only became thicker.

The ambulance came. The girl was sedated, taken to hospital. The crowd continued standing on the street for a while, stiff and wordlessly still. Slowly then, not talking, they began to turn, walk silently back to their homes. They sat back down on their settees and chairs, stared in silence at the walls. The noise of TVs and radios echoed emptily in their sitting rooms. The children, wide-eyed and mute, waited for someone to speak. The women did what housework they could find, ironed the next day’s clothes and swept the floors. The men poured more cheap liquor into their glasses of ginger beer.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Luna.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

It was Karen’s intention to drive Nicki directly to the hospital. It was absolutely her intention. But the hospital came and went with a missed turn, and then a wrong turn, and then a strange overpass looming up in the road where Karen doesn’t remember an overpass ever being before, and now they’re somehow feeding off route 84 onto route 30, the old scenic highway through the Columbia Gorge. Nicki’s in the backseat, moaning and panting, and a glance in the rearview mirror shows she’s not looking so good. The contractions are coming fast and close and hard. Karen can tell from the way her breathing has changed, from the way the groaning has given way to an animal keening. There’s a smell of blood and saline.

Nicki’s so far gone now she hasn’t noticed they’ve gone off course. Karen imagines what it must be like to go animal like that, to have the lizard brain take over.

“Water broke, Kar. My water…broke…Shit…your seat…your car…are we…soon are we gonna be there…soon?” and the girl fades off again, then the keening, keening, a sound so high pitched it’s barely there and Karen says,

“Low sounds now, Nicki. Low sounds. Remember we learned the low sounds make the pain less.” And the girl pitches her moans lower, dutiful, malleable. A woman in labor is like a small child, Karen read in one of the books. She remembers that now, and it’s true. Nicki is sunk into herself, into the pain and the instinct; sunk in and trusting Karen to watch out for predators.

Karen meant to bring the girl to the hospital. She did. But the miles are ticking by. The car keeps moving forward, the hospital falling ever behind them.

Karen’s intentions were good. When she’d found out that Nicki-that ridiculous young receptionist, all red lipstick and cheap skirts-was pregnant, she’d bought an extra cookie at lunchtime and brought it back for the girl. “Eating for two now,” she’d said with a smile. Just to show that she was happy for her. All of twenty-three and unmarried and now pregnant, but who was Karen to judge?

When Nicki’s boyfriend had predictably left her-moving out in the middle of the night and leaving Nicki alone, six months pregnant and all her family back east-it was Karen who stepped in to help.

“You’re so good to me, Karen,” Nicki had said. She said that all the time, how good Karen was to her, wonder in her voice that someone-a stranger, really-should be so kind. When Karen stopped to reflect on it, she marveled, too, at her own kindness. How good a person she must be, how generous, to have stepped in to support the girl as she has.

“Don’t you want kids of your own?” Nicki had asked Karen once. They’d been driving home from the childbirth class at the hospital, Nicki yammering on about one inanity or another, and then out of nowhere she lobbed that question. “Don’t you and Alex want a family?” Karen had pushed her face into a smile and shaken her head. “That’s not for us,” she’d said.

Arriving home that night after dropping the girl off at her grim one-bedroom rental, Karen had found Alex at the kitchen table, hunched over the remains of his dinner. One plate, no leftovers. “Portland is full of single mothers,” Alex said. “You’re going to save them all, one after another?”

“She’s alone,” Karen said, rummaging through the fridge, thinking to make herself a sandwich, or maybe she’d just open a can of soup. “All on her own. The least you could do is show a little compassion.” Compassion. Just a little bit of compassion.

Tires hum over asphalt, the road snaking and coiling through forest. It is something beyond Karen that is driving the car east now, away from the hospital, away from Portland, into the deep wet of the Oregon woods. The girl has pulled her shirt off; in the rearview mirror she is all belly, a quivering mountain of pain. “Karen…kah…rnnn…oh god. Where are we? We…we…weeeee…”

That sound, that awful wailing and whining from the backseat.

A miscarriage. Such an incidental word for the death of a child. A slip. A misstep. One day there’s the promise of a beating heart and the next day there’s bits of your baby floating dead in the toilet water. And not one time, one child. Three times like that. Three times. Three beating hearts gone to water.

“You’re alright, Nicki. Keep breathing. Watch your breath now, Nicki.”

Nicki doesn’t hear her. Nicki is deep in her pain. Nicki is a primeval baby-making lump of flesh.

“Karen…karenenennn…hospital? What’s going on where are we Karen? Oh god, oh god.”

“Low sounds, Nicki. Low sounds.” They’re well outside the city now, winding through the Gorge, no streetlights, no house lights, and the road is empty, middle of the night like it is. (Babies like to come at night, the childbirth teacher had told them.) The dark is deep and true on the old highway and it takes them in, swallows them whole, and Karen keeps aiming for the center of that darkness. East, east…pushing east. It’s not too late to stop. It’s not too late to turn the car around and take the girl to the hospital. But the dark pulls them in, pulls them forward. There is a rope tied to Karen’s front bumper, some great unseen thing reeling that rope in, hand over hand, mile after mile, those unseen hands carrying Karen and Nicki and that baby into the deep wooded night.

“Let me out! Karen, let me out! The baby’s coming you let me out!” and Karen hears Nicki scrabbling at the door. The girl is grabbing for the handle, making like she’s going to leap out. What is there to do but pull over? To stop? Just ahead there’s a turnoff, a scenic viewpoint where in the daylight drivers stop to see the Columbia River spill out and stretch before them and across the river Washington State but at night there’s nothing to see but shapes that hint at cliffs, and the sound of the water.

Karen pulls the car in, the hum of asphalt giving over to gravel. Crunch of wheels on gravel and the car stops and out tumbles that girl, half naked and slick with sweat and out she goes, out of the car and looking wild and scared, looking at Karen through the windshield like a caged animal suddenly and unexpectedly freed and not knowing where to run, where to go first. Wanting to go every which way at once. And then she’s running, or trying to run, but a contraction hits and Karen is out of the car, Karen goes to the girl, catches her by the arm,

“Nowhere to go, Nicki. Now settle down. This is no place to be running off.”

Nicki’s eyes are wide and rolling like a terrified horse, nostrils flaring, clutching at her belly. “Why are we here, Karen? What have you…Karen you take me to the fucking hospital NOW, Karen!” She grabs Karen’s shoulder with an otherworldly strength, clamping her fingers down so Karen thinks they might pierce right through her flesh, might meet in the middle and form a ring inside her shoulder. Talons of some awful bird of prey, sinking in.

And then the fingers release and the girl is on the ground. “Baby’s coming. Need to push…need to…” and there’s no time for getting the girl back in the car. No more moving east, no going back west. They are here and the baby is coming.

The girl is lying on the gravel in front of the car, writhing on the ground, her head, her belly, her foot rising to meet the flat yellow beams of the headlights. Karen kneels, positioning herself before the jutting angles of Nicki’s spread knees. The girl’s belly is a tense, thrashing planet and beyond it the river and the hills of Washington State muted by the dark.

Between Nicki’s legs, the baby’s head is crowning like a fearsome bloody dawn. Another contraction, Karen breathing with her, Karen urging the girl on. The head is out, the shoulders out, the baby slipping into Karen’s unworthy hands. A boy. “A boy,” she says. They knew it would be a boy, but to say it now, to say, “The child is here, he is born, a boy,” it feels necessary, a benediction. “You have been born. You are a son.”

Karen’s children were never born, Karen’s children gone to water. She hears the sound of the river, soft and steady, swallowed by the dark. She thinks of her children as part of that river now, her children gone, gone, gone…

But this child is here, this child has arrived, and he is beautiful and he is terrible, a great screaming bloody thing, held up like the proof of God in the harsh glow of the headlights.

Eat Something Warm

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Metellus1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

When struck by illness, the body
is the culprit of its actions
like a wet toothbrush.
         They say the body clinches
         and grinds its teeth while asleep

when the body is overtaken with stress.
The body is culpable for the stress,
too, guffaws the dentist.

         The body says:
         you remind me of myself when I was younger.

Let’s say the body, when young,
held a lung that fell sick,
         rendered by a gasper,
          lungs a melisma of wheezes:

the coughing always arrived at rest sans resistance.
Until the body declares:
the brush is overtaken by the tooth.

Go Fish

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Metellus2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

If you keep making that face
it’ll get stuck that way,
and so it did.

If you keep making that face
you will have your father’s face.

If you keep making that face
you can exchange it for a matching face
like playing Go Fish.

Nod once for yes,
nod twice for no.

Nod once for the femoral artery,
nod twice for the ephemeral artery.

You knew that the circulatory system
would stagnate
if you kept making that face and yet

that’s exactly what you did.
You said found dead or announced dead,
because you think the living deserve all the credit and yet

you kept finding and announcing
your little heart out.

You knew if you kept making that face,
yours would wither to a still life:
a card never plucked from the deck.

Got any sevens?

Answers in the Affirmative

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1.

In Philadelphia, I want to say
         “youse” and “y’all” in equal measure.
I want to say that
you should answer in the affirmative
         with an “alright.”

2.

I want to live in a world
with a language
that has a second person plural.

3.

In Philly you can say “iight”
or “ard” or “rd,”
         when answering in the affirmative.

4.

Today, the world’s
seventy-percent water.
Why, then, couldn’t I
been born a submarine?

5.

At home, by the Schuylkill River,
a shell rises from its submarined state.

I saw a tortoise shell without a tortoise
and it reminded me of a foreclosed home.

6.

Tomorrow, the world’s
eighty-percent water.
And still I won’t
awaken moored beneath
the surface of the sea.

7.

Any day now, will I wake without a home?
Yes, I answer, any day now.

         Alright, I answer.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Walker.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

My sister always looked even more beautiful when she ate. Maybe this was why my father preferred her, something I first noticed as we drove back from camping in Montana, when I was nine and Lila was 14. Our parents had bought a flat of cherries at a roadside stand. Lila and I spit the pits at each other across the back seat. Then my mother showed us how to tie the stems into knots with our tongues.

My mother always had a certain kind of magic. I wonder now what would have happened had she taught Lila something else. Something that could have protected her from my father.

The red marks at the corners of Lila’s lips turned her smile into a cluster of fallen petals. She was ripe, irresistible. Eventually I stood on the backseat to study my face in the rearview mirror. Juice stains, that’s all. I flared my nostrils at my father’s reflection to make him laugh, but he couldn’t stop looking at Lila.

At the border they said we had to finish the cherries or throw them out. My father parked. We piled out and sat on the berm to eat.

I felt sick to my stomach when it was over.  Pits, glistening with saliva and clinging fruit, freckled the asphalt. As we crossed the border an officer nodded as if we’d merely done our duty. Lila stuck her tongue out at him.

“Sit down and close your mouth,” my mother said. My mother spoke rarely enough so that when she did, we listened. Still, my father’s eyes flicked between Lila and the road all the way home.

After that, my father took Lila on special outings-breakfasts, bowling, movies with names that sounded R-rated. He and my mother sat me down to tell me Lila was having trouble in high school. She wanted be too thin. She needed special attention.

They were so proud of me, my mother said. She put her hand on my father’s knee. The air crackled, and he jerked away. “Static,” he said, rubbing his thigh. My mother flexed her fingers.

The next summer, my parents took us to the islands for vacation. The humid air seemed to dampen whatever passed among us. We retold the story of our last trip so often that when someone said “cherries,” we’d all start giggling.  I said I’d always hoped that officer had planted them on the safe side of the border. My parents kept laughing, but Lila looked thoughtful.

My father sat next to me at a luau that night. He quizzed me on spelling words and cheered for each right answer-even psoriasis, with its surprising p and many s’s. Then dancers came by to teach people the hula. My father waved me out of my chair.

On stage I wiggled my hips when I was told. Torchlight and applause made my cheeks flush with happiness. My family watched me from below. Lila was even eating, skewer after skewer of meats and pineapples.

She was still licking juices from the webs between her fingers when I returned. My father stared at me. The flush in my cheeks turned hard and frightening. I wanted to reverse myself, to walk backward onto the stage, un-swing my hips, sit down again and have no one notice me.

After midnight I woke to my father standing at the side of the pullout bed I shared with Lila. She was asleep; her deep breathing rattled the ancient bedsprings. Instead of sitting up, I reached my foot out as slowly as I could to touch Lila. The bedsprings paused. Then Lila stretched an arm overhead and reached toward my father. I closed my eyes, not sure why I felt relieved, and didn’t open them again until morning.

Lila wasn’t there. A pineapple sat on her pillow. Its spikes sliced my fingertips as I carried it into the kitchen.

When Lila didn’t return by nightfall, my father called the police. My mother held the pineapple in her hands and hummed.  The day before we left I sliced the top off the pineapple and planted it in the hotel’s garden strip.

A month later my mother grilled an enormous fish for my father. The next morning he was dead.  At his funeral, I caught a scaly sheen under his skin when I glanced away from his body. The doctor said a heart attack felled my father while my parents were having sex. Neither explanation is one I want to think about.

My mother mails ads to far-off newspapers with my father’s photograph and the date of his death, in case Lila might see. When she thinks I’m asleep, she cradles me in her arms and whispers that even if I become beautiful, she’ll never let anyone hurt me.

Her breath feels gentle as island l air, warm enough so the boundary between skin and sky disappears. I want to tell my sister that it’s safe now to push out roots, to grow.

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Try not to look so used. Dash of soap between the legs,
a moment’s scrub and call it clean,
then check your dress for any tears or stains.

It’s hard sometimes to sleep, so rub a little lipstick
on your cheeks or swipe a bit of chalk
around your eyes. You’ll look awake

enough. Pin your hair back, spare yourself
the tangles, pulls, the getting it in your mouth-
then crack the window, clear the scent of sweat

and let whoever’s next pretend that he’s your first
today. Smile hard-until your jaw aches,
until your face freezes that way-and if he asks, make up

a name (everyone here pretends they’re someone
else). Just between us, if he’s going at you harder
than you agreed-well, no sense in getting killed.

Tuck a blade beneath the mattress. Just in case.
After, have a drink or two or three. If you’re late
to bleed I know where you can end it, fast

and cheap. Don’t think twice, don’t kid yourself,
you’ll see. You’ll get the hang of it.
Get out there now, best catch on quick: Blow kisses,

hike your dress up, call Come on, boys, and get it while it’s hot.
You have something they want-now go and sell it
like it’s everything you’ve got.

Swamps

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When they drained the swamp water
from his ribs, they found a chewed bit
of heart, strung with seaweed like a locket.

They folded it in his suicide note
and gave it to his son, who gummed it
until his teeth grew in. He aged
with his daddy’s eyes, bought a house
by the swamps, lost his hair watching
his wife doll up and disappear, smiling
at her own limp in the morning.

Bare-pocketed, he saw his son minnow-mouth
at the ghost of his mother’s breast.
They’d rock together, stomachs growling
until she came home soaked in sweat
and cologne to nurse her son full of
well-whiskey and borrowed cigarettes.

They found him in the swamp, just bones
with a head full of lead and swamp mud.
The coroner thought his skeleton
was waterlogged well before death.

They wrapped the bullet in a note,
the same note his dad left, and gave it
to his son, a scar for things that don’t bleed.
The boy read the first line of the note
“There are swamps everywhere. Stay dry.”
and set the note on fire, dropping
the bullet in the ash. He wrapped
his arms around himself like a rag
wrenched his little ribs until water sprung
like ribbons in the breeze. He pulped his veins
and slept in the sand, daring
the tide to try and tongue his bones.

The Girl Who Prays for Storms

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Firefly-eyed with blossom soft
brown skin, she’d moonbathe and pray
to nighttime clouds, steamy starlight,
for storms to come and rattle her ribs.

As her hips spread from sapling straight to
oak crescents, she’d touch her tongue to her wrist
and taste her pulse, slapping out our song
like a quickened tide sloshing a rhythm.

The same beat we’d dance to when we grew
voices from the sounds we’d heard as children
wailing in the dark like make-believe
madrigals. The song she taught me
when I found breath in her lungs, deep enough
to soothe the cinders crawling in my veins
till they sighed away their steam, like bodies in snow.

We’ll take this tune dancing, river-waltzing
like tipsy leaves, swaying down midnight shores.
Withering in time, and touching like tempests.

When the song is over, she’ll ease her feet
into the mumble of the waves. I’ll watch
without a voice as she rubs my ashes
into her wrists, and scatters the rest
into the sea; skin wrinkled like bark
but eyes still burning like fireflies at dusk.

We invite over all our friends, ready the house. Poker night! we say. It’s been too long! they say back. They bring beer, or whiskey, or wine, and snacks, and money to lose, but sometimes too many cancel last-minute, or just don’t show, and we aren’t able to play. If as many as half don’t show, we don’t have enough.

We used to know more people – some moved, some had kids. We used to create Facebook event pages, really have fun and make awesome graphics, get playful with the description language. Then it got we were getting too many Nos and Maybes, not enough Yeses. Got kinda depressing. The only comments we’d get on the event wall were from people who had moved, saying sorry they were gonna miss it. Sorry they moved. Or from people who’d had kids, but they never said sorry for having kids.

One guy had to go to rehab – now he’s sober and so says he probably shouldn’t. Another guy… she tried to sleep with. Or, maybe she didn’t try to, but she didn’t try not to either. Same thing, sometimes. He doesn’t so much say he probably shouldn’t, but it goes without saying.

Sometimes, when we do get enough people, its like old times – we get drunk and make stupid bets that we wouldn’t make sober and flirt with each other’s wives and husbands, but then someone will ask what ever happened to that one guy, or someone else will ask why doesn’t that other guy play with us anymore, and either way it gets awkward. Sometimes we get past it, other times it ruins the night.

One girl’s dating her cousin now – not blood or anything, but still. She feels awkward coming with him, but awkward coming without, too, which makes sense. She fears what we might say, both in his presence and not, and it’s probably for the best, because we probably would.

Sometimes, after everyone’s left and the night’s over, we think, why’d they have to ask that? Ruining our night and making everything awkward, with their awkward questions and our awkward non-answers. We think, maybe we shouldn’t invite them next time? but of course we do because without them we definitely wouldn’t have enough.

Another couple just doesn’t like us anymore. I don’t know why. Sometimes there’s no explaining these things. Or maybe it’s us that doesn’t like them. Sometimes it’s hard to remember. Sometimes it doesn’t really matter.

Some nights no one shows up at all, even the ones that said they’d make it, they were sure they could, they promised. We go about our night, try to pretend like we’d never invited anyone in the first place. Like we’d cleaned the house for our own benefit, like we’d never had any plans otherwise. We Sharpie out “Poker Night” on our calendar, smile and remember we’d rather spend time along with one another than with anyone else anyway. We watch a movie in bed, like this had been what we’d looked forward to all day, we don’t even like poker anyway.

Well Boys I Think Our Work Here is Done

The last taste on my tongue will be sweet potato. My thoughts will be of fancy hotels named after classy women; of flint arrowheads and terracotta soldiers; the difference between earwigs and silverfish. Sandstorms. Sea monsters. All the things I won’t discover. And I will look up at the moon and I will be afraid, but I will know that this world was once home to great things like redwood forests and pickle barrels, tubas and Judy Garland. My eyes will film over; there will be a crash. I will be flung into space and I will try to think of myself as a ragdoll rather than a trash bag. I will look down and see the lights of the Vegas Strip in the middle of the big cold desert, and I will taste sweet potato, and I will be fine.

My Nephew Makes His Own Lipstick

My brother, fearful
of other fathers’ stories of sons parading in stolen pearls,
denies my nephew
a game of beauty parlor.
Now he sits in the kitchen
with a jar of slick cherries, splits them open one by one, and devises.

Bonaparte Run Aground

For now he’s sitting on an ugly beach-
wearing a big hat, pursing his lips;
talking strategy with himself.
Hudson! My cape! Hudson! My sabre!
He still has a butler in his mind.
He closes his eyes and meditates
on what we see with our eyes,
with our minds- And what if
we all were blind?
On the verge of transcendence,
he’s interrupted by a spray
of saltwater, and scrounges
for the English equivalents
of mer and merde. He yelps:
Is there no handkerchief for me,
is there no chocolate? His jailer,
everywhere always but helpless
always, too, can see he’ll soon be dead.
Doctors and devotees will weep
into his bellybutton like his mother
over his father, like the mermaid
over her prince in a different ending.

In the Before Picture I Looked So Happy

I wore sneakers to my first ballet class,
though I don’t recall if it was because
my mother wouldn’t buy me slippers
or I wouldn’t wear them.
I was the only one with black tights;
the only one who cried.
Something off about the lights
and the drama of the music-
the pain in my foot, sharp and unfamiliar,
every time I’d jump.

RHINOCERI

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         We can agree there is a time for honesty
and then there is a time for honesty.
         This is one of those times. Honestly,

that night on my parents’ roof after
         we’d bought the condoms and made
our pacts and you asked if I was ready

          I said yes, that I was all yours, but
I didn’t tell you I couldn’t quit thinking of
         the National Geographic I’d perused

that morning in the can, the rhinoceri
         about to die from drought so I herded them
from Africa into my virginity’s history.

         I’ve come to know them as the way
I know something important’s going
         to happen, go out the window, or jump a horse.

And again they’re here in this, doing
         whatever rhinos do when they aren’t dying.
I’ve burnt up shadows staring into myself,

         the sun on the Serengeti. I thought you
a sky alive with birds of paradise, even
         when the rhinoceri first came to me and

even when afterward you said I couldn’t love,
         not really, because I was only seventeen-
I never was angry for that until yesterday,

         drinking on a street café’s deck. I am
sitting with friends, a man and a woman.
         Another woman walks up and sits with us.

The new woman offers herself to my friend
         who promptly says my other friend is his
girlfriend. The new woman lowers her price.

         Bellowing rhinos surround me, rhinos
not dying of drought. The new woman understands
         and starts to stand to leave but falls over

drunk in the road. She refuses my hand
         to help her up, out of shame, mine or hers,
who knows. The rhinos are here and charging

         for the grace a boy in love deserved. Rhinoceri
believe in a golden age for love. The new
         woman tells my friends no one can buy

what she saw between them, she’s tried
         for years to drink her heart’s lake. I want
to say I scooped her up, a silver stallion

         crossing the plain, herding the rhinos, that
there was no time to fashion a saddle
         or make declarations in the night,

that we and the rhinos set off for every mirage.
         The new woman’s situation made me want
to cry. I am again in the can, reading the walls,

         wishing all these names are somewhere
scratching their bellies and backs against rocks and trees.
         The rhinos are standing in the rain.

BOY SPLINTER

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Gerard2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Skin he knows he doesn’t have. Yellow pine
         underneath the course grit sandpaper so

three seasons graying will go away layer
         by layer until the honey colored inside

becomes the honey colored outside with deep
         course grit scratches. He sees the grain,

the pores, the thirsty pine’s cells. Sinew and bone.
         The beer he’s drinking. The woman

he doesn’t want to cut her finger or drive a splinter in
         when she leans on the railing.

She will place pots here. Red-hot pokers one summer
         and basil the next. Yellow pine underneath

the finest grit- More like a fingernail file she uses
         readying for Friday. Barbecue waiting for

charcoal and flame. Vodka almost frozen and
         lemon wedges cut and wet in the ice chest.

She will lean on the yellow pine railing
         against the summer heat pretending her life

is a field just over the one she sees.
        The deck is on house’s edge. The railing,

the last stand between salmon dressed with a hint
         of citrus and clove waiting for the thin honey glaze

and the far field’s river ripping the world in half.
         He has finished the wood so she can white-knuckle

the edge of everything, turn and face him, the hurt
         she wants at the day’s end and mostly nothing else.

1.

There were so many things the girl didn’t know, things she refused to know. She didn’t want details about the dark weight of the universe. She didn’t want diagrams showing the number of stomachs inside of a cow. She didn’t want pamphlets on how many times a cell divided to make a baby. She went down to the river and plunged in her arms to the elbow. The water was cold; she wanted to drink some but wasn’t sure it was clean enough. Nothing was usually clean enough. Things were always dirtier than one wanted them to be. Things were always contagious in some way or another, laced with roundworms and blood flukes and long-suffering parasites. But living carefully was better than living other ways. Taking care with water was preferable to an invasion of foreign organisms.

2.

The boy walked to the girl’s house in a panic. He was worried all over. The worry came out of his pores in the form of sweat, the strange-smelling sweat of cattle in shoots. His breath was sour from all the worrying and his feet swelled, spilling out of his loafers. He didn’t know what he would say to the girl; he didn’t know how to explain himself. He had so many feelings and so few words. He had so few sentences. He had no sentences. They bobbed for a moment in the back of his throat, forming, gathering momentum, gathering finesse, and then he swallowed them down. His stomach became a terrible place to be. Everything else in his stomach decided to GET OUT. He vomited on the sidewalk, drenching a colony of ants. His worry wiped out six generations of ants. Only the child ants in the field with crumbs on their back survived the attack.

3.

Sometime after the baby was born, the girl shaved her head and put on a turtleneck. Now that her scalp was bare, she wanted to cover her neck. She wanted to cover her whole body; even in long pants and long sleeves she felt naked. She put on leather gloves to cover her hands. She put on thick socks and shoes to doubly reinforce her feet from the elements. She put on reflective sunglasses to shield her eyes from the sun and also from other eyes. If people tried to look at her, they would only see themselves.

4.

The infant screamed all night and made terrible sounds. The girl put the infant in the window to see what would happen. No one came to take the infant. No one saw the infant in the window and decided they had to have him. The girl didn’t know what to do. She screamed and made terrible sounds and the infant stopped crying and looked at her. The infant looked at her and looked at her and looked at her. The girl had never been stared at for very long except for by men. Men were always staring at the girl for long periods of time, but their stares were different. Like infants, men were hungry. They were hungry for different things and for the same things.

The girl didn’t want to feed anyone, so she left and the infant grew up without her. He stared at women in bars, in cafes, in streets, in cars. He stared at women almost all of the time. He sometimes wondered if the woman he was staring at was his mother, but usually he just wondered whether the woman he was staring at would be willing to take off her clothes. He wondered if she would get down on her hands and knees and purr like a wildcat. He wondered if she would crawl towards him on the linoleum and say things in his ear normal women wouldn’t say. He wanted to hear the worst things in the worst way. He had a terrible ache to hear such terrible, terrible things. He wasn’t willing to tell anyone this. He decided instead to wait and listen. One day he found a woman he hoped would say the things he wanted to hear. She took off her clothes. She got down on all fours and purred like a wildcat. She crawled towards him on the linoleum, nude, and put her soft lips to his ear. He strained to listen. He would remember this moment forever. She said, “I don’t expect you to love me.”

He agreed this was a sensible idea.

5.

Somewhere in the black, distant universe: an epic smashing of gas and light. A propelling of particles: panspermic spores strapping saddles to asteroids and riding to earth like microscopic cowboys. The wet blue everything vibrates with energy. Creatures develop then grow apparatuses: scales, teeth, fins, hearts. A cow is born with four stomach chambers: the book, the blanket, the bible, the honeycomb. Cave walls are carved up and painted, deep grooves and dyes to represent cycles: sun over moon, land over water, man over steer. Man steps from his cave, blinking, his mouth chewing something. It’s not language yet, but it will be soon. Man establishes hierarchies: things that pass through the body; things born from the body; things that enter the body and refuse to leave.

All the girl wanted was to live as an empty vessel. Just the parts she was born with and nothing extra. Not to be a heap of human that anything can enter. Not to be a pillar of flesh from which anything can escape.