you were given a choice.
you chose this road
first, then the
present.

become an alcoholic to
find a higher power.
meditate occasionally to
see how well it suits you.
in between,
fill the emptiness with Oreos,
coffee,
a smoking habit you detest
but gives your fingers something to
do when you’re speaking anxiously
in public,
when the caffeine is rearranging your
tongue into metaphors and you
need a moment of pause,
clarifying to the audience
with a descriptor you
previously forgot
and the story: winding,
inexplicably always
out of order.

run a 5K every three weeks
to give yourself a mission:
get back in shape,
hone your vision of
yourself.
bathe everyday.
tell the cat you love her
and pet her for an extra few minutes
before you walk for hours
to lose those new found vowels
completely.
pluck out your roots and
dead ends hiding
in a stealth spot.
begin a practice of voyeurism.
sit comfortably and
file your nails into sharp points.
lean into them.
write everything down.

start ordering your steak rare:
inhale the lost veal,
the lost zeal of an entire feedlot;
the scent of plasma and cud.
devour a a squealing colony
without remorse.
      give cannibalism a chance.
you’re talking to yourself in public again.
the looks from the other patrons
don’t bother you.
you remember them with skinned knees on
bathroom tile;  your stomach in
velvet knots,
your obsessive purge.
you remember them peering at you
in courtrooms,
you remember them in handcuffs,
in shackles,
side eyes from jealous brides
as you make a scene at the open
bar.
it’s not the groom you want
or ceremony you despise,
it’s the bride’s eyes.
the way you’ve stolen and
groveled afterwards.
the way they held
onto those wrongs and their
condescending pats on the back
withdrawn.
how you’ve managed to
survive it all with gratitude,
without much impact,
you’ve suddenly risen
to their ranks.

get your wisdom teeth removed
and then
cut them into daggers.
check out Home Depot,
ask for “industrial size”
ignore all the
are you ok ?
you’re muttering again.
read the directions.
this stuff is toxic.
don’t get it on your eyelids.
press the bone back into your sockets,
flick the canines,
gotta be solid.
smile:
you’re still celibate.

you’re still hungry;
avaricious,
less slovenly from
all the exercise,
less addled than before
and armored like the night.
go back to the diner.
lick your plate.
click your tongue.
you showed them how
starvation’s done,
you showed them how to roam.
you put your money where your
mouth is: glued into
your gums.
ring the alarm and
show them home.

 

your mouth is lined with
homemade knives, and you’re
wafting noxious with each
breath    you begin to teach
them how to
move on instinct.
you begin to salivate
with virile.
you begin to chew more
loudly.
Miss? you ok, Miss?
now that your dysphagia’s
done, you’re gonna smile
wide and show your fangs.
show them how
  to run.

“Veruca Salt”

I will publish an anthology
of all my hurts, but the original poem
went: I will publish an
anthology of all  my hurts
and it is just a
picture of me
walking to Huntington Station
not giving out cigarettes
or tokens.

it takes me forever to finish anything
because nothing
matters
but
helping
others
and
family.

  “Brevity”

and then Calliope walked out the walls carrying Circe’s storm in her arms.

“girl, you said you were writing a love story.”

I’ve never felt this much,
I begin again
to enter my body
to finish the story,
the fugue now over
and not slated to start again.
the mania quelled to a dull
buzz when I drink my morning
coffee but never more and the
deluded percussion storm
fading.
I spent years wandering
capes and cliffs and caverns
and never setting foot on
any ground nearby.
if you asked me where I was,
stopped me on a street corner,
I would blink my big owl
eyes as if I just woke up,
not be able to answer fast enough,
you’d be alarmed to find out
I’m local.
you can live anywhere
as long as its not in your body.
even Philadelphia, even
Kensington, the first neighborhood
I arrived to.
I tattooed her name
on my arm to never
forget where I came from;
the city that  unsheathed
me to beat me with it’s
black ice and corners.
she turns to me again and
says, I implore you,
for me, do you like
warnings or do
you like to drown?

and feeling myself a
smirking fox,
traipse the town in
pink chiffon, I spit on the
floor and I say:
I don’t know
why don’t you just
fucking surprise
me?

 

 

“a thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”

 

–adrienne rich

i wrote those poems on a plane and cried the entire flight. it took a lot out of me and deviated wildly from my plan. i never finish anything, I say to you, that’s not what it’s about.

when I am old, I want to read these things and remember, I have loved.

It is want

and memory that

drive my hand. I had a

feeling once.

I’d like to get it back.

My friends know not to mention

the straws. If they find one on their apartment floor,

 

they merely pick it up,

hand it back or save it for me.

later when I greet them with a hug, they point to the basket on the end table in case I forgot one or dropped it on the walk over.

I fish a blue one out of my jeans and we begin the catch up.

and they know not to mention it if I eat something with eggs in it and then return to my scrupulous investigation of ingredients at restaurants. this is normal deviation from my ethics out of either convenience or fatigue. they know not to mention my tears when they ask how my father is or to try to embrace me while I’m crying.

 

I  need the floor to crawl around on, not the bundle. not the restriction that touch bares. let me sit in silence and twist the plastic in my fingers like a baby blanket. Let me be the neglected child in your foyer. let me finish screeching. there is no bottle.

 

they sit and wait for me to finish, watching my hand reach in want, in memory of the way the sun hit my shoulders one day. but more than that, it’s the way I told my mom I didn’t want to keep Pepper’s dog brush and now cry in therapy, remembering how she laid in my bed every time I went away for more than a day or met me at the bus stop or came to my room, busting open the door. The guilt of turning twelve and denying her attention, suddenly self obsessed, hiding in my room and saying “Go, Pepper.”. I said, “I should have kept the fucking dog brush” and I turn away, embarrassed at this sudden admittance of remorse over something so menial, or how attached I am to animals, something childish about grieving your dog or sleeping with your cats every night. something childish in attachment to pets and things and memory. I spent days of my life watching the metal touch the black fur and I hate myself so much all I think about is the times I turned her away. it’s the same poem.

 

i’ve heard it said before and I have yet to be proven wrong: it’s the same poem. it’s always the same poem.  and people say not to live in the past so I burned all the pictures. it’s the same poem. the way we try to get our memories back. the way I insist we throw everything out, it’s always the same poem. the way our garage fell in on itself and took all of our grade school memories, the large painting of my mother, every single collected Christmas decoration since my brother was born, my yearbooks.  it’s the same fucking poem, I should have kept the dog brush.

 

my childhood cat lived to be 21 and rubbed her face against my face when I visited her. I believed she had lost some feeling in other places. she loved being outside, you couldn’t keep her in.  by the end, she was so skinny and her fur had fallen out. but she was loved at 21. her name was Fancy. I named her after Fancy Feast when I was five and I loved her even though she scratched my best friend every time she visited and sometimes hissed and sometimes attacked my ankles. someone called animal control on her and they stole her from my front yard to put her down. she would have lived another year of rubbing my face every time I came home. it was the way she felt me, remembered the five year old that named her. I remember everything: 

 

the way she sat for hours on the dining room table to watch candles dance, sat in wrapping paper, shoeboxes, laid in the street yet always had the sense to move when cars drove down the court. how she slept at the foot of my bed for years on repeat.how my dad said she was in his van once and he had to turn around to drop her off back home on his way to work. sneaking through an open window, she was crouched in the back. the same thing happened to my partner when he left his windows open. and I told my mom she could throw the dog brush away as I had no dog now, it had no use, it’s the same poem. grief; I remember everything.

 

you write until there’s nothing left to mull over, to pluck out or inspect. util your hereditary dementia begins, until there’s nothing left to burn or steal from someone’s front yard to put down like it was yours to take. like she wouldn’t have lived another year of greeting me, my secret wish I say to pets out loud: I hope you live forever and I squeeze their neck and

 

I remember everything.

 

“Grief pt 3”

No one embraces me when I cry. It is not allowed. And what I mostly try not to talk about is anything to do with home.

 

 

I am 34 and cannot remember a single time I collapsed in someone’s arms the way I watched my one year old goddaughter allow herself, snot-nosed and shrieking and red, reaching for the door after her mother left for work, to be sheltered in mine. To be buried in my knit black sweater her uncle later picked gluten-free apple cookie crumbs out of.  How I don’t want to wash that smell off: baby wipes or something light like vanilla but not manufactured, calming that way, or like lilac. That inexplicably pleasant aroma that babies have. Her allowance of me; being carried and twirled around the apartment in rapture. Me, dizzy but stronger than I thought. Her thirty pounds a feather. Her leopard footed pajamas.  Mouth doused in watermelon juice. Me, turning on the player piano so she can bob to the euphonic, lyricless Hotel California. The way she looked at me with a sudden streak of joy as I began to sing, reached those sticky fruit fingers to my lips, beckoning them to continue. A stranger that appeared in the bed next to her in the middle of the night, all black, tall and humming.

 

Is it the bosom I miss or the way the sky looked the day I chase; the day the sun hit my shoulders the first day of summer vacation ? I have not been carried to bed. I have not been shielded. I have not been kissed all over the face. I will not allow it.

 

As my goddaughter mimicked my notes back to me, doing her best to capture the correct inflection, I began to tell her my name. She first tapped my teeth and I showed them for once. They are brand new porcelain. She will never see the molars stained, or the way I closed my lips on instinct when someone got too close to my face. She will not see me laugh with a hand in front. She will see the brIghtness of each one, test its durability as she places her plastic teething ring inside my mouth so i can show her how to bite. “I’m the alligator,” is one of the first things I say, Then the way I showed her how to say this alligator’s name.

 

 The way I whispered it to her the first time, so every time she said it again, it came out a muted  “sah.” A whisper back. “Sah.” My name is Sarah, I whispered looking her in her long eyelashed eyes. Never full volume, a whisper.  But correctly and immediately repeated. “Sah.” The way I kissed her ears and told her that I met her in a dream before she was born.  Before laughing hysterically, I felt her pause, gaze back at me, drool on my cheek. I felt the grass on my feet as I ran outside with my summer reading list after first grade. Me. being the first in the class to learn how to read in Kindergarten, my teacher applauding me, overhearing me silently reading an entire book aloud to myself during free play. I always chose the reading section during free play. Then being marched across the hall and forced to read a book in front of all the first graders, now me, diligent in my studies. My mom cleaning the blinds. She was always around in a way. The smell of bleach and the sound of the screen door as she walked into the back yard, the sun hit my shoulders and my goddaughter whispered “sah” back to me, forgetting the shut front door and I felt her fingers press my neck, the memory form and the grief of it passing as she slid back to the floor to pick up her plastic guitar. As I let myself fall on the plane ride home. Hood off.

 

I’ve mailed her letters every few months since she was born. Sending her a stuffed fox, stuffed shark, lucky stone, a postcard with an explanation of sand dollars just in case they go extinct before she touches one.

 

The sudden wish to be hers and also blushed and squalling in someone’s arms on someone’s floor, probably telling them about the way my father taught me how to dance to The Rolling Stones or how I was wrong. About most of it. Returning to my earlier journals, always sparkling with a forgotten dream repeated for three years straight and then buried deep. My father’s dentured smile. “You don’t want to be like me, Sar.” That’s how he said it. “Sar.” He called me “Sar.” These things hurt later, never now.  “Take care of your teeth.” My father’s note to me after graduation about how proud he was of me that I threw away in ire. We subsist on removal of anything that invokes the way he used to move in front of the stereo, hands out to me, tall glass of Wild Irish Rose on the dining room table, the smell of smoke “Come on Sar, dance with me.” The note he gave me before I moved to Colorado, gone and he’s only ever written me two and my old journals: “I really want a daughter” repeated in the margins. The way he hugged me in tears telling me he would miss me. Did you forget you didn’t believe him?

 

I am eight days late and openly crying on an airplane. Not the whisper of it but the full volume roll. Not an eruption but more than four rolling tears, kind of a loose sob. if anyone touched me, I would turn and they would see me unperformed: not made up or plucked, tear streaked, unvaulted and the kick of it,  hoping to be carrying the world’s next bastard.

 

 everything about me

ancient but my teeth,

now singing. 

they are proud;

showing, shiny and

sharpened and strong

like screaming daughters.

 

“The alligator”