Mansplaining Poetry With Emily Dickinson
The good-looking English major with the muscles
and tattoos
and the slicked-back blonde hair
tells me that my poems are vulgar.
He says,
You can't be a woman who wants
to be taken seriously
and write poems like that.
To emphasize his point, he sends
me a poem by Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson who never left the fucking house.
Dickinson who loved in fear.
I hate Dickinson.
Her seclusion. Her pauses
and pleas for death.
I want to scream from the slanted roof
of the campus library—
You egotistical piece of shit!
Hope does not have feathers!
If anything,
it is the streets of New Orleans on Ash Wednesday.
It is the teenage girl with the unopened pregnancy test
tucked in the long sleeve of her jacket.
It is the electrical storm that tears through the circuitry
of the brain and renders a dreaming woman
in a black dress stupid after a midnight kiss on New Year's Eve.
It is the last scrap of chaos
lying trampled and sick
at the bottom of Pandora's box
that she will gather into herself with cupped palms
like the final flickers of a dying fire in a wind storm.
It is an unraveling rope.
It is the bottom of the dark bottle.
It is a solid eight hours of good sleep.
It is the shining stained glass window
or the lapsed payment on
a landscaped cemetery plot.
I have no time for slanted truths.
Give me Sylvia's head in the oven while her children play down the hall.
Give me Anne's backseat, cigarettes and legs-spread-wide honesty.
Give me Lowell's shitty car-wrecked marriage.
Give me Bukowski's bluebird heart
and his whores and dark bars and Skid Row
summer breezes that stir lace curtains
while a drunk man at a typewriter
with the ugliest mug you've ever seen
gets his dick sucked
in the moonlight.
But please, do me a fucking favor
and keep your Dickinson to yourself.
Punk
Rock Baptism
He
drives us to the liquor store
on
a Saturday night.
Inside
the city limits, the streetlamps
shine
through the car window and
wrap
my wrist in bangles of light
where
my palm rests on his thigh.
Black
Flag is on the stereo,
rising
above the small town silences,
blocks
and blocks of brick houses
leaning
into the full-bellied moon.
He
takes my hand, laces his fingers
through
mine and squeezes.
Rollins'
voice booms from the speakers,
“We're
born with a chance....
I'm
gonna take my chance....
We're
gonna rise above.”
The
parking lot is nearly empty
as
we pull in. All the lost souls
have
found a place to rest tonight.
Down
the street, the strip clubs
shine,
a forest of pink neon
where
the pretty cheerleaders
we
went to high school with
have
all gone to die.
It's
been seven years since
I
parked my old Mustang
on
the concrete pad at the reservoir,
swallowed
down two handfuls of pills
and
a nameless bottle of vodka
like
I was in some kind of mad love.
Two
weeks before that, he'd slipped
a
rope around his neck
and
prayed for peace.
Once
you lose yourself,
it
is never exactly the same person
who
comes back.
Inside,
we pluck bottles of liquid fire
like
flowers from the shelves,
and
later, parked on the side of the road
with
the hazard lights flashing,
we
tangle and unravel again
and
again. The steam of our breath
rises
out of us like ghosts
of
the people we could have been
if
life had been kinder, and condenses
on
the smooth glass of the rearview mirror,
gathering
and swirling over our reflections
like
rivers of holy water,
dragging
us under, washing us clean.
In
My Dream, I Was A Werewolf
The
flowers were white
and
grew down by the river
in
the place where we undressed
and
entered the black arc of the water
like
passing through a portal
into
another world.
Mosquitoes
covered the slope
of
the mountain with their savage whispers.
The
radio played, and we danced
as
Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit”
in
her voice like summer gravel
against
the soft pockets of our knees.
Hungry,
we took the night by its throat, tore into it,
and
even that was not enough.
When
we kissed, my body was too small
a
vessel to hold all of the wildness
that
came flooding in. I sunk under
and
folded like the river bank after a hard rain.
The
white petals of the flowers floated
on
the surface of the water
like
summer stars.
My
only wish was for you
to
be happy. For you,
I
cried out to God over and over.
Behind
us, the paths
had
already started to overgrow.
Everything
that comes from the earth
will
return to the earth.
I
held my breath
and
your tongue in my mouth,
watched
your eyes close
like
a cemetery gate.
An
orange moon swung
half-full
in the sky
like
a hound's tooth washed
in
animal blood.
I
scarred the lines of your face
into
my palms like pentagrams
so
I could remember all of this
when
I woke, because the truth
is
as simple as a silver arrow of geese
cutting
through the morning sky.
Nothing
that passed
between
us
was
ever meant to live.
The
You I Remember
I
have never kept photos
of
the men I've loved.
I
still see your faces
and
frozen smiles just fine
each
night through the gray
veil
of ill and dreamless sleep.
If
anyone asked,
I
could draw a faithful map
of
every freckle and mole
and
dimple
and
the small creases
under
each blue
or
brown or hazel eye,
the
way each pair of lips split
into
a different fluted shape
before
sex, and after.
I've
charted your paths
through
my mind
like
an astronomer charts
the
trajectories of comets
as
they cross the night sky.
But
when the years
have
shed their sad coats
and
passed by like freight trains
wailing
their sad song into the night,
when
someday
you
are seated alone
or
with your wife and children
at
a table across from mine
in
a restaurant we used
to
come to every Saturday,
or
we somehow brush shoulders
at
the airport baggage claim
while
reaching, mistakenly,
for
the same dull black suitcase,
please
don't be alarmed
if
I say nothing at all
and
turn my back to you
like
a stranger in a subway car
at
one in the morning.
You
could never be
the
you I remember.
Gobsmacked. I'm sitting here, absolutely stunned. No wonder Amber was chosen to feature. Brilliant, brilliant work.
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