[[bpstrwcotob]]
Two Poems
see, the beech tree / never asked to be made palette / for the
lovebirds / armed with blades / gashing their runes / into the bark / scarring trunk / initials standing out / standing tall / for love
it is a burden to know;
it is a given to fear
teeth upon bone. blood upon snow.
skin upon skin. worry upon face.
face upon sheets. repeat then repeat.
bandage the wounds but return to the teeth.
return for more. the wound is not
a badge of the love you once received,
but it feels close enough to warrant
another tear of your flesh, another seep
of your fluids. the wound is not
a badge of the love you once received,
but it is all that awakens your
senses. the days are many but
the moments of awareness are few.
in the morning drops of dew, count
the moments you feared would pass
you by. they already have—maybe.
it is a burden to know. it is a given
to fear. when december comes knocking
at the window, knuckles chapped
in the biting wind, what answers will you have,
what lessons left to share?
someone once told me to understand
love as disease / love as invitation / see, the beech tree / never asked to be made palette / for the lovebirds / armed with blades / gashing their runes / into the bark / scarring trunk / initials standing out / standing tall / for love / beneath curls of incense with unfurled wings / the lovers pronounced / three words each / over the peeling wound / as the tree wept / and the human eyes / remained dry / engrossed in their ritual / establishment / of a lover’s pact / meant to last forever / neither human / able to admit / that forever / doesn’t have to mean eternity / only outlast / those who made the promise / or even shorter—the will to keep it / and i guess in a way / your will could be / what your forever means / but i’m not convinced eternity encompasses / such a small patch of grass / fingers in the soil / homegrown roots / my knuckles are white with grip / nightmares come / to life / i’ve seen them / sketched in crimson / what i can only assume / to be blood / running / beneath spilled milk moonlight / in the hallway that takes / hours to cross / the clocks on its walls / always ahead of me / and my watch / i feel like i’m living / life playing catch-up / three steps behind / and always faltering / always running to get back / to the carving of the beech trees / back to the lovebirds / violence disguised as love / the problem with humans / our tendency for violence / excusable by passion / masked by irrationality / the fragility of human emotion / they say lovebirds have poor sight / poor focus / flighty birds really / their passion is their weakness / and here you know / weakness is just a synonym / just a precursor to downfall / another obstacle to getting / back to those beech trees / the only things that truly matter / unfold beneath shuddering leaves / between scarred trunks / and why do you keep walking past them / as if their suffering is not vocal / earth-shattering / the catastrophic crash / of lost limb after limb / see lovebirds slice / their legacies into the skin of the tree / penetrating that protective layer / the barrier tenderly tended / since the seed casing ruptured / and the sun first graced / the virgin bark / as it stepped into the light / shaking / feverish / starving for worlds / of wind and soil / thirsty / for the elements whirling and crashing / all around / that gaping bark left behind by the / lovers enraptured / each by the other / peeling bark that festers / unlike human skin / the tree is unable to stitch / itself back together / over the wound / and hide / the spillage / the white screaming scar remains / a talisman / a legacy / an invitation to insects / to disease / infestation / and again / redefinition / leads to love as decay / love as downfall / thinning forests / and feathered arms / looped together / bringing about destruction / this hunt / this quest / this path leading nowhere / but deeper and deeper / into the forest / towards the origin of trees / and bees / i just wanted to define love / but i guess i’ll keep walking / keep looking for tracks / trying to recall the penciled path / curled over the torn map / i’ll never leave home again / i’ll never step foot here again / just tell me what it looks like / how it feels / how to recognize love / even bloodied / and heavy with gore / stumbling through the door left unlocked / some nights even ajar / since footsteps echoed down the steps / when love last left / and my maps stopped leading to you.
A Puerto Rican Bathroom
Last St. Patrick’s Day I was groped / on the sidewalk outside Tin Roof. / Too much Jameson was how we got there, / waiting for an Uber / that would never show.
Last St. Patrick’s Day I was groped
on the sidewalk outside Tin Roof.
Too much Jameson was how we got there,
waiting for an Uber
that would never show.
Our best day yet was at Boulder Pointe
Golf Club; I wore two sweaters
and his Patagonia like a dress over top.
Sundays are supposed to be
Mrs. Butterworth’s: warm, and
sweet, and slow.
Last Taco Tuesday a stranger told us
Jesus was gay and poly.
Tipsy on a Maiz margarita, a man
tried to track me and Gabi to our car.
Thank God they noticed; my thoughts
were wandering Maybury Sanatorium
like a drunken jungle gym.
In four days I will be my sister’s Maid
of Honor, in a dress from California, beige
three inch heels from Target.
English is my first language, but
"honor" is an elusive term.
Jeep Cherokees have been following
me everywhere, leaping
out of left turn lanes all over town.
They bring me back to August,
back to Calvin Klein skin,
back to a Puerto Rican bathroom
I will never set foot in.
Re: I HAVE DECIDED ABOUT POETRY
Red graffiti says I HAVE DECIDED ABOUT POETRY & it’s like, what did they decide / exactly, that poetry’s so great they left their family moved to the mountains / lived in a little tent in the middle of nowhere writing haikus 24/7? Or did they decide / poetry’s so not worth it
Red graffiti says I HAVE DECIDED ABOUT POETRY & it’s like, what did they decide
exactly, that poetry’s so great they left their family moved to the mountains
lived in a little tent in the middle of nowhere writing haikus 24/7? Or did they decide
poetry’s so not worth it, went into business selling widgets to wankers
at 100 bucks a pop instead; floated stocks, shares shot up & crashed back down, now
they’re in the gutter wishing they were dead? Or did they decide poetry’s
what you do when you can’t do anything about babies getting their legs blown off in
Gaza (or in any of the endless wars coming soon to your doorstep), but
you still want to be Good so you make up some cute little clichés about how Bad it all is
& you win a prize named after this dead white guy, then you get to go
on living The Good Life far away from the blood & guts the dying & the crying? Or did
they decide to play games with suckers like me, looking for something deep
in red BS sprayed on walls, & now they’re sitting there laughing their ass off while they
read this trash? Or maybe they just wanted to say they’ve decided about
poetry without saying what cos it’s nobody’s business but their own; meanwhile I can’t
decide if it’s good or bad there’s not enough spray in the can to paint the town
red with my word salad, when the graffiti only needed five little words to start WWIII.
Thursday
Nearly 21,000 kids are simply unaccounted for in Gaza. They lie under their homes’ stones. / In Idaho, a dry breeze drifts from the sycamore across my windowsills past the lilacs. / I toast sourdough and spread blue cheese dressing, lay down green leaf lettuce, / overlap tomato slices and pile on oven-crisped bacon, feel it crunch under the top bread.
Ruidoso burns, Spencer residents haul waterlogged sofas onto their front lawns.
In Oslo, one of the more beautiful men I’ve ever seen glances at my photos, taps a heart.
He doesn’t message and I measure how long to wait before telling him he’s so hot I could cry.
What do they do with roadkill? Where did the two men who came to remove the deer
impaled on my friend’s fence take its body? Was it burned or does it even now rot?
Nearly 21,000 kids are simply unaccounted for in Gaza. They lie under their homes’ stones.
In Idaho, a dry breeze drifts from the sycamore across my windowsills past the lilacs.
I toast sourdough and spread blue cheese dressing, lay down green leaf lettuce,
overlap tomato slices and pile on oven-crisped bacon, feel it crunch under the top bread.
A beautiful man in Los Angeles asks my height, if I grew up playing sports.
It always feels superior to say ballet, omitting that art’s propensity for humiliation.
Stop working. Reach out to me first. You told us things would be lighter with this new job.
My family texts from Montana and I live always with fear in the periphery,
goading me to look it in the eye, that hour or two between the click of the lamp
and sleep the riot of it. At work I write about our team in Ruidoso, Spencer,
handing out pet food and toothpaste. I edit a fundraising page for a dog who was shot
named Lucky. A beautiful man in Minneapolis gives me a number I won’t text.
Housewives get drunk, bicker and embrace in Dubai, New Jersey, Orange County.
In my book a man sleeps with his friend’s daughter and becomes embroiled in post-war
French socialist politics despite wanting only to write a novel. He writes a play and sleeps
with his ingénue lead. A tuxedo cat sits on the patio opposite mine, kept close by pink string.
In the depths of my bowels the world’s array of important things all trade in magnitude.
Three Poems
If we are lucky, we get old / and sit a while in God’s waiting room, / dance at cafes, admire / Baroque architecture, embody
the environment.
Zombies Walk in the Garden
If we are lucky, we get old
and sit a while in God’s waiting room,
dance at cafes, admire
Baroque architecture, embody
the environment. Sure, zombies walk
in gardens, dualities exist
outside in hay bales, the ocean, helicopters above
deconstructed sound sculptures
follow a river of wires. Later, a man
steps into the frame, now inside
the work, the art alive, pushing
past the dullness of looking
at it hang from a wall. There are too many
conversations we’ll never end.
My Mother Visits Me
Every year from across the country.
She’d never been this far away
from mountains before I moved
here after college. I take her
to all my favorite places
which soon become her favorite
places: the old school diners
with walls slightly yellow-tinged
back from the days when
you could smoke cigarettes inside.
She swears she’d give anything
to relive the sacred ritual of eating
and smoking together again,
just one more time, though she quit
smoking a decade ago.
We visit the punk rock
venues and the dive bars,
the permanent scent
of stale beer emanating
from their graffitied walls.
The speakeasies and jazz clubs
she gets giddy for.
We laugh and stay up
into the depth of night,
eating skittles and Fritos
watching black and white Westerns
in bed. She offers me black licorice,
and I give her the same smirk
I’ve been giving her
my whole life. She pries
into my sex life, and when not
given the amount of detail
desires, she proceeds to share
the too many details of her own tales.
The next day, we ride bikes across
the Brooklyn Bridge and along
the Hudson River. She says
it’ll do if you can’t be
on the back of a motorcycle.
We walk down the canyon
of 5th Avenue, arm in arm, window
shopping for things we’d never
wear, even if we could afford them.
The only store
I convince her to enter
holds a piece of haunting
history: as promised, I tell her
the story of Elma Sands as we stand
in front of the 200-year-old brick well
in the men’s department, imagining
her white muff discovered
drawing water in the morning light.
On our walk back, she catches me
up on the gossip from home—the new
neighbors, the old tattoo shop, how
fast it all keeps changing. She
tells me over and over,
as if I could forget
how proud she is, how
she misses me before
she’s even left.
When my mother
visits, she is no longer
buried in the ground.
The clovers have not yet
grown over her gravestone. I can
almost feel her tousle my hair.
Loons
You cannot believe it, but the sky marigold sorbet
reflected through the looking glass, a lake where families
of Loons preen their feathers for flight while floating by
your own family out each evening on your father’s boat
raising cocktails to the setting sun, a ritual you already miss
watching goslings grow up, fuzzy-headed and bobbing
on water, wingspan tucked beneath them. It happens before
your eyes: cats get fat, hairs grow gray, the bodega on your block
with your favorite bacon, egg, and cheese closes, becomes shuttered
for a few months, then renovated, and now you’re crossing your fingers
it’s not going to be another Chase Bank, or CVS, though you wouldn’t mind
a closer grocery store. As long as there are more summer nights
like this—pooled liquid, silver with gratitude that some things did not
work out, taking instead friendships blossoming over wine, watching bad
reality tv, and a love for falling in love, all of it, even those stormy days
when boats remains docked and a stillness settles over the lake, gazing
out from cabin windows wondering where Loons go when it rains.
Bliss
Excerpts from Tritan Tuttle’s blackout poetry work in progress, “Bliss.”
“Climax Came”
climax came.
I looked at
God.
He said, I’m going to give you something great."
“Blissed”
too blissed out
to care.
“Miracles”
her husband
thought they’d be pro-
ducing
miracles.“
Beautifully Growing”
beautifully
growing
Artist’s Statement
“Bliss” is part of a much longer and larger story still in progress, and it’s a gift to be the one to discover it hiding in magazine articles and newspapers. Lost, hidden, or forgotten words and images find new life in these analog collages, telling the tale of a man and woman who over the course of forty years fall in love, fall out of it, and find their way back to each other again.
I started doing blackout poetry as an attempt to avoid drafting my novel, and I never expected to find a whole new story. Illustrating it via collage brought me back to my teenage years when I first discovered how therapeutic scissors and glue could be. In a digital world, there is something to be said for making things with your hands. There is no escaping the messiness of analog art when it is scattered like confetti across your home, sticking to the bottom of your feet as you make it through your day.
Over the years, each image found me right when I was looking for it.
Somehow, art always arrives on time.
With each layer of paper and ink, a new story emerged, like an additive sculpture. Like the relationship in my story, what was once abandoned—each thrift store photo, old text book, outdated encyclopedia, or tiny speck of discarded ephemera—has new life.
I hope my work encourages you to look twice at everything, searching for the deeper story it may tell.
Constant Weights about the Signs
A collection of mixed media works.
contexts
writing sets itself as the act of intercepting and recording a series of phenomenological data into signs, rather than calculating them out of a signification formula;
every bit stands for an amount of energy, just as every word represents an amount of signification
in the seamless transition from sign to sign, signification progressively sheds its content and takes on the archetypal value inherent in the sign-making or sign-discovery process;
the increasing lack of conventional text components reflects a systematic and theoretical approach rather than an aesthetic judgement;
this establishes a structural field of new formal possibilities that re-quires us to rethink where signification resides, regardless of how we use it;
potential residual contents tend to become theoretical, trapped within the spatialised metrics that delimit and sustain the expanded textual environment;
Two Poems
Alas for the prisoners of masculinity / who would not be caught dead holding / a man’s hand on the boardwalk between / South Pointe Drive and First Street, / where even hetero couples get swept / out to sea, crushed under condos or / washed up on the beach to be eaten / by realtors. What do you want, nothing / is perfect. (But it might be survivable.)
Miami Gay Pride
Alas for the prisoners of masculinity
who would not be caught dead holding
a man’s hand on the boardwalk between
South Pointe Drive and First Street,
where even hetero couples get swept
out to sea, crushed under condos or
washed up on the beach to be eaten
by realtors. What do you want, nothing
is perfect. (But it might be survivable.)
Lost in this city for eons, afraid of
HIV, of police, of dying and nobody
notices, of living & nobody notices,
of the people afraid of me (including
me), of men who need you to know
they like GIRLS (whatever), rescued
by a guy schlepping Domino’s for ten
years with no Wi-Fi and he still can’t
speak English. Yep. Feels like home.
My life unfolds in the dysregulated
hands of a clock TikToking off sun
showers in Adderall City, anesthetizing
stylers arriving by invitation only from
Argentina and Latvia and NewYorkCity
rolling up on Soho Beach House where
a Russian model sacrifices two french
fries and one bite of a half-pounder as
an oblation to the Versace angel.
If you fall into the apps without a life
vest, you may awake with the heir
apparent on a palmetto runway to
Millionaire Row. Cloned by a 3-D
printer in an intracoastal bird cage,
another Giza on the a$tral plain,
orbiting Planet Her on a flexible
itinerary the way a menu flies out of
some pop up: strictly “need to know.”
Smoothing the synchronous pillow
case into divipada pitham—bridge
pose—we met in a sketchy nebula.
Then he crawled his way out of me
like a poem, the umbrella a robotic
arm with webbed fingers carrying
us to Puerto Plata, bone-sweat-like
silver-tears on Bro-meliads. Rain
or shine, these sprinklers revolve.
They never quench this/thirsty/soil,
hungry tendrils caressing each tender,
shrinky bud and leaf, exfoliating piña
colada in the sauna, arroz con pollo
and fryde plantains at the mercado,
or an officer responding to another
unscheduled, eventual emergency
at the World Museum of Erotic Art.
(Humanity was going up in flames.)
Percolating through the food court
at Lummus Park, the carmelized chunks
are melting into sweetness, ripened
grains imbibing the savory juices. ¡La
Vida! In a heartbeat the world flips &
you can see from the Mariana Trench
through a glass-bottom boat an ahistoric
collapse of a pre-histeric ghetto.com.
Now Jews will be living north of Fifth!
You can be gay here during Pride,
he says, Erotes serving elotes on
blushing wings from a fully-erect
coconut grove on Ocean Drive, chin
strapped police & jock-strapped
waiters, flirting with the Michel-
angelo at Marshall’s admiring your
microfibre boxer briefs (say it 3x
fast lol) if all your sales are final.
But you can’t go out, because abuela
got catfished in a dream, lost her
iPhone, her rosary, her conscience.
And you will ride this sparkling
elevator alone through security forever.
Blind Date
Pulling up in darkness I’m “I think I’m here,”
and you saying prove it with a pic of your bldng
okie, which felt over the top but still I took
it through the cold glass the lights bouncing back
in my face from every direction & you were like
okie. Idk it’s like you couldn’t look out a window
where I parked or if you did you couldn’t believe
your own eyes.
Off to the left flies a giant American flag but I
don’t think you recognized any of that color-
blind landscape, the cars at the dealership near
the frontage road crossing an ocean you
never noticed like stepping onto another
planet through a door you may never see again.
How do you find your way back to a
strange place?
Waiting for an hour I drove off once but you
said to come back, and there was a licorice
whip of man-shaped hole in the snow the
smoke out your mouth a lit fuse burning into my
car under layers & layers of Gucci frosting which
granted it’s cold but you turned the weather into
another layer. No wonder you took so long
getting dressed!
“Are we staying close?” was you asking where I
lived like a scared vampire timing his exposure
to a world of curses to a white boy lost here in the
hackles of your suspicions like arguments you
rehearsed upstairs for the last hour about why you
shouldn’t come down and get burned so that
even a condom might be held against you at
the inquisition.
I’m going to New Orleans, you said later,
to be closer to “my people,” but it wasn’t
your family you wanted, either but the culture,
is what you said not soul food or jazz or voodoo
or not just that but lying still on warmth of black
asphalt under a hot moon and the earth stops moving,
no more questions where you are living with the
windows down in a place that you can see with
your own eyes.
Lazy Aging
Seemed a ponderous passing of days / since meadows waved flaxen arms, / and a silver brook backed up / to form a beaver pond.
Seemed a lazy aging local time—
a long...slow...Newtonian apple fall
from this plot’s golden height.
Seemed a ponderous passing of days
since meadows waved flaxen arms,
and a silver brook backed up
to form a beaver pond.
Relativity stretched summer and fall
longer than were—
a most protracted, agreeable, entertaining,
leisurely, passage.
Suddenly!
The speed-of-light funeral march—
seemingly—arrived unsung.
“What is time?” asked I
(scientifically, philosophically, angrily)
of passing wind—
who (if anyone) should know.
Who does time think it is:
taking responsibility upon itself
(without notice) disappearing so?
Yet, signs unveiled themselves all along—
impressed on lives contingent—
noticing.
Three Poems
A decade ago, I would have told you I'd have children by now. It was never a question, only an inevitability. I longed for love and marriage, for stability, for vows and promises. Motherhood would have been the happy byproduct of my dreams come true. I would have gladly consigned myself to that fate had my future manifested in the ways I desired it to. But wanting a thing only drove it further from my grasp.
Single, Thirty-Something Female
In my early twenties, I read an article in a magazine about increasing numbers of unmarried women in their forties, fifties, sixties, like an exposé or an epidemic. I always thought that by the time I was forty, I’d be married and I wouldn’t have acne anymore. But here I am, over forty—I still have acne and I never got married. Those words remain embedded in my memory, so shaken had I been to imagine that same fate might await me. A decade ago, I would have told you I'd have children by now. It was never a question, only an inevitability. I longed for love and marriage, for stability, for vows and promises. Motherhood would have been the happy byproduct of my dreams come true. I would have gladly consigned myself to that fate had my future manifested in the ways I desired it to. But wanting a thing only drove it further from my grasp. Loving men has been like watching fireworks, has been an endless stream of violent explosions and trying to remember how beautiful it all was after nothing but ash remains. It became harder and harder to believe in fairytale endings where I would be anything but alone ever after. It is a strange thing to wonder about the life I would have made for myself if I could have chosen it, if everything I’d ever clung to hadn’t withered in my grasp. Perhaps if I saw myself as a mother more than a wife, it wouldn't matter, alone or lonely, I, like many before me, would do it anyway, without asking for help, without waiting for it to arrive. Even still the idea of children glimmers enticingly in my mind sometimes, a mirage shifting on the desert horizon. But the closer I get, the joy of it always burns off like so much haze in the sunshine. Instead I feel the relief that I did not get what I wanted when I wanted it, that it gave me the freedom to decide to want other things. I still dream of love, imagine futures that surprise me. I still leave every door I walk through open behind me. Just not this one. There have never been any clear instructions for how to wrest satisfaction from a world so good at withholding. The only thing I knew to do for so long was keep revising the plan after each failed attempt and starting over. Now, I’m learning to forgive myself for feeling old, for growing tired of beginning again. I’m learning that alone does not have to mean unhappy. And when I think about what I might have had if I’d had my way, I no longer think I’m missing anything.
Biological Clock
My biological clock is ticking. I can hear it in the rhythmic trilling of the crickets hiding in their tall grasses. I hear it in the tapping of a spoon against glazed ceramic, slowly stirring honey into a hot liquid. I hear it in the pattering rain falling steadily on a sloped roof and sliding down the asphalt shingles to the gutter. Sometimes it is a dancing rhythm, a rumba, tango, waltz, two-step—at other times a dirge, a marching rhythm for a processional of the dead.
It is like any clock, quietly doing business in its place until one day, in a blanket of stillness, you notice it ticking. It is then that you turn on another noise to stop yourself from hearing its constant, ceaseless toil. But every day from then on, when the silence visits, the ticking returns. It was there, clinging to the edge of your awareness all this time like a slug on a tomato leaf, a single slimy touch away from noticing. Why is the ticking of a clock so disturbing? It is a reminder, one might say, of the forward motion of time, its nature to never relent. Time ticks away and all things are left behind, the clock ticking will outlast us all. Or perhaps because the ticking is steady and sure, which none of us are, which nothing in life ever is.
Not even clocks really, which die sometimes, too. Sometimes sudden, a brief moment of failure and the ticking ends; and should you be lucky enough to witness such a death, you'd hold your breath a moment wondering if you’d finally outlasted time itself—the utter silence left behind by the stilled ticking would feel intensely intimate, a private moment of immortality. Or otherwise, a clock's death is slow and steady. It first becomes unreliable, counting seconds twice, resting for whole minutes on end. The clock becomes a problem to solve, a patient to cure, an enemy to defeat, the clock becomes everything, the whole center of your awareness, always checking to see if still it ticks. The clock is dying but you keep fixing it and fixing it, resetting the hands to their proper positions. And when it dies, it hangs on the wall and reminds you every day that you are out of time. You begin to hear phantom ticks, imagining the clock still works and turning again and again you see it, dead. And this too is an intimacy for you, for the clock. It was a part of you once, a thing that lived and measured.
What if I had more time, I wonder? What choices would I make without a ticking clock counting down the days I have left to decide? Some days it is a war I must win against the clock, to declare my intention to fail before I meet my failure, to turn misfortune to success. But I've weighed far more than time on my scales, and always I come up wanting for desire. I've said this again and again: how many times I've calculated, accounting for the variables. But time is not a variable, it is a constant path ahead. And always I am moving forward toward the day when the choice will no longer be mine.
Sometimes I think about how much time I may have left before the final bell is rung. Sometimes I wonder if time will make me change my mind. And then, will it be too late, will I be out of time? I keep hearing the clock tick, sometimes reverberating echoes and other times a quiet whisper. Lately, I have been turning down the noises to listen to it ticking, taking comfort in its constancy, learning unforgiveness from its unwavering plodding march. The clock, like an old friend, a flashlight, a mirror, showing me things I couldn't see alone, in the dark, without a way to measure the weight of this decision.
Here, it says and indicates a single moment. Forever lies just beyond this point.
The Mother Inside Me
"In every man there is a child. In every woman there is a mother."
—Santosh Kalwar
Inside my hollow belly she coils my womb,
awaits its filling, she is patient for my mistake.
Inside I feel her alien polyp suckered
to my locked and hidden spaces. She longs
to hold with my arms, feed with my breasts;
she feasts with my eyes on the smallness of infancy.
The mother inside me is a hostile invasion of need,
is a peal of vicious laughter at each finished poem.
How long did she build her subtle residence
before I noticed her presence? Inside me,
she burns, kindled by the pilot light of hope
that has kept me from ending my worst days early.
A whispering voice in my ear, when I think of the future,
she reminds me of the endurance of decision. I can feel
her hunger bubbling inside me, but I cannot stomach her desires.
Creation is a violence I couldn’t bear to inflict—
not for loneliness, not for need, not even for love. Inside me,
the mother starves but does not wither, the mother fails
but does not relent. She is not a thing that I could kill,
only a secret I must smother. The mother inside me
is serpent shaped, slithering up my esophagus.
She opens my mouth to speak. Instead, I scream.
We are not so different, the mother and me.
We both want something we cannot have.
If asked, then lie
For six years I kept you safe from it all; / sharp countertops. The toxic lake algae. The toxic grass. / I shut all the windows so the toxic air wouldn’t get in. / I checked your fever with a thin thermometer. / I uncanned soup and paced the linoleum.
I told you to be silent in the attic.
After the “Balloon Boy Incident,”
Fort Collins, CO. October, 2009.
For six years I kept you safe from it all;
sharp countertops. The toxic lake algae. The toxic grass.
I shut all the windows so the toxic air wouldn’t get in.
I checked your fever with a thin thermometer.
I uncanned soup and paced the linoleum.
I told you to be silent in the attic. I put up posters
searching for your missing body. I did not listen to the men
at the grocery store who said they once saw you
running away from the yard towards the highway,
between traffic lanes on all fours like a determined deer.
I asked countless Hollywood producers if they could
find a team of camera men to record our family.
I begged air traffic control to close the Denver airport.
I told everyone you were up there, in our silver
weather-balloon stuck in thin air. I asked your father
again and again how we should phrase our loss.
I prepared myself for the interviews, the autographs,
my Good- Morning-America debut. I put on waterproof
mascara. I thought of the intonation and voice
I would use to posture as remorseful.
That is why now, after the reporters found
nothing inside the husk of the balloon,
and you have returned from the attic,
and the people with cameras have all gone back
to Los Angeles, I am here, sitting on the lawn.
Watching a family of elk cross one end of the highway
to the other, thinking of all the mothers
without personal stylists. Without anyone looking at them
at all. Watching the elk. Mowing the grass. Washing a dish.
Three of four elk make it across. One of four, don’t.
Great American Desert
There is no water but only sandy, calcareous soil, / and no trees to fell for a lean to, or to hang a noose. … / “Come. Trust me. In my violence is freedom.”
There is no water but only sandy, calcareous soil,
and no trees to fell for a lean to, or to hang a noose.
Abandoned buffalo wallow gather stagnant pools.
Tendrils of creeks pass as rivers. They make no sound.
The only sound is the wind, always the wind,
as if a drunk God had forgotten how to be silent.
Come south of the mountains, warm desert winds breed
with the cold air of the north. They birth tempests.
Maybe it’s how the mountains subdue the sky,
alter its jet streams, shade its sun, impede its views
of unbroken horizons, maybe these are why storms
bloom into yellows and purples and greens and blues,
with clouds that seem to tumble over each other,
as if above us were an Edenic formal flower garden
fenced, furrowed, and sown by a maniacal bachelor
who breeds hybrids, lives with cats, and breathes dust.
As for me, I feel more awe than fear at a prairie storm.
The child in me excites, as if a father, gone to war,
has returned, more myth than man, with the rage
only men too hurt to know pain carry as a fetish.
With such a brooding nature, a squall line entices:
“Come. Trust me. In my violence is freedom.”
In a derecho, the rain parallels the earth.
Droplets sting like miniature flint arrowheads.
Trees rip from their roots. Walls topple like sticks.
Streets back up with sewage. Lives turn upside down.
But it is the peace after the storm that admonishes.
We do not often hear what the silence says.
When I listen, what does it say? That true silence
does not exist. There is always a whisper in the air,
a prophecy that in a world of unbroken vision,
there is also life to lose, and life to make.
That is what one finds here, among the scrub
and shortgrass. Silence is another order of voice.
Dobbs v. Jackson Tasting Menu
the pamplemousse / has finished rotting / everyone’s sky / under my french nails
the pamplemousse
has finished rotting
everyone’s sky
under my french nails
our moon translates
to spoiled egg
my goose flesh is more
a country of fowls
smacking their skulls
on the same pine
the planet says it savors
me like last drops of wine
it’s not my choice
to re-seed grenades
to lie
fresh cells are seasoning
our homes like water
for soup mmm—
notes of pyre girl—
talk hot vinaigrette
spit supercontinent rifts
delicious past genomes—
mmm
good heresy tastes
as sweet as baby
not that i would know
something ate up
all the light—everything
everything else
is night
Two Poems from “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates”
Either I will fall asleep or I will not. / If I fall asleep either I will dream vividly or I will not.
We’re proud to feature these two poems from Annie Schumacher’s chapbook “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.
On Persephone’s Night Terrors
Either I will fall asleep or I will not.
If I fall asleep either I will dream vividly or I will not.
If I dream vividly either I will wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath or I will not.
If I wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath it is because I am cursed or I am not.
If I am cursed it was because I was born cursed or I was not.
If I was born cursed either I inherited the curse from my mother (or not).
If I inherited the curse from my mother then she inherited the curse from her mother, did she not?
If I ask my mother’s mother about it she will either deny cursing my mother or she will not.
If she denies cursing my mother, will I stay in hell?
If I eventually fall asleep, I will be seeing and listening to everything at once, my senses fixed like a dog.
Where is the drug to drug this hell out of me?
I swallow the tablets like honey.
Even if I never fall asleep for fear of losing what I left, which is itself a kind of curse, I will swap out new hell for old hell, or I will not.
I wake to sticky green leaves.
Swans
It takes eight years to exit the pop music museum.Two older women, arms linked, dance to Waterloo.
We bought hats like that, we walked across a bridge
in Cuenca like that. When do you know someone?
When did I stop knowing you? My sadness spills
out a bouncy Swedish pop star’s lips,
the rising melody covering my heart in a brown sap.
The crowd carols along to the next song, searching
for cheap flights to Athens like we did. I peer through glass
at the metallic stage costumes, the headlong curve of my heart
-ache—were that it anger, I could hate the costumes.
I exit the pop music museum in heavy, platform-soled
tears. White birds sway in the water, my sister sings happy
birthday from a distant time zone. At what point in their
disillusionment did they transform?
Flesh and Bone Zuihitsu
They think it’s been months since my mom tried to contact me. / The cousins say she’s reaching out to connect. I say it’s been years / of you are such a bitch and this whole family is done with you.
They think it’s been months since my mom tried to contact me.
The cousins say she’s reaching out to connect. I say it’s been years
of you are such a bitch and this whole family is done with you.
My therapist tells me I’m too resourceful and clever to let family
suck my will to live; I hear more work. She says step back.
Says observe the process and sends me an email
summary of our recent call. The subject header: Snow & Peace.
A picture of the oak in her Maryland yard.
It wears a floor length gown of white pin-dotted snow
accented with one green birdhouse, frosted cupcake feeder. It says
here, here is sustenance. How I want
to take all my therapist offers into the marrow of my mind.
Mother’s way of comforting was to declare me her own
flesh and blood. There is a bird called lammergeier,
German for lamb vulture. It raptors the bones of carrion,
drops them onto flat rocks to expose the marrow.
My therapist is one of these bone droppers. She asks
what I will gain from allowing my mother’s opinions to define me.
I see a little girl as a cloth napkin dropped beside bone china
where marrow has been sucked from the calf’s bone, just a baby,
cross-cut. Osso buco, Italian for bone with a hole.
The spongy cake of our bones consists of hematopoietic cells called
Poiesis, from ancient Greek, the emergence of something
that did not previously exist; also, poetry. That flesh and blood
is made of poetry, that lines break like bones, that I emerged
from the syntax of a mother who drops rotten rotten
daughter. Will I never find sustenance?
I find her wedding announcement, 1964, The Scranton Times.
Cake topper of a woman, the bride wore a Chantilly lace
and white silk organza chapel gown with a scalloped neck.
Her headpiece of sheer rosettes with a large flower on top
was edged in seed pearls. What about that seedless bird feeder
nailed to a frozen oak somewhere on the Delmarva Peninsula?
Peninsula, Latin for almost an island; or a daughter.
I worry about the birds. Remember they prepare for the cold,
stockpile seeds, and pack pockets of air around their bodies.
Like Qafia to Radif
my lover’s eyes sing patterns of rhyme, but for me it’s those lips. / Fleshy enjambment where I end–stop, the perfect couplet, those lips.
my lover’s eyes sing patterns of rhyme, but for me it’s those lips.
Fleshy enjambment where I end–stop, the perfect couplet, those lips.
Pressed against mine like Charon’s obol, death could be so blessed.
A modern libation poured for Aphrodite, both poetry and prose lips.
My lover’s smile, sharp as a scimitar, separates top from bottom—
Parting ways they flash a pearly shift, glossy-toothed kameez. Oh lips!
That mouth my muse, I tongue an invocation, call for inspiration:
Passion’s incarnation, my lover resurrects with save-my-soul lips.
Like the fifth bayt in an ancient ghazal, they round in rhyme-refrain.
A closing of flesh and pucker of hush, I marvel at broke-the-mold lips.
Not to whistle but to kiss, this lover’s embrace I could never resist.
Whispering Candice, they touch my ear and I hear, give me those lips.
Dish With Bamboo Leaves
So I am trying to make sense of / this world; why my mother throws out / anything that shows any sign of / chipping; why she / insists on buying porcelain, or / keep the jagged / blue-glazed pieces of hollowed clay.
Style of Ogata Kenzan 尾形乾山 (Japanese, 1663–1743)(?)
So I am trying to make sense of
this world; why my mother throws out
anything that shows any sign of
chipping; why she
insists on buying porcelain, or
keep the jagged
blue-glazed pieces of hollowed clay.
Like any traitor daughter I promised
to become rich and finally make
it out of that place. Saying absolve
reminds me of the palm shadows
thrown across the hot Californian
concrete, sandwiching, jarring,
captured butterflies baking in
their own passions. Rain felt like
absolution sometimes. October miracle,
drinking through skin like lotus root;
lips always chapped;
our little rituals. I scratch her back for her
every night; little jets of white;
red; dragging fingernails
across, gleaming sailboats from travel
brochures in bloody bays;
edens in sunrise, suns in
seas; girl practitioner, skin
horror vacui. The weather, she says.
Needs a lot of lotion, cracking,
damage; fine porcelain from
dream screwtape marriage; white and
blue maiden who bears her king on
a mattress of fine porcelain.
Threat of overthinking taken up
by Japanese kintsugi. Months repaired with
bits of urushi and gold. Exchange, take up any
Japanese art. Self deformation. I am trying.
The rot must precede rebirth.
The weather, pottery chips
easily; always more susceptible
to hives and clinical paraphernalia under
the sun. Five bucks and I bought the sun.
Fifty sheets of gold leaf to put in my sunscreen.
Mother’s cheeks glisten with tear streaks
when the light hits in the right way. Like hot
concrete on Ventura, after an October rain.
Three Translations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours
I often pray at night: be mute, / who remains washing in gestures, / and whom the spirit drives in dreams, / that he writes the heavy sum of silence / on foreheads and mountains.
Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht
Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht:
da ward die Zeit, Dann schwiegst du lange
Dein zwetes Wort ward Mensch und bange
(wir dunkeln noch in seinem Klange)
und wieder sinnt dein Angesicht.
Ich aber will dein drittes nicht.
Ich bete nachts oft: Sei de Stumme,
der waschend in Begarden bleibt
und den der Geist im Traume treibt,
daB er des Schwiegens schwere Summe
in Stirnen und Gebirge schreibt.
Sei du die Zuflucht vor dem Zorne,
der das Unsagbare verstieß.
Es wurde Nacht im Paradies
sei du der Huter mit dem Horne,
und man erzahlt nur, daß er blies.
Your very first word was:
Light
:
with that there was time, then you were long silent.
Your second word became man and fear
(we still darken in its sound)
and again your face reflects this.
But I don't want your third.
I often pray at night: be mute,
who remains washing in gestures,
and whom the spirit drives in dreams,
that he writes the heavy sum of silence
on foreheads and mountains.
Be thou the refuge from wrath,
who violated the unspeakable.
It was night in paradise:
be you the keeper with the horn,
and one only says, that he blew.
Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern
Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern.
Und vielleicht erlaubst du noch eine Stunde den Stadten zu dauern
und gewahrst noch zwei Stunden den Kirchen und einsamen Klostern
und lassest funf Stundennoch Muhsal allen Erlostern
und siehst noch sieben Stunden das Tagwerk des Bauern—
Eh du wieder Wald wirst und Wasser und Wachsende Wildnis
in der Stunde der unerfaßlichen Angst,
da du dein unvollendetes Bildnis
von allen Dingen zuruckverlangst.
Gieb mir noch eine kleine Weile Zeit: ich will die Dinge
so wie keiner lieben
bis sie dir wurdig sind und weit.
Ich will nur sieben Tabe, sieben
Auf die sich keiner noch geschrieben,
Sieben Seiten Einsamkeit.
Wem du das Buch giebst, welches die umfaßt,
der wird gebuckt uber den Blattern bleiben.
Es sei denn, daß du ihn in Handen hast,
um, selbst zu schreiben.
You darkening ground, you patiently bear the walls.
And maybe you allow another hour to last in the cities
and you still allow two hours in the churches and remote monasteries
and leave five hours of hardship to all redeemed
and see the daily work of the farmer for another seven hours—
before you become forest again and water and growing wilderness
in the hour of incomprehensible fear,
since you are your unfinished image
reclaimed from all things.
Give me a little more time: I want to love things
like no loves them
until they are all worthy of you and far.
I just want seven days, seven
of which no one has written yet,
seven pages of solitude.
To whom you give that book
that contains them will remain bent, over the leaves.
Unless you have them, in your hands,
to write yourself through them.
Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig
Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig.
Die Lande einfach und die Wasser faltig,
die Baeume riesig und sehr klein die Mauern;
und in den Taelern, stark und vielgestaltig,
ein Volk von Hirten und von Ackerbauern.
Und keine Kirchen, welche Gott umklammern
wie einen Fluechtling und ihn dann bejammern
wie ein gefangenes und wundes Tier,—
die Haeuser gastlich allen Einlassklopfern
und ein Gefuehl von unbegrenztem Opfern
in allem Handeln und in dir und mir.
Kein Jenseitswarten und kein Schaun nach drueben,
nur Sehnsucht, auch den Tod nicht zu entweihn
und dienend sich am Irdischen zu ueben,
um seinen Haenden nicht mehr neu zu sein.
Everything will be big and powerful again.
The land is plain and the water is rippled,
the trees huge and the walls small;
and in the valleys strong and varied,
people who are shepherds and tillers of the soil.
And no churches embracing God
like a refugee and then a lament for him,
like a trapped and wounded animal,—
the houses hospitable to all the knockers,
and a sense of unlimited sacrifice
in all actions, and in you and me.
No waiting for the afterlife and no looking beyond,
only longing not only to profane death
but to also practice on the earthly,
so as to no longer be new to his hands.
Obit in Another Language
You spark / a drag queen in a death drop. / The runway gleams.
You spark
a drag queen in a death drop.
The runway gleams.
Strobes flicker.
You’re bald.
Elizabeth Regina
expiring while standing
in the cancer ward.
Ampersands pour from a champagne flute
as you fall.
A bell rings.
You win.
Chemo drips from a bag through a tube
to the port in your chest.
Footlights shatter as judges gleam
in their simmering electric blue
velvet armchairs.
Followed to the grave by many
the obit said
but that could mean two types of procession.
A stripe of bodies tumbling into a grave
or a mob of grieved lovers in ripped clothes
shadowing you.
You’re nude, writhing and gasping
in a turquoise sequin sea.
You’ve learned only one language.
You’ve opened only one eye.
Magic is the art of believing
what you see.
You see what you’ll never know
and turn your head.
You remember the untranslatable
heat of a lover against your back.
Jut of his ginger furred belly.
You write a poem about him.
You blink and write the miracle again
containing different versions of you.
You begin another life.
Birth of the Blues
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars? / Come into this world between dark southern thighs / while our enslaved ancestors dance to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps, / and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines, and drums?
Was it Miles Davis’s “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back fingering those keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale, and Countee Cullen
while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors dance to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps,
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines, and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature?” Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?
In Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Cafe Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s voice?
Or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane, a love supreme flowing from his horn?
Or in a Black child’s first giant step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.