Nostalgia

What she misses is the pale-faced swimming pool days.

The days of evil-eye sour candy and

murderer's crabgrass. The many hours of

hot-seasoned sunlight making prisms of the hose water

snaking through the air;

isosceles cut cucumber sandwiches and

cloud mayonnaise for lunch,

dinner parties with the wicked magician and

his son, with all the musical humans with their sundry

flukes and jams--

Her mothers hands, always on her back,

rearranging the map of her insides.

2006

Aurora

She had seashells in her hair, and glass beads.

She is a beat-nik, a bohemian, perhaps

I'd like her less if I saw her more.

"What do you smell like?" I'd ask,

and her hands would blossom towards me:

twat, pot, and coffee.

2005

Difficulty

Faulkner said, (my father said,)

that he wrote novels because

poetry's too hard.

And that's why I write screenplays

(my father says,)

because novels are too hard.

It's too hard for me,

sometimes,

to even

speak.

2006

The next time I see my mother

is in the morning over the optimistic faces of fried eggs.

We sit in a booth with red seats; what she calls a greasy-spoon joint,

but the jargon i've heard is "area of neutrality."

I smile to placate her, showing teeth the way you do with animals,

making your intentions as obvious as possible.

It's been eight months, but today the clock runs in nervous circles;

an hysterical gyre, a relentless tattoo, and my sister says a blithe thing or two,

about a dress; a book; the dreams she makes up on the spot.

My mother is small, hangdog, sober and watery, her creases ancient cuts in stone;

she wears a funeral of clothes, and her mother's diamond studs, drooping

like sad jokes from her rubbery ears.

We are a family of early-risers:

(we are of debutantes and cowgirls, actresses, lunatics, prisoners, alcoholics,

disappointed lovers, strong, noble, terrified women, a staircase of

dying ghosts bound into my DNA.)

Through the window I see damp socks and bottle caps

sadly hugging the gutter; the sidewalk's wet from street-cleaning.

The bleak sky's like a white sheet stretched tight,

and I'm cold so I hold my coffee in two hands.

My sister brings up World War II; lesbians; celebrities.

My mother nods.

Her eyes are rainy, her mouth a wan, red line.

I ask her if she's eaten but she says she's not hungry,

and we look at the eggs:

yellow and trembling aborted baby chickens

who never got to tell their mothers that they loved them,

never got to leave and say fuck off.

My sister brings up the weather, but I wish she wouldn't

because it's my mother who taught me to hate the sun.

2006

Poppies

I’ve read so many poems about poppies;

Fields of them, red, girls in summer dresses

upturned, somersaulting, cartwheeling, or raped.

I never walked through a field of poppies,

but outside the train’s window from Munich to Vienna

I saw them, thousands of them,

red, girls lifting up their petalled skirts at me

flirting, or saying fuck you, hinting their sexes at the fast moving glass.

O, gentle opiate, I’ve unfastened my silver shoes,

I’ve walked so long and now I’m ready to go to sleep;

Coddle me, dust my eyelids, I can nearly feel the breeze your

fields imply—

I would sleep forever in and under you,

my right hand kept warm by my sex,

the left by my heart;

I'd dream eternity in the dark red iambs my

blood moves cleanly through me, and

each dream will encapsulate a lifetime!

The girls, aloof, maternal, will dust me with nectar,

and show me not their unknowable faces.

I will descend into dispassionate facsimile,

the flush of my cheeks, the moistening of my mouth,

response to my own mysterious stimuli.

Don’t look for me here, for I’ve found you,

don’t raze the fields, lest I wake;

I want to continue as an unknown ratio—

The Comfortable Coward,

the Innocuous Sensate,

the warm-bodied Sleeper, a girl whose

consequence is none.

reply to an email received on election day

I asked him to dinner;

little did he know I'd been invoking him in poems

for six months.

I miss you, I said, and he said,

well, don't think about it too much.

He gives me all my best one-liners,

contriving chapels from the air,

and then,

there are limits in nature, prairie thunder fire and it's back to grass, waxing and waning, overshoot collapse, chewed nails god

Who wrote that, I asked, and then he,

I did-- just now.

There's a word always on the tip of my tongue

when he makes a church for me of his arms--

(perhaps no one will love me as he does again?)

apologies are mere cathedrals. your kisses are mountains, your hands are hands of god, your mind divine, my transgressions infinitely palpable-- forgive me

Forgive me for this silly poem, anyway,

I am ashamed.

Untitled, Oct. 10th

I get a call from a California number I don’t recognize;

Something’s wrong with his heart.

That night I dream I am an airplane flying over Okinawa,

My silver body cutting through the air like bullets through water,

The sunlight catching my wingtips, I whirr.

There are boys in my belly and my heart,

There are boys in my cockpit, my cerebellum;

We are all going to die.

Pulmonary Ablation sounds like prayers and lemonade to me, but

Dad says I’ve got the heart of a poet, or something.

He’s got the heart of a dying person.

Grist for your mill, he says every single time, and,

Hemingway went to war so he’d have something to write about.

Then I am a sheet-metal lean-to,

Holding him in all of his sweat and ammunition,

A warped, corrugated chalice for his adolescence.

The heady smell of pot is riper in the jungle,

The looks between boys are more intense.

– Hey, Giamatti, you know what sound a helicopter makes?

– Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop…

I can keep it together long enough to hang up the phone—

And then the old forest floods;

Monsters and shadows emerge from the trees,

Men with hideous knives, with terrible guns,

Cancer gnaws at the floor where

The breadcrumbs have been eaten,

The compass spins infinitum upon its axis.

The boys from the bunkers shiver in their living rooms

Once they get back to the States.

Many die intentionally.

There’s something that seems to me now

Unbelievable, what I never asked him—

Did you cry, ever, like a child?

Father, did you ever break down?

what love was

mama made me meat

every day of my life

she asked me what love was

and i said salt

(2006)

Ode to NYC

If I were going to write a poem about you, New York,

I’d write about your goddamn $10 credit card minimums,

about the 5 o’clock in the afternoon light on your buildings,

And the way it’s impossible to get run over while crossing 115^th Street on Broadway.

The way Brooklyn spleens to me, and the Bronx gutters me, and how midtown Manahatta with all its noble courage, disgraces me. Crooning Queens eviscerates me, (imagine me, Seth says, imagine Queens and all the rolling hills).

Hip to me, LES, swing low SOHO, gibber at me Chelsea morning!

I’ve stood naked in you with the snow under the Washington Square Arch at midnight like a witch or a lunatic and with bare feet.

New York, if I were going to write a poem about you I’d color it with my histories, and with Seth’s and with Theodore’s and with Christopher’s and with Dalton’s and with Anthony’s and with Lucas’s because they’re all part of me, now, that which is also part of you.

Allow me to explain:

That when I was a little girl I’d pack six Oreos into a handkerchief and wait at the end of my driveway, New York,

for you to pick me up.

If I wanted to write a poem about you, New York,

I would write about vomiting into the top hat on the L train.

I would write about the L train. I would write about the boy I loved drinking vodka out of a plastic handle on the L train. I would write about drinking whiskey from flasks waiting at various stops on the L train. I would write about the boy I loved, his breath, smelling sterile of gin, whispering kisses at me on the 1, 2, 3 trains. How drunk, we’d sit on the pissed-upon floor of the F train; how I can barely remember the first time we made love except for the beigey flush of lights, the fluttering of wings—we were drinking so much Nikolai back then, and boxed wine.

If I were going to write a poem about you, New York,

I’d remember how you carved help into my thigh with a broken safety razor, I’d remember waking up with potato chips stuck to my legs, to my face; I’d remember

hiding candy wrappers inside my pillowcase, shaving all my various hairs off with a safety razor, not being able to taste anything because you’d numbed my tongue with salt; and then getting onto the 1,2,3 redline with clean legs and red lipstick and black stockings, going underground to go get drunk with all the names I called you: James, Patrick, Marion, Marion, Sylvia, Rachel, Kengo, Seth, Adam, Theodore, Shayla, Steven, Aaron, Spencer, Galen, Laura, Daryl, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex.

I’d write to you, New York, things you already know about yourself;

like about those teetotalers you harbor, and those vegan freaks. Those pretty anarchists, all those young goddamn lawyers going to Fordham getting law degrees in whoknowswhat and forwhy? We don’t know. About all us amoral hipsters Howling secrets into each others’ mouths as the sun cums up; I’d write about growing familiar with dawn, how once when I couldn’t sleep for cocaine I walked a hundred blocks of you above the 1,2,3 certain I was going to die, ducking into fast-food joints at the sight of every terrifying phallus, everything a giant knife, you with meat stuck between your teeth, ex-lovers, and objects dripping with AIDS, dead children, the undead, split by the tracks of the 1,2,3 underneath me-- I was at 72^nd when the sun rose above your horizon-- goddammit! the bagel men were out with their huge, clammy hands, salting bagels, brewing coffee, Sleep was out with the bagel men, salting bagels, busy, but not with me.

If I were to write a poem about you, New York,

It would be a love scene set in clean white sheets with a tendency to float up like clouds as if in a Godard movie.

You would be you and I would be me and I would traverse your body in all directions of the compass, and I would sleep with you, soundly, New York, and you would entomb me in your cold streets, swaddle me in your sake, drink me your Hudson, your sweating Atlantic, eat me your fields of immigrant dollars, your heroin-laced hamburgers; oh Glorious Percoset, $5 a pill at Columbia University, sink me down into your dreams of me in sheets voluminous as Godard’s, oh Mighty Robotussin! My heels raw from loving you, New York; my dumbed, unfeeling tongue; New York, Walt Whitman’s eyeing you with a peculiar grin, New York, all your angels are inside me, trying to get out.

Cat On Acid

Have you ever, my mother asks me,

seen a cat on acid?

I have, she says, and I'll never forget

that it ran across the lawn like a black

stripe on green,

and climbed up a tree backwards, the freak.

And all the time, it howled the most terrible howl,

so its panther cousins in the

wild jungles lifted their heads

and rent their feline cool with the worried cry--

a sound that launched a hundred million

blackbirds from their perches on the telephone wires

hundreds of miles away.

I've only heard a sound like that once more,

she says:

when I was in the hospital and you were

coming out of me, you screamed, she says--

I'd never been more terrified. And she looks

out onto our lawn, which is short and very green;

the sprinklers make pararbolas of white-light

into rainbow.

on second thought, she says, I might've been

the one who screamed.

'08