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.