Poetry

A checkered powder blue dress on Sunday morning—Easter

Red, the color of a leaf in autumn, tied up with a matching ribbon

Little white shoes cradled on small feet, not quite touching

the carpet under the wooden pew

Notes of a piano began, my feet swinging

and swaying inches above the ground,

Back—What can wash away my sin?

Up, Nothing but the blood of Jesus

Back, What can make me whole again?

Up, Nothing but the blood of Jesus

The music carried me on its wings

Pure white curling around me,

Tickling my cheeks with silk feather tips

I fall into them and let myself soar

Don’t cry, they tell us.

But if you must, 

be sure to look pretty doing it.

Emotional discretion now comes in a tube

so you can paint on indestructibly perfect coats,

little gatekeepers to lock away the evidence that you cried. 

And should you let it out, 

you risk confining yourself to the caricature of the Crying Girl,

(Streaky-faced, probably sitting in a bathtub somewhere).

Because as everyone knows, there is a fine line between 

Sentimental 

and

Emotional wreck. 

But moderation was never my strong suit. 

I am a floodgate and never a trickle:

a saltwater plumbing problem to be solved. 

In airports,

during movies.

And, God forbid, even funerals – 

“Don’t cry so much,” 

says my grandmother’s oldest friend, half kindly, half fiercely,

pulling me to her chest to muffle the sound of my grief.

Because pain should only ever leak from us, not pour.

Because an open wound cannot possibly be worn with dignity.

Is it any coincidence that the words “hysterical” and “hysterectomy”

have the same Greek root? 

For every woman who wears her heart on her sleeve, 

there is someone handing her waterproof mascara. 

I think about those ladies in the ancient world, 

how they used to weep for hours on end,

 and I wonder why we ever stopped. 

Who caged those oceans inside us, decided

they were not our stories to tell? 

So today, I am twisting the lid back on the tube, 

nailing it shut and lowering it into the ground, 

I am pulling the cork off my bottled up tears 

and using them to water the roses I will lay

on the grave of every heartache I have ever buried:

Every raw emotion I have ever apologized for. 

Clouds have never moved

more quickly than here

under the blaze.

A child’s laugh has never fallen

on softer ears than mine, now.

I watch her spoon pasta,

painting red her lace bib.

The water never cooler,

as condensation on a glass

of spiked lemonade.

Stone never felt refreshing

on bare feet, as here in this city.

And I miss you.

Your hands were rough,

But they made sturdy dreamcatchers,

pointing out shapes in the clouds.

I imagine the father you would have made,

better than mine, I now know.

But I didn’t want two girls and a boy,

even if I could’ve given them to you.

Our martini nights so quickly turned

sour, like the salted limes on glass,

It’s funny how we called it passion.

1. Impostor’s Summer

I brought no pictures to hang on the wall.

Before I left, I cut my hair

and saw for the first time a woman whose body

I could stand to walk around in, a woman sure

of herself, so I know I’m not the girl in the pictures.

I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

Besides, I don’t need the pictures:

the woods outside my window are my father,

the moonlight my mother, the books I read my siblings.

In the sticky heat of July afternoon, caught

in a rare moment of levity, I pen a letter

and send it home — no reply.

I am no bird — wayfarer, woodland creature,

woman I am, nothing more, or less —

and no net ensnares me. But I want to float

up and out of myself and into the song

of the bluebird. Tu-a-wee.

I paint a picture for my mother, the real one,

and she hangs it in the bathroom in the house

I grew up in. Home? No, that isn’t it, at all.

1. Autumn Untethering

Thanksgiving is late this year. The trees

are nearly bare

      except for the maples

      burning a full, deep red

      like the flame of a phoenix before it turns

                  to ashes,

and the crumbling stretch highway to my parents’ house

is a tired, sweeping immensity that I can spread myself out across

with no definite shape until I reach the horizon

and then some

or disappear entirely, unraveling like the seam

      of a well-worn sweater,         

                              trailing all the places I’ve been.

At supper, I am either full or starving depending on who asks,

and we sit in rigid chairs and try to not let ourselves spill into each other.

I am searching for some semblance of settling but there are only corridors

to the spaces in between the spaces in between, pieces of myself kept in boxes

lining the hallways — for continency’s sake, in case the next rendering of myself

doesn’t pan out.

One of these days, I’ll have to take them with me when I go, pile every last one into the trunk of my car and drive back down the highway to God knows where—I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

      Everything around me is dying

            or making itself scarce,

shedding

                        the pieces that won’t make it through winter.

1. T.S. Eliot in January

If I go out bare-skinned, sleepwalking into the morning,

the bite of the air feels almost like being held, almost,

if I stand stock-still and clench my fists, cleave

to January’s shaky breath, clutching it between my fingers.

  “My whole life I’ve been lonely,”

said to no one in particular,

 and I am answered with the echoing steps

of my own feet on stone streets. I keep my eyes fixed there­—

to look another in the eyes is to admit to the vacancy

of my own gaze (to have squeezed the universe into a ball,

to roll it towards some overwhelming question).

At six years old, maybe seven, I’d walk beside the fence during recess, following it back and forth, eyes fixed before my feet, humming. Would it have been worthwhile to have kept my gaze forward, to face the weight of the eyes on me? I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

On my birthday in an empty house, I sit at the piano

and pick at a melody I thought I’d buried.

 (That corpse you planted last year in your garden, /has it begun to sprout?)

Winter has a way of smothering the bones

so that by its end they’re almost like that of a bird —

hollow and frail, brittle under pressure but apt for flight.

1. Spring — or Recurring Apocalypses

While it’s still windy, before the heavy heat comes,

I linger a while longer in the bright quiet of the morning

to knock the frost off the words I buried alive last year.

(Prayers? Confessions? No, prospective longings

waiting to take root).

                  I dreamt I was in Eden the day before the world

fell apart. Mine was the first sin, a temptation

not of taste or knowledge but of ownership,

the gripping illusion that I could claim a garden

as my own, to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

The pines are teetering, laughing and screaming

in the wind, and I wish I was one of them.

I could stay here, plant myself on the forest floor

and see what takes. But I am in the business of vagrancy.

• Incarnation

The last summer before I move away, I am watching myself

from the outside, putting all the people I’ve been into neatly packed boxes.

There are no cold, hard lines, only streams of water flowing into each other.

I pack the pictures, trade something nebulous

for the palpability of the strange tragedy of home

and the warm advent of body.

The summer before college

My mother invited me to her house for tea,

she said,

but I know she only drinks whiskey.

My tires hit the gravel,

sliding down the narrow driveway.

The whirlpool in my stomach spinning,

something more than tea is waiting,

I know

I turn my key in the doorknob,

almost surprised it still fits.

I call her name,

I haven’t said “mom” since the day I left.

No response echoes back,

but I know where she’ll be.

I step onto the back porch

and there a cigarette,

circling fumes escaping its head.

At first, I think,

nothing has changed

but my eyes travel down.

Her growing belly,

stretching out from her blouse,

contrasting the rest of her slim frame.

“She’s the size of an avocado”

I watch a ring of smoke.

“I’m due in February”

I remain frozen, entranced.

“She’ll be named after your grandmother”

Her eyes beg for some response.

All I can find is the cigarette,

Watching as she takes another puff

Another child born with lungs of ash

She draws another breath

Suddenly the leaves change, and I am ancient and a child

all at once, grasping their fiery, brittle bodies

between my fingers too tightly until they crumble.

Everything that ever has been or ever will be

laid to waste in my hands.

Do you remember last October

(or any October, all of them),

when we sat underneath a full moon and you

(or anyone—you could have been anyone)

told me it would be like this forever?

Like a child, I believed you. Like an old saint,

I knew I would love you even if you were lying.

And so I chose to believe you, like a child.

Everything that has been or ever will be

sits incarnate on the brim of the chill of the air,

so fragile, so impenetrable—a phantom,

and yet it hangs there, eternal.

I will spend all my Octobers believing you.