Totally F-able
is something about me
no one ever has actually
said. So what
if someone told me
he really likes I write
my little poems
and even stand up sometimes
to share them?
You’re a dick
is what I said
but just to myself
as I descended
the narrow stairwell
after that New Year’s Eve
party at Jack’s place.
There was the confetti
my mind makes
when it shivers the night
into beautiful pieces
—I mean the stars.
I wasn’t drunk.
The sky does that
if you’re lucky or if
you are prone
to looking up,
which I guess I am
so terribly trying
hard to do. Then you see
there are strangers
flying 30,000 feet up
in the cloud’s head, bad ideas
like reading the comments
or that one time
some man on tv said out
loud he thinks
Hillary should be shot
in the vagina.
I have lain down
on a frozen lake
and held my breath to hear
the ice moan or crack or
hum—the otherworldly
music of the transformed
water that sounds like
nothing you could believe
unless you were here,
right now,
with your wool mitten
clasped in mine.
Listen, it is good
to make yourself feel
small in the mouth
of the cosmos.
It’s how I am
full of all the things
I want to say but don’t
know how—
the ineffable
in my body taken
form.
Ancient History
a poem written in the voice of Medea1
A sonnet is a little prison, so
allow me to slip a few words out
now I’m fixed2 between these walls. Though
I might leak3 like a broken downspout
in a storm, and I don’t doubt
you know what Heraclites4 said of the mind:
dry ones are wisest and best. A drought
is what I’d call that, but I find
it’s best not to disagree with men.5 Let’s rewind:
I spilled the vintage of my agony.
That’s what the chorus rehearsed in ill-timed
verse when I killed my kids. 6 Insanity? 7
You’d better learn how to sing:
I know how to play a king.8
1 Tyler Perry (a man who plays a woman in the Madea film franchise) explained to TMZ that “Madea” is short for “Mother Dear.”
2Here I must agree with Seth T. Hurd’s A Grammatical Corrector; or, Vocabulary of the Common Errors of Speech: “To fix is to make fast, or permanent; to set immoveably, &c.: hence, to fix a watch, is to stop it, or prevent it from ‘going;’ which, it must be admitted, is a very unsatisfactory mode of repairing that article.”
3 “Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day,” writes Anne Carson. We’re too porous, you know, the way we squirt blood, queefs, the semen entrusted to us, tears.
4Heraclites is also said to have said “you can’t step in the same river twice.” My English teacher claimed that means nobody is the same person from one moment to the next, but I think it’s the river that’s always changing, not men.
5Once, after I ripped my voice on stage reading poems about my grief, an acquaintance approached me and put his hand on my bare arm: “I hadn’t realized you were so beautiful,” he said.
6I asked around: in what other stories do mothers murder their own children? I wasn’t looking for headlines. I was looking for older stories, the ones that bubble up from subterranean veins, the ones that you can sometimes glimpse in the bones of feathered creatures on the forest floor. Everyone circled the answers, like how B. and I went skinny-dipping under a full moon and I forgot I had children, or a body, or a body of words in which to sink or swim.
7 The phrase “to go Madea on” means “to go off on/violently attack,” writes beekm on urbandictionary.com, which I guess could be one definition of insane.
8 Online Etymology Dictionary entry for the name Medea: “related to mēdomai ‘to deliberate, estimate, contrive, decide,’ mēdein ‘to protect, rule over,’ from PIE root *med- ‘take appropriate measures.’”
Dear God
a prayer composed from one line of Sappho
lyre lyre lyre
Rumi Says There Are Love Dogs No One Knows the Names Of
The thing about exes is
some people have them. I don’t.
I collect sugar packets, my only
excess. The thing about sex is
I thought it’d be enough, like writing a poem
about the moon: turns out it never leaves you
less thirsty. The thing about XXX
is that Rumi line, how we’re all doggie stylin’ it
after the divine. The thing about death
is the weight of the heart when Anubis drops it
onto the scales, just stop
and think for half a sec about what’s in there
unless your brain’s already been extracted
by hook through your nose —
Abracadabra! now you’re a sky wrecked
with bells. In other worlds, rain. (In other words
sea.) The thing about a hex is how it could be
a jinx or a screw with six sides.
Does it matter what we call it? Either way
we get fastened, and the thing about
yes is my leash.
In “Ancient History,” the line “I spilled the vintage of my agony” comes from a translation of Euripides’s Medea that I found in a library on Mallard Island in Rainy Lake. I wrote down the translator’s name, but this scrap of paper has been lost, and I have not been able to return to the island since.
The title “Rumi Says There Are Love Dogs No One Knows the Names Of” is taken from a line in Rumi’s “Love Dogs,” as translated by Coleman Barks.