AILEEN WUORNOS TEACHES ME ABOUT COMMITMENT
First rule. Men always want to come inside you so that if they give you a sickness or a baby, you are bound to them forever. People will tell you men don’t like commitment and the first rule is that you shouldn’t believe them. Remember, sickness or a baby. Neither of which they’ll take care of. Men will commit to hurting you but not to healing you. I love commitment and you can believe me on that. Second rule is that you should always believe me because I am always telling the truth. I love commitment because I hate asking questions. I want everything to be big and loud and forever and certain and true. I want to say my mother’s whole name. I want you to tell me I have her nose and mean it. I want to be forgiven quickly. I want to say I love you on the first date. I want to play your favorite song until you get sick of it and then never play it again. Tell me you’re hungry and I’ll fry you an egg. I want to remain young enough to believe I’ll never change. I hate epiphanies. I spent my whole life getting into cars with strangers and the worst part was when I recognized them from somewhere I couldn’t remember. No, the worst part was when I remembered but couldn’t tell if they did too. No, the worst part was when my mouth pulsed around them and they said, Do I know you from somewhere? Everyone says I speak in hyperbole but it’s just that there are so many ways for things to be the most of what they are. I hate being just a little bit cold in the supermarket. I just want to know where I’m wanted and where I’m not. And that’s what I told them, you know? I told them I wanted to make sure the people who hurt me don’t ever hurt anyone again. And since you can’t ever be sure of that, I took their whole damn bodies.
III.
Big mothership and all. I’ll be back, I’ll be back.
—AILEEN WUORNOS
SHE LIT UP EVERY ROOM SHE WALKED INTO
but never asked to be the center of attention, just came in, always with a smile on her face, excited to see the people who loved her, which was everyone she ever met, and did i mention she was always happy, never ever ever was she in a bad mood, in fact i don’t think anyone ever saw her not smiling, did you? i heard, from a girl at church, that she actually had a smile surgically implanted into her face, i mean just the most bubbly, cheerful girl you’ve ever met, everyone had a crush on her but no one actually dated her, which made her that much more desirable. she was celibate, i heard, but somehow knew exactly how to make everyone want her, she was like that, such a bright future, so bright we could barely even look at it without permanently damaging our eyesight, she could’ve done anything she wanted, a nurse, a lawyer, a silent wife, talk about a girl with goals, and on top of all of that? she was a track star, volunteered at the soup kitchen on weekends, and had never disappointed her parents, honestly, come to think of it, there was no one in the world who deserved this less than she did, of all people, i can think of twelve people who deserved this more, it’s almost like a sacrifice, maybe the world just didn’t deserve her, maybe none of us did, someone so wholesome, so vibrant, so alive, so obedient, so demure, so petite, so tender, so strong, so pretty, so prude, so brave, so quiet, so butchered, so blue. i guess the silver lining is that now the bar isn’t so high for the rest of us, we all look better with her dead, just kidding, did you hear she was clutching the fence when they found her? she fought like hell, apparently, it’s a shame it was my birthday party and i forgot to invite her, it’s a shame no one heard her screaming, the music was just so loud and we were all singing along.
[everything we called hormones. everything we called a temper tantrum. everything i envied. everything i wanted. everything about the babysitter’s other life, i wanted, the one i wished so badly to know, the one where she shows me where she hides.]
WHEN THEY FIND HIM
The men who loved him say,
We never would have expected this,
while his ex-wife goes into hiding.
Before the Visalia Ransacker
turned Original Night Stalker
turned East Area Rapist
turned Golden State Killer was caught—
a former cop, living with his daughter
and granddaughter in a vast and stuccoed
suburban home in Citrus Heights, California—
the detectives were overwhelmed with tips
from women who were convinced
it was their uncle, their boyfriend,
their coworker who once,
in a fit of rage, smashed his computer
screen with an empty mug.
Everyone keeps asking aloud,
Who would have guessed?
Him, of all people.
But we look at each other
across the room.
We roll our eyes.
We have the composite sketch
in our pockets. We held it
up to our fathers
while they slept.
what does it mean
to have an instinct?
does it just mean I was born
to avoid a certain breed of death?
WILL I EVER STOP WRITING ABOUT THE DEAD GIRL
& all of the ways she, i, we, would be unborn
& at the hands of who—men we once loved
or who stumbled upon us, those who we ticked off
or turned down & then, how they will remove
what’s left, in small parts or on display
or tucked into bed to be found by the landlord?
even when i am not writing
about the dead girl, i am writing
about the dead girl. even when the girl
in the poem is alive, she is dead
& i am writing about a time when she wasn’t.
i am sorry for killing the mood.
it’s just that i can’t stop thinking about her
& how she must have been afraid like i am,
how she too must have imagined some blue
version of herself. i’ve always had trouble
getting over people & maybe the dead girl
is the one i never will, the one that got away,
whose favorite song is playing in the pharmacy
while i wait for my medicine.
maybe there is a dead girl inside of me,
inside of all of us, waiting for her turn
to tap dance at the beauty pageant,
maybe right now she’s shy & nervous
backstage, but once she hears her name,
she’ll shuffle, ball, change
& not blink twice.
[i am sorry to do this to you. i know you’ve been hanging on so long. i did not get a final phone call. i saw her face on the internet and i knew it was a tribute. do you ever think about which picture they’d use? if you’re reading this, please choose the one of me in a t-shirt the color of burnt sienna, my hair in a single braid laid over my shoulder & across my chest. it is not my favorite photo but the one where my mother says i look most like myself. alec took it. ask him for it. the babysitter died in the hospital where my mother works. no, the babysitter died in the bathroom of my favorite restaurant. then was taken to the hospital where my mother works & died again. i hate telling people how it happened. there is a difference between fact & truth. the fact is that she overdosed. the truth is that he killed her.]
ELEGY FOR ALLEGEDLY
In its place, a gap wide enough for a girl
to press her finger.
Now a sentence looks like my teeth.
The boy touched me in my sleep.
The owner of the cake shop drove
twenty women to quit their jobs.
What I said happened is what happened
and not what I remember.
ODE TO THE WOMEN ON LONG ISLAND
after Jennifer Givhan
I want to write a poem for the women on Long Island
who smoke cigarettes in their SUVs with the windows
rolled up before walking into yoga, who hack and curse
in downward dog, and Debra from the next block over, who
has strong opinions about Christmas lights after New Year’s,
who says that her body isn’t what it used to be
but neither is the economy or the bagels at Rickman’s Deli
so who really cares, who, during shavasana, brings up
the rabbi’s daughter, who got an abortion last spring,
and Candy in the corner, who is mousy and kind
but makes a show of removing her diamond ring before
class because it’s just too heavy, calls Debra hateful
and the class takes a sharp inhale through the nose
then out through the mouth. And after class, after Candy
rushes home to check the lasagna, Debra lights up
a smoke and calls her best friend Tammy.
So then the girl calls me hateful,
hateful, can you believe it? What a word.
Some kind of dictionary bitch over here
and so you know what I says? I says
you don’t know the first thing about hateful,
wanna know what’s hateful? Menopause.
And it doesn’t really matter if Debra actually said that
to Candy (which she didn’t) because Tammy is so
caught up that Candy called Debra hateful (which she did)
that next week when Tammy runs into Candy while
shopping in Rockville Centre and Candy asks Tammy
how she’s doing, Tammy will adjust the purse strap
on her shoulder and say, We all have a little coal
in our stocking, Candy, and Candy will shuffle away,
certain that Tammy knows something about her marriage
that she shouldn’t, and she doesn’t, she just loves
Debra, who just has a lot of opinions and had Candy given
her the chance to finish her sentence, Debra would have
talked about the reproductive rights march she went to
in the ’60s and the counterproductive sex-shaming
methods of organized religion. I want to write a poem
for the women on Long Island, whose words stretch
and curl like bubblegum around the forefinger, who
ask if I have a boyfriend and before I answer, say,
Don’t do it. Don’t ever do it. You know
my friend Linda, she’s a lesbian,
like a real lesbian, and whenever I go
over there, she lives on Corona over by
Merrick, by the laundromat, you know where
I’m talking about? Whenever I go over there
and see her and her wife, what’s her name?
I can never remember the girl’s name,
anyway whenever I go there I says you know
what I need? I says, a girlfriend, that’s what I need.
The women on Long Island smoke weed once a month
on the side of the house after their husbands—Richard Larry
Gary Mike or Tony—go to bed, they let their teenage
daughters throw parties in the basement while they watch
the home network upstairs and keep a bat by the couch
in case anyone gets Mickeyed, even if it’s their own sons
who did the drugging, the women on Long Island won’t
put it past any man to be guilty, even their kin, who,
after all, have their husband’s hands and blood and
last week, when a girl was murdered while jogging
in Queens, the women on Long Island were unstartled
and furious, they did not call to warn daughters.
They called their sons. Took their car keys, their coats,
locked the door, and sat them at the kitchen table.
If you ever, and I mean ever, so much as
make a woman feel uncomfortable
I will take you to the deli and put your
hand in the meat slicer, you think I won’t?
You hear me? I will make a hero out of you.
With mayonnaise and tomatoes and dill and onions.
I want to write a poem for the women on Long Island
who, when I show them the knife I carry in my purse,
tell me it’s not big enough, who are waitresses
and realtors and massage therapists and social workers
and housewives and nannies and tell me they wish
they would have been artists but
life comes fast. One minute you’re taking typing classes
for your new secretary job in the World Trade Center
and the next it’s all almost over, life I mean, but I kicked
and screamed my way through it, and so will you,
I can tell by the way you walk. One more thing:
When they call you a bitch, say thank you. Say thank you, very much.
MY GIRL
Dee & I are rolling silverware in the ’50s-themed diner where we work & “My Girl” is playing on the jukebox for the forty-second time today. We are still singing along, even though we don’t want to, it’s just so easy to say it, My Girl, & Dee stops to tell me she’s been on television once, Dateline, she says & if there is one thing I know about Dateline it’s that you’re either on it as a dead girl or as someone who knew her, but Dee is neither. Dee is just a woman who stopped her car one day when she saw a girl, naked, running down Central with shoelaces tied around her neck & asked if she needed help. They’ve gotta learn that this stuff happens, somehow, she says of her daughters, who were piled into the back seat when it happened, as if defending herself from some judgment she thought I might make about her motherhood, but if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that Dee knows how to raise a kid. She’d been kidnapped, just picked up right outside of her studio apartment & escaped after three days of being tortured, Dee says without a shift in tone, she never shifts in tone, even when she is explaining to the group of Harley riders at table 10 that she can’t serve them any more beers, even when she tells off some lady’s kid for wasting the ketchup, even when she hits the high note on My Girl, somehow, the gavel of Dee’s mouth always thuds the same way. One might even think she is telling me a story about her daughter’s new boyfriend, how he refuses to wash his dishes, a nuisance, this man who took the girl & tied her to a bedpost in his Albuquerque apartment. When they caught him, he led them to a body up north where the family of the first girl he murdered found her bracelet in the mud. Dee says, You can watch the episode, somewhere. Three years later, after I’ve quit the diner, I move to New York with a man who loves me & I am drinking a beer in a bar with flat-screen TVs above the liquor shelf that are usually reserved for football but today, they’ve turned the channel to Dateline & there is Dee’s face, explaining that she watched the girl for a while as she ran into businesses and was kicked out every time. No one helped her, Dee says to the camera. But my tire iron is under the front seat of my car. I’m not going to let anybody hurt us.
AILEEN WUORNOS CONVINCES ME TO PUT DOWN MY DOG
If it was socially acceptable to bite people, every person in this city would have a chunk ripped out of their thigh in the shape of my mouth. I undid a few men and now the state is gonna undo me. When I was a kid, we would scoop out snails from their shells with a spoon and let them sizzle on the sidewalk. How many men do you know who did that to a woman and still get to walk free at the grocery store, try all the samples, go golfing on the we
ekends in their peach pressed pants? In an article about me, I read that you always know the killer was a woman if the body is left covered with a blanket. Just say it, you always know the killer was a woman if she cleaned up after. Just say it, you always know the killer was a woman if she tried to protect the kid who would discover the body. Even the television shows have titles that show we only do it when we lose it: Snapped, Enough, Women Who Kill. But listen, and I’m only telling you this because you asked me, it’s better to let her go than shut her inside your house until she’s so old you have to carry her up the stairs. She deserves to be somewhere where no one is afraid of her and maybe that place is death. I just think it’s funny how, before they kill you, they give you anything you want to eat. Like, don’t do me any favors. I’m gonna ask for black coffee because these motherfuckers don’t deserve to watch me enjoy something. But you? You boil that dog a whole chicken. You let her rip it to shreds.
ODE TO MY BITCH FACE
you pink armor, lipstick rebel,
steel-cheeked, slit-mouth,
head-to-the-ground, mean girl.
you headphones in but no music
you house key turned blade
you quickstep between streetlights
strainer of pricks and chest-beaters,
laughter is a foreign language
Life of the Party Page 7