The rape joke is that he was your father’s high school student – your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.
The rape joke is that he knew you when you were twelve years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.
The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.
The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.
The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.
Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.
You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.
The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.
The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.
It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, ‘I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,’ which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.
The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.
The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.
The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.
The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.
The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends – haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.
The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
Patricia Lockwood (2014)
from Fairies
2
Fairies begin their day by coming together a moment and sharing joy.
They love the feeling, which dew on the leaves draws from grass, lilacs and the response of meadow and flowers to the dawn.
Diminutive green sylphs now run in the grass, whose growth seems intimately associated with theirs, a single line of concentration.
They talk to themselves, constantly repeating, with an intensity causing their etheric doubles, grass, to vibrate as they pass, vivifying growth.
To rabbits and young children they’re visible, but I see points of light, tiny clouds of color and gleams of movement.
The lawn is covered with these flashes.
In low alyssums along a border, one exquisite, tiny being plays around stems, passing in and out of each bud.
She’s happy and feels much affection for the plants, which she regards as her own body.
The material of her actual body is loosely knit as steam or a colored gas, bright apple-green or yellow, and is very close to emotion.
Tenderness for plants shows as rose; sympathy for their growth and adaptability as flashes of emerald.
When she feels joy, her body responds all-over with a desire to be somewhere or do something for plants.
Hers is not a world of surfaces – skin, husks, bark with definite edges and identities.
Trees appear as columns of light melting into surroundings where form is discerned, but is glowing, transparent, mingling like breath.
She tends to a plant by maintaining fusion between the plant’s form and life-vitality contained within.
She works as part of nature’s massed intelligence to express the involution of awareness or consciousness into a form.
And she includes vitality, because one element of form is action.
Sprouting, branching, leafing, blossoming, crumbling to humus are all form to a fairy.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (2013)
from Mystérieuse
24
Observatory dome, vertical and horizontal curves, mobile staircase leading to a large telescope, wheels, cranks, large gyration systems, eyepieces, lens, and in front, table and chair: two figures seated at the table, scholars leaning over their calculations in puzzlement, drops of sweat splash, the figure comes towards them – concentration.
Simple background, table and chair: the figure approaches one of the scholar figures who indicates silence, drops of sweat splash – imperative gesture.
Simple background, table and chairs: whilst one of the scholar figures sits and calculates, symbols all around, drops of sweat splash, the other scholar justifies or tries to explain – invitation to go and look.
Mobile staircase leading to a large telescope: the figure climbs up – impending explanation.
Simple background, telescope, lens: the figure looks in and cries out in terror, drops of sweat splash – horror.
Simple background: two concentric circles in which the silhouette of a hairy spider shines out among the stars – an unlikely vision.
Simple background, chair: the figure comes back all excited by what he has seen, drops of sweat splash, addresses the scholar figure sitting at the table: falling on deaf ears.
Simple background, chair: the figure, all excited, tries to explain what he has just seen to the scholar figure sitting at the table, drops of sweat splash: falling on deaf ears.
Simple background, chair: the figure, all excited, explains what he has just seen to the scholar figure sitting at the table who understands none of it, drops of sweat splash – lack of understanding.
Simple background: the figure, all excited, explains what he has just seen to the scholar figure who gets up, drops of sweat splash – lack of understanding.
Simple background: the figure invites the scholar figure who gets up to go have a look, follows him to go see, drops of sweat splash – verification.
Simple background, telescope, lens: the scholar f
igure looks in, drops of sweat splash, agrees and comments to the other standing by his side – barely surprised.
Simple background, telescope, lens: the scholar figure looks in and describes precisely what he is seeing, drops of sweat splash – truly scientific.
Simple background, telescope, lens: the scholar figure looks in, drops of sweat splash, while the other thinks, formulates a hypothesis – a guess.
Éric Suchère (2013), translated from the French by Sandra Doller
Some Fears
Fear of breezes; fear of quarrels at night-time; fear of wreckage; fear of one’s reflection in spoons; fear of children’s footprints; fear of the theory behind architecture; fear of boldness; fear of catching anxiousness from dogs; fear of ragged-right margins; fear of exposure after pruning back ivy; fear of bridges; fear of pure mathematics; fear of cats expressing devotion; fear of proximity to self-belief; fear of damp tree trunks; fear of unfamiliar elbows (all elbows being unfamiliar, even one’s own); fear of colour leaking from vegetables; fear of the mechanics of love affairs; fear of slipping; fear of ill-conceived typography; fear of non-specific impact leading to the vertical ejection of the spine from the body; fear of leaf mulch; fear of the timbre of poetry recitals; fear of balcony furniture; fear of colour leaking from the heart; fear of internal avalanche; fear of the notion of a key engaging with the inside of a lock; fear of psychoanalytical interpretations; fear of dregs; fear of book titles; fear of particular hues of sky glimpsed from aeroplane windows; fear of text stamped into metal; fear of promises; fear of alienation brought on by hospitality; fear of unexplained light; fear of comprehensive write-off; fear of fear; fear of help. Fear of asking for, receiving, refusing, giving, or being denied help.
Emily Berry (2013)
from Odes to TL61P
5: 1.i
I stupidly broke the catch. I slammed the door shut and the catch encased in the door is now broken. The catch inside the rim is fine, and if I lodge a spoon in there it continues to function, but obviously then the door isn’t closed. I am having a nightmare finding a replacement door. I have managed to take the door off. But I can’t seem to get the door apart to remove the catch itself. A liquid sieve was slicked on mock extinct. The grating is a waste grown empty, ground up in the missing cogs; the ultimate multifacets grow facetiously immortal. For who knows well it isn’t; she wants more than that, and so should you; please as if gradually read all the notes on your coding notice; it’s good to know the worst, it’s good to know that it’s only that; Perturbation theory leads to an expression for the desired solution in terms of a formal power series in some small parameter that quantifies the deviation from the exactly solvable problem. Love can be trusted not to fade, as also faded out to trust; devour the wind that just washes over you, its meaning is its filling; your reflection in glass blown into the shape of your face to accommodate its progressive jutting; cracks appear in your shambolic argumentative scream learnt fresh from first orgasming, a rondo to oblivion d’exécution transcendante; excess levity leads to an unblessed strain injury for the dozen or so marketing executives secretly pretending to get good enough at free improvisation; they’re out back; whatever the fuck that thought is, get it back; commissioning variations on your theme – the screen blinks, Yemen for cubist; get it back; mortality is scrambled to the précis of our meaning, to make life comprehensively succinct; the immutable is better than the mutable, the inviolable is better than the violable, and the incorruptible is better than the corruptible: look at teeth, or Africa. Or Wales. Look at yourself. You don’t need to be Dante.
I go on to the mound. It is snowing a bit. The fence at the corner is obscurely associated with being loved and doing the creosoting for a meagre sum which I think is a lot but is also a way of rounding into the street with your feeling of disappointment. Twigs scratch and knock on it, later redone in local colour. People are dragging back the sled. On the top the snow is packed onto the muddy grass oddly hard by all their feet. That is the efficiency of feet. People go down the mound. In the summer when the snow was gone under the mud I went there with David and ended up agreeing to be the one who was fucked so long as I did not have to be the one who would fuck back, and put myself on my hands and knees with my pants down, in front of him, facing away; I felt myself become a hole, I now think I emerged as a hole for him; I now emerge as a hole for you. We didn’t get to do it, our mothers came looking for us and stopped it even before fear did, but I suspected even then that he was frightened or just indifferently disgusted, since otherwise surely he would have done it to me quicker, since I think so; I mean that him fucking me would have come first, but not me fucking him, or our mothers; we should have made our mothers come too late; I heard that he told people about it and I was angry because I was ashamed at having again capitulated to secrecy; secrecy was my enemy, like God engrossed in someone else; in the caravan in his garden I tried pressing him to agree to one last fuck without touching with his father figure who was a man I now give a cartoon nose, white skin, a beard, and idly establish was 40. I’m colouring in his hair, it’s brown. It wasn’t love, but it hurt and left me complex; I am a real hole for you, not a barely noticeable flimsy crack; David had a stupid way of laughing and a fucking ugly blush. Hasten defections. I swapped stickers with him, and went on to exchange my motorbike for Christian’s tank, an agreement which my father unhappily replied was a sort of extortion from infancy, but which made me sexually delight in having given away more than I had got back, for the delight was secret; I made my sister wear the fantasy lieutenant’s shirt with the felt tip arrows pinned to the collar. To propitiate invasion. Nylon for Insignia. I lay under a cushion and asked her to jump on my head. She did. I like Roxette, Elite and cocoa butter on carrots.
Keston Sutherland (2013)
The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter
It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. ‘Dear Son,’ was the way it began. ‘Dear Son’ and then nothing.
Mark Strand (2013)
Chicken
A poem goes to the other side. It’s different there, but that’s not why I wrote it. There’s all there is, in the chicken joke. Where are you going with this.
Cathy Wagner (2012)
Birthweights
for Freya Potts, born 22 Jan 09
When the baby arrives we announce the birthweight. To make it real. You were driving at midnight, woke us to tete-a-tete the network with Fuckin’ hell: all perfect, not a freckle. So welcome Freya, at eight pounds ten.
Birth is the only operation that runs itself, medical science just helps it along. The op involves removing live flesh from flesh, undertaken not to simplify but make life more complicated. Or various. We take it out and watch it mould us.
One father looked back: the first time was like a bloodbath. But the last was like a bar of soap.
So welcome Freya without freckles. Is it Freya with Phoebe’s face? Or the face of Potts? Or Freya with her own face, an afterthought of resemblances? All the birthweight declare is: I am here. I thought: could genetics make for babies announcing their own names in the minutes after they’re born? Then the wait for the phonecall.
Past midnight, we wake. The baby’s here: all perfect, not a freckle.
She says her name is Freya.
Chris McCabe (2012)
Other Things
To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
– Amana Colony, Iowa
To buy a potted plant is to admit both faithlessness and need. To water the plant, perhaps daily, perhaps once in a while when you remember and th
e leaves start to droop, is as close to love as it gets.
Other things mean other things.
To light a lamp is to hide darkness in the same closet as sleep, along with silence, desire, and yesterday’s obsessions. To read a book is to marry two solitudes, the way a conversation erases and erects, words prepare for wordlessness, a cloud for its own absence, and snow undresses for spring.
The bedroom is where you left it, although the creases and humps on the sheets no longer share your outline and worldview. In that way, they are like the children you never had time for.
A cooking pot asks the difficult questions: what will burn and for how long and to what end.
TV comes from the devil who comes from god who comes and goes as he pleases. To hide the remote control in someone’s house is clearly a sin, but to take the wrong umbrella home is merely human.
The phone is too white to be taunting you. The door you shut stays shut. The night is cause enough for tomorrow, whatever you believe.
Remember, the car keys will be there after the dance. Walls hold peace as much as distance. A kettle is not reason enough for tears.
The correct answer to a mirror is always, yes.
Alvin Pang (2012)
from Adventures in Shangdu
Of Lucky Highrise Apartment 88
The contractors were in a hurry to catch up with the rest of the world so they rushed off before they finished building Highrise 88. So here is my apartment without its last wall, gaping out to a panoramic view of Shangdu’s river. Across the river, all the white-tiled factories hum anxiously. This hum of 2,000 factories can inspire or drive you mad. Yesterday, a drunk man and a suicide used 88’s unencumbered views to fall to their deaths and now there are ads for new roommates. I am one of the few women who live alone in this building. My last roommate married as quickly as she moved in with me. I see her in the neighborhood, pregnant and gloating, with men who fetch her footstools.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 6