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for my sisters
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Dedication
[ i ]
Harder
Beast
blessings
Birthstone
Heir
Groundhog day
Spine
Lung
Dead things
Quarry
London, Dresden
Flower
Thanksgiving
Lemon and cedar
Racetrack
[ ii ]
Anthem
Seven Minutes in Heaven
Wheel
Peep
How I
Cave
Semaphore
Vows
Montgomery Inn
Safehouse
Crush
Lion
October
Portrait of my family as a pack of cigarettes
Blue ring
Playhouse
Quarry
Halt
[ iii ]
Vitrine
Zero
Ardor
Powder
Barometric
Jigsaw
Never said
Jealous
Vertical
Quarry
This house
Milk
Slap
Wormhole
[ iv ]
Rapture
Clerestory
Masochist
Ring
Hive
Bind
we have grown nautical
Lily of the valley
Lewis and Clark
Almanac
Husband
driveway
Grisly variations
Eulalia
Quarry
Little fugue
Dear columbine, dear engine
Dead things
What sound
Mouth
About the Author
Also by Melissa Stein
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special thanks
[ i ]
Harder
If you’re going to storm,
I said, do it harder.
Pummel nests from limbs
and drown the furred things
in their dens. Swell creek
to flood, unhome the fish.
Everything’s gone too cozy.
Winnow, flush. Let’s see
what’s got the will.
Let’s watch what’s tender
choke or breathe. Try
to make a mark on me.
Beast
Tadpole with legs.
Hawk with a long tail
that is a snake
dangling from its beak.
The apple limb
grafted to the plum tree,
blue Mustang
with the dull white hood,
Ken with the head of Barbie.
The boy with a new plump fist
of heart or kidney
or some shining pins or discs
or a thick, imperative tube
fastening a mechanism
of breath. What’s wrong
with me is you.
blessings
may your harvest fit in a sack may none of your apples be sweet may barbed wire tear off the snouts of your pigs may the mirror show the scarecrow’s face the moon shine on your wedding day may the milliner embroider your bonnet with nettles the blackberry fell your dog may your every joy grow a carbuncle may your eyes go to milk may the moth make its nest in your bedclothes the wind blow sickness in your ears may your husband leave you for a crone may his mother season your cooking from the grave may corncrakes gnaw your sour bones a shadow fall across your shadow the mice lay their eggs in the mouths of your children your children have the blacksmith’s eyes may tracks lead hunters to your door your fingers melt like candles may you succumb to god’s terrible kittens may the wolf carry off the heart of your heart and the swans swim thrice by your grief
Birthstone
Facedown in carpet,
arm pinned behind me.
Oh, opal. Oh, tourmaline.
Oh emerald of the cool, cool shade.
A jewel is buried in this
pile I will find it with
my teeth. Pearl from grit
wrought me. Do you know I
have hopscotch and dandelion,
weathervane, watering can.
I have a story, I am skipping
out into whiteblue checkered
yes that is an apron, edged
in rickrack, whipped
by wind into the shape of
my mother. The sun behind her.
Cut out of that light with
pinking shears, steps out
with face and whole hands,
entire: that old apron
wrapped twice around
my waist, kitchen soldier,
jade milk-glass mixing
bowl wire whisk and sifter,
the floured board, the dough’s
shagged fist—does it hurt, does it
bruise, would you hand
me a nasturtium,
its orange burnt bitter
carnelian, mouthful
oh where is that jewel
Heir
Tables heaped with meat
and fruit. Plates laden
with roasted juice and what lies
leaking it. He grabs a fist
of serviceberries and purples
his lips. At the last
she lay blue and bloated
as a frog’s upturned belly
in the moat. His reign
stoppered in her. All the sapphires
and gilt. All the chalices
ensanguined. He commands
snowbanks of ermine
to line the crypt. Guard hairs
glistering, ensiform. Murmur
of underfur. An avalanche
to keep them warm.
Groundhog day
i.
Fat joy splayed on its belly
eating everything green gives it.
Fur fluffed and cresting
like a crown.
We go around like this,
mowing up whatever we can
and in our own ways, drowning.
ii.
Who am I to say
this leaf is more delectable
or this flower, that spreads like a gown?
Let the groundhogs devour and burrow.
Let green sustain the mouths.
my own starving.
Spine
Cantilevered in blind heat:
this lust in a field
of grasses taller than
a man. He told my body
something it would never
forget and I never
saw him again.
Weak in the knees
is more than just a phrase;
it’s a disease
and I still can’t stand up straight.
Lung
Flounder’s eyes lie
one side of its head.
Tarantula can shatter
falling centimeters.
Sweet jabuticaba swells
from trunk, not limb.
Like snow in June, this white
spot on your lung belongs
to no one, being wrong.
Dead things
i.
This is the season of dead things.
Bat curled up on its back, frog broken open
to the meat, a turtle’s pixelated shell.
And all the frantic honeybees.
As a child I daily encountered such death
when the air was close or thundery.
There was the flipping over,
the poking things with sticks.
Look what I found, smeared and bloated.
Look what’s living in it.
ii.
Hawk stood along the path
as I jogged past. He eyed me sharply
but didn’t stir. His ankles had these surprising
little cuffs. When I looked back
he took off into a blur of coral tail, gray wing.
He shrieks around the property
to frighten small creatures into hiding
and picks them off while they scurry.
In this way his cry pierces doubly.
iii.
She was nearly gone
by the time I went to see her.
A nurse was dampening her lips
with a coral triangle of sponge
and she was rasping, a little louder
when I sat next to her and told her I was there
and loved her though who knows if she knew
though they say they do. Her skin
had grown a size too small. Her eyes
that were ice blue were closed that day;
because I’d missed my plane
I missed their final opening.
She died early the next morning.
I held my mother’s hand through this
though we hadn’t spoken in a year.
I’m next, she said. I will be, too.
Quarry
As you slept
I was thinking about the quarry,
about light going deeper
into earth, into rock, the hurt
of light hitting layers
that should be hidden,
that should be buried,
and how when it rained
for a long time that absence filled
with suffering, and we swam.
London, Dresden
In the classically laid out fountain koi
slapped and gaped at the surface
like misguided bathtub toys. Like mute
prisoners. Like the abandoned overgrown
goldfish they were. And even more so
when the sky broke upon them,
unleashing flowers of ice. The bodies
took cover as best they could, as bodies do,
within their medium. And the ice kept on falling,
as long as there was ice to fall.
Flower
The ruler left a welted stripe;
the hand and belt, raised letters
I could read. My desk held
parchment, paint, and mucilage,
its lid a face for stenciling—
how ink would fill the ridge compressed
in wood—those cells—compressed
for good—my own, what I was beaten for.
I never learned to play the violin.
I never learned what I was beaten for.
At Easter brushing watercolor on crayon—
what soaked into the egg’s white skin
and what resisted—beading there—
It’s possible to envy wax.
Sometimes I drew around the mark.
The red would fade, the blue would stay.
Blue shape, blue flower
yellow took. Then everything went in.
Thanksgiving
Swan folding its head
into its wing. That snow—
falling into the water. My friend’s
daughter in the car seat,
sleeping. The water is ice.
The plow doing its job
along the night roads.
Night roads doing their job
of being dark, and slippery.
The crisp perfection of an envelope.
The blank perfection of a sheet.
The snow on the windshield
a tunnel of wings
my friend is driving through.
The night, the plow, the street.
His little daughter’s head
nodding against the car seat.
His older daughter next to her.
His wife. A family. Over and over
let’s grant them safe passage.
At least on this inviolate page.
Lemon and cedar
What is so pure as grief ? A wreck
set sail just to be wrecked again.
To lose what’s lost—it’s all born lost
and we just fetch it for a little while,
a dandelion span, a quarter-note.
Each day an envelope gummed shut
with honey and mud. Foolish
to think you can build a house
from suffering. Even the hinges will be
bitter. There will be no books
in that house, only transfusions.
And all the lemon and cedar
in the world won’t rid the walls
of that hospital smell.
Racetrack
Velvet and shit: I summoned it
and come it did. The horses’ flanks
are rank with sweat and flies and I
remember you between my legs
achieving for an hour or so.
We parted on the best of terms:
the sweet unsayable loss that’s gain
in drag. The day hurt a little
brighter for all that sharpening.
I have a turnstile heart; it opens
madly and shuts just so.
In morning cold, the horses’
breath takes on the shape of terrible
blooms. The hoof-stamps sound less
urgently. I’m not talking about my heart.
[ ii ]
Anthem
We were all in love
but didn’t know it.
We were all in love
continually. Bless
our little hearts,
smoking and drinking
and wrecking things.
Bless our shameless shame.
We were loud, invincible.
We were tough as rails.
We stole street signs
and knocked over bins.
Ripped the boards
off boarded-up stuff.
Slept in towers
filled with pigeon shit
and fluff. We kicked
beer bottles down
cobbled lanes.
Tires and chains.
Chains and wheels
and skin. The world
was always ending
and we the inventors
of everything.
Seven Minutes in Heaven
It’s all the rage to sport waxed moustaches
and cure your own sausages
in some mildewy basement that formerly
woul
d have hosted convulsively
awkward parties with spin the bottle and seven
minutes in the dark and terrifying closet
(aka heaven) but now boasts soppressata
strung on repurposed vintage drying racks
and fat clay pots of kombucha and curdling hops.
Personally I’ve never recovered from the sex-shaped
void left in those closets by all the groping
that should have occurred to me but didn’t:
right under my nose kids my age were creeping
into adulthood one clammy, trembling palm
on one breast at a time. There was also
the horror of not being chosen in gym.
It is conceivable that learning intricately
how to butcher an entire hog
and render every morsel might give one
a feeling of mastery one lacked in childhood.
It is the greatest immaturity to believe suffering
entitles you to something someone wiser
and grayer than I once said.
But in those basements and carpools and
playgrounds as I assassinated one by one
clandestinely my torturers
abandoning their foul normal
bodies to compost the astonishing
tedium of the wending suburban lanes,
I was transubstantiating to supernal
fame and beauty and such eerie genius
that entire books were written about my
books. In fact it takes a long time to realize
your suffering is of very little consequence
to anyone but you. And by that time the future
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