sure of my practiced vows,
already addicted to the sanctity of bondage.
I was an unfurled ballad in a scoop-necked
sheath carved of sugar. And him on my arm,
grinning like a bear, all sinew and swagger.
Bibles were everywhere. Dizzied by rote,
I stared at the gold rope around my finger.
He owned me.
And that felt nice.
That felt right.
the first time i hit her
I thought the loose tooth a temporary nightmare
the second time i hit her
He cried himself to sleep, and that was nice,
that was right
the third time i hit her
He counted my scars and whispered never again
baby never again
When i’d die without you
turned to i’ll kill you if you ever leave me
I bristled like a hound in heat, I didn’t
understand the not being aroused, when
let’s get away
turned to
you’ll never get away
such heat rippled my
belly such crave in me screeching walk run run run
run
i etched a thin line into the throat of her running
run
i stalked streets just a breath behind her
run
i shattered our son’s skull with a shotgun
run
i wanted her dead.
My first thought as he jammed the
still smoking barrel into my breastbone
her first thought
as the blade mapped my chest, the
hammer sliced the air toward my hair
the bullet pushed me through a plate glass window
my last thought you won’t believe this
my last thought
you really won’t believe this
my last thought
was
he must really
love me
LOOK AT ’EM GO
for my granddaughter Mikaila
Hard-sewn, soft-belly, huff, hip swing,
teeny woman catapult, dings in the walls
of your body. I know your scars, badges
earned in the grave pursuit of science—
jump rope whips along a curve of calf,
toes stubbed purple, tender uncolored
patches of skin woven shut over your
small traumas. Wily dervish, you flip,
hurtle, fly, daily rattle your soft spine,
send your bones to the wailing places.
This is play in the age of Grandma, who
knocked those buildings down? This is
8 years old in the age of could-die-soon.
This is life as collision and scrape, hard
lessons in the poetics of risk. Daring
the world to harm us, you pull hard
on my hand. Grandma, let’s run! We laugh
and trip as the sidewalk sniffs our skin
and stars along our path flame shut.
Die fast, die slow, die giggling, die anyway.
Our speed tempts the Reaper as I shelter
you in this first death, the loss of our throats.
STOP THE PRESSES
My job is to draw the pictures no one can voice,
to soothe and bellow toward the numbed heart,
to breathe in your chronicles, discuss them out
in lines weak enough for you to read and swallow.
My mouth is a jumble of canine teeth, I bite only
at the official whistle. My job is sexy leads for the
bones clattering in your closet, to sing you sated
each night with a forgettable soundtrack of paper
and ink. I am neat, easily folded, a sifter of truth
born to be burned. I count your dead, fathom their
stories, bless them with long, flexible histories
and their final names. There are no soft stanzas
in this city of curb sleep and murdered children.
We need soft words for hard things, this silk
brushing the inevitability of rock. Birth truth in
this way, just once. Craft the news and overcome
all that you ever were—a reason to turn the page.
WHAT YOU PRAY TOWARD
“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966
I.
Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made
myself come. I’m right here!, he’d sputter, blood
popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks,
goddamn it, I’m right here! By that time, I was
in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my
pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train
slicing through my blood. It was easier to suffer
the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives
and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking
with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and
codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership
of things? I was sneaking time with my own body.
I know I signed something over, but it wasn’t that.
II.
No matter how I angle this history, it’s weird,
so let’s just say Bringing Up Baby was on the telly
and suddenly my lips pressing against
the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought
wow this is strange, what the hell, I’m 30 years old,
am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt
go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy
I had never had it never knew, oh I clamored and
lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried
writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping
and machine-gun diddling their insistent c’mon girl
c’mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing
blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing
left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has
rocked she, he who has made she weep with script.
But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby,
the fur do fly, all gush and kaboom on the wind.
III.
Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling.
As long as there is still skin on the pad of my finger,
as long as I’m awake, as long as my (new) husband’s
mouth holds out, I am the spinner, the unbridled,
the bellowing freak. When I have emptied him,
he leans back, coos, edges me along, keeps wondering
count. He falls to his knees in front of it, marvels
at my yelps and carousing spine, stares unflinching
as I bleed spittle onto the pillows.
He has married a witness.
My body bucks, slave to its selfish engine,
and love is the dim miracle of these little deaths,
fracturing, speeding for the surface.
IV.
We know the record. As it taunts us, we have giggled,
considered stopwatches, little laboratories. Somewhere
beneath the suffering clean, swathed in eyes and silver,
she came 134 times in one hour. I imagine wires holding
her tight, her throat a rattling window. Searching scrubbed
places for her name, I find only reams of numbers. I ask
the quietest of them:
V.
Are we God?
WHAT MEN DO WITH THEIR MOUTHS
for cr avery
cue the frenzied combo of molar and spit, his tongue
touches every chroma on its way to blue. he deftly
conjures washboards and rubber, even suburban
girls lie still for the twinging, the humid reckoning.
i want to coax last night’s corona from his chin, rub
my index finger along the surface of his laugh, pull
it open to check the throat’s slick road, something
illegal’s going on down there, the sweet keening
of ancient instruments, wonder boy opens beauteous
and words become both otherwise and everything.
DREAM DEAD DADDY WALKING
You don’t have to be asleep to dream. At any time,
cue the untruths. You can believe, for instance,
that your dead father isn’t dead anymore.
There is the doorbell clanging and your one-year-old
screeching Granddaddy!, lurching and running
to the banister to risk his life looking over,
and yes, there is a curving staircase, partially awash
in sun, and your father skipping stairs,
grinning gold tooth, growling Hey Meathead
to his yelping grandson. Your unslept story freezes
right here, with his bony brown face upturned,
you and your leaping baby looking down at him.
The clock locks on this.
The raucous welcome stops, he does not take
another step, nothing moves but his face,
slipping out of sun into dead again. I am alone
in my office, terrified of conjuring him,
but there is the clanging, the boy screeching,
the gold tooth, those slats of June, the son,
the father, the daughter seeing all of what has
already happened happening,
and the soft remembered thud of wingtips.
WRITING EXERCISE BREATHING OUTSIDE MY BINDER
I’m as trapped as a housefly
in a vagrant’s unwashed beard.
Yesterday’s stinging snapshots:
fatty salted meat grilling madly,
a dying bulb sputtering heat and speckles of light,
Mama’s keloid-scarred cheek suffering pink foundation.
To balance that then with this now,
I gulp potent cocktails
of fluoxetine and chardonnay, and confess
that I am partial to crying jags
and this thing James Taylor coos:
Here comes another gray morning,
a not so good morning after all. . . .
I itch that scratch
before the refrain of the real
fades and forces me back
to my $50-a-week white woman.
Our current topic:
I collapse beneath touches.
What rises me is the relentless
march of seconds, guffawing weirdly,
all dressed in their heaven-bound church hats
and ripped little gowns.
THE THRILL IS ON
Inspired by the B.B. King/Eric Clapton video “Riding with the King”
Side touching side, they lean one into the other,
hugging guitars tighter than a wise man holds
onto a wandering gal, which is tight as he can clutch
without actually chaining her to the slippery surface
of his heart. The Lord promised to age B.B. the way all
bluesmen age, decorating him with a sweet snag
in his hip, a solo lecherous eye, and an abundance
of tales peppered and fueled by ’ssissippi sun and just
one more fried something—I know, I know, it ain’t no
good for me, but hell, I’m from down South, and down
there grease is a damn food group. For so long, he was
grand marshal for the calling of the catfish. Now history
threatens to overwhelm, pulling him to earth with pills
and needles, diluting the crimson kick in his blood.
I didn’t want to see the hasty Afro grow silvery sparse,
didn’t need his sugar sickness unwrapped on prime time,
certainly didn’t ever want to hear the blue grunt falter
as if, rehashing his woe, he had inhaled a pocket of air.
Once, in a cluttered Newport trailer, B.B. leaned forward,
touched a hammy hand to my forehead, insisted I was
hiding a piece of some angel. The voltage left his chapped
palm, sliced through like hooch, and settled restlessly
in the south of me. They cast the most remarkable spells,
these blue fathers. See how the guitar connects directly
to the belly. They dazzle with sharkskin and gold incisor,
work roots and moaning conjures, teach Northern children
the waning language of screen doors and spent matches.
Rotund on 2/4 time, impossibly sexy with all that misery
in him, B.B. laughs with his mouth wide open, serves up
a glimpse of old glitter, the odd pork sliver. The two of them
climb growl-first into that Caddy to cruise streets saddled
with old Negro names, streets where loose women beckon,
brothers check out the rims and storefronts spit glass teeth.
B.B. fills that backseat again and again in a circular tuxedo,
pearl buttons popping, bow tie lost forever under all that neck.
Craving my blue daddy, I scramble into that car, grab hold.
Clapton, looking like everybody’s picture of Jesus, floors it,
hurtling three old fools toward a common key, an enviable end.
BLUES THROUGH 2 BONE
Her daddy was ashed grooved hands,
tree trunk man, rock in the A.M.E.
and haul a righteous hymn all the way
up from his skinned toes home.
His shrine at the kitchen table,
dousing Mama’s overwhupped
starches with Tabasco fire,
gotta make it worth the biting,
peppered heat stinkin’ an inch
from all of his skin. Baby girl
he’d whisper, baby girl baby girl
baby girl, splintered palm pressed
into her belly, kicking hard denims
away from his ankles, losing
his thumbs in her hair, clawing loose
Sunday plaits, saying with muscle clench
and crunchy candy that she was
wide shoulder pretty, sweet leg
double dutch jumping pretty,
more color than was ever even necessary.
Underneath a pissed blanket, she waited
for teacher. She loved the rough universe
of his left hand, and how he said she was so black
he needed directions to get to her
in the dark.
FIREMAN
Some days he’d slowly spin his dizzying
street corner arc, a circle he swore
was defined by angels. And they is black
ones, too! he’d declare, never daring
beyond heavenly prescribed boundary.
Fireman wrecked Otis Redding lyric,
spewed misaligned gospel, regaled us
with his tales of recent visits to a hell
that was preparing to receive us all.
Sizzling Chi days, he’d whirl furious,
shower the one or two feet beyond
himself with stinging spittle, preach
and pontificate through the blur. After
sudden stops, he’d lean against the bus
shelter to undizzy. Lawd ham mercy, he’d
moan, while the world turned upside
in and Mama and I cut a road around him.
Long time before, Fireman had raced
face-first into a blaze trying to save
something belonged to him, a dog
or a woman or some other piece of life,
and an explosion had blown his face
straight back, you know, sometimes
I hate words, they don’t know how
/>
to say anything, imagine that I am digging
my fingers deep into the clay of my face
and pulling, watch how my eyes get,
how they can’t stop seeing the last thing
they saw, his eyelashes gone, eyebrows
gone, everything on his head headed
backwards, like it was trying to get
away from him. Maps all over his skin,
maps for little lost people, everybody
this way, back, his nose smashed flat
and headed back, back, smoke-dimmed
teeth tiny tiles in his mouth, can’t pull
bulbous pink lips together because
of skin fused to skin, no end to that stiff
horrible smile. In my dream, I rest the full
of my hand against his fuming torso,
daring it a place there, chanting ice.
Not knowing this sudden love, Fireman bolts
and resumes his dance, whirling, waiting,
charred limbs outstretched. From his
monstrous mouth, wrong Otis strains
to be louder than that November day,
that bone heat, those shattering windows.
PSYCHE!
“Piscataway, NJ (AP)—Researchers at Rutgers University have developed a trio of drugs they believe can destroy HIV.”
—Dec. 12 in New York Newsday, the Toronto Globe and Mail and hundreds of newspapers around the world
“Rutgers researchers say new drug stops HIV in its tracks.”
—Washington Blade, Dec. 17
“New class of AIDS drugs ‘could be it.’”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune, Dec. 18
“Press stories in mid Dec. 2004 about an AIDS breakthrough from Rutgers University and elsewhere were exaggerated in the media.”
—AIDS Treatment News
many more than that many,
this hallelujah, this bruise Jesus
all over purpled ankle, more than
this scrubbed silver and next needle
this whole heart in an african hand
much more than these drum digits
this possible this wait a minute what
does this say this page 47, more than
this mad, this unlatched, this bandage
and gut swirling, what stiff number
was the blanket, scissored felt
and eye buttons, glitter elmer glued
to gone outlines, names too simple
to be so hard pronounced. more
than that, even more than conjured
million, this cock/tail, this twitch
and drool, this vomit, this legislation.
Teahouse of the Almighty Page 5