Now We're Getting Somewhere

by Kim Addonizio

  the flap of skin swaying beneath its throat

  and share it with the next wolf

  to trot by. But here there are no wolves.

  Through the kitchen window fangs the moon

  to fuck you up even more, to send you slathering

  away, past the condo community,

  past the lit houses, into the deep woods;

  where there’s a moon,

  there’s always a deep woods.

  SONG FOR SAD GIRLS

  Right now I feel like a self-cleaning microwave about to malfunction.

  My friend texts from the east coast, I smoked so many cigarettes in this chair.

  She’s in some bar. Do people still even say, old haunts? She’s sitting there with a second beer,

  haunted by a sad girl. Now I feel more like a burn hole in a cushion,

  still smoldering. A set of plastic curtains. Whoosh, I could go up any minute.

  Sad girls, sad girls, you’re everywhere. Sick on the snake oil

  of romance. Blundering in and out of beds

  and squabbles with roommates. Scalded by raindrops.

  Hating yourselves with such a pure hatred.

  Loving the music that makes it worse. This is that music.

  There’s a low piano part in here somewhere, sinking under a wave

  of minor thirds. There’s a plastic guitar with shitty strings and you think

  you’re that guitar nobody wants even for a weird art project. You don’t know

  that your trash and dead birds can cast beautiful shadows. You don’t know

  anything and I love you for that.

  Right now I feel like a menthol filter. I float face-up in the toilet,

  my lipstick dissolving, as crowds of girls swirl by. I creak like a rusted-out insect

  trying to fly. I spin around and around

  for you and you only, scraping out this old, sad song.

  RÉSUMÉ

  —after Dorothy Parker

  Families shame you;

  Rehab’s a scam;

  Lovers drain you

  And don’t give a damn.

  Friends are distracted;

  Aging stinks;

  You’ll soon be subtracted;

  You might as well drink.

  TELEPATHY

  I don’t know if telepathy has ever been proved or disproved

  but when I go out with a friend & there’s a man by himself . . . I feel . . . him . . .

  Something goes out from me, little threads of energy, my invisible feelers begin waving,

  my third eye on its stalk turns slowly . . . & if I’ve entered the circle of his awareness

  where his pancakes are shrinking from his bacon . . . or his beer is wetting itself . . .

  what messages are drifting into his hair . . . like cat dander . . .

  like oversharing fortunes from insecure fortune cookies . . .

  I am not a strong, independent person experiencing life to the full . . .

  I never learn from my mistakes . . . Maybe you could be one of them . . .

  Men like to say they’re not mind readers, but the ones I’m drawn to aren’t readers at all . . .

  Their thought-balloons are full of dick pics . . . floating toward the ceiling

  & slowly deflating, like their interest in me . . . Maybe telepathy is bunk, but magic sure isn’t . . .

  I remember a man who liked to dress me up . . . then saw me in half

  & I stood up smiling & bowing . . .

  SMALL TALK

  Let’s skip it and get straight to the rabid dog at hand.

  This is some weather we’re cowering from.

  Would you please touch my face like a blind person?

  I feel like a giraffe in a parking garage.

  Let’s skip it and get straight to the death smell

  coming from behind the refrigerator.

  Can I offer you something more subtly evocative

  of the underlying theme of your life story?

  How many self-important wounds do you have?

  Everything you say is tiresome.

  I’m going to walk away slowly and not look back.

  Now we’re getting somewhere.

  GHOSTED

  I guess you realized how worthless I am

  I myself am just beginning to discover it . . .

  Nothing is being named after me

  A planet would be nice . . . or a star system

  But I don’t want to be anyone’s sunbeam

  Maybe a black hole . . . I just saw a picture of one

  & oddly you weren’t in it . . .

  I don’t care what you’re wearing right now

  as you don’t think of me at all . . . I’ve already disappeared

  like a dead girl in a police procedural

  but you’re not the detective . . . & I’m not dead . . .

  Darling, there are plenty of nameless alleys

  & I intend to walk down one late at night

  howling at the trash bins until a light blinks on

  & someone sets out a nice dish of gin . . .

  AUGUST

  What I want is to slice open its stomach and watch

  its toxic sun uncoil into the sea.

  Cicadas seething in their asylum in the trees.

  All this frenzy and scorch

  and at night music hammering from the outdoor bar

  where the dancers blindside each other

  with longing, and the long tide slopping

  in and away, barnacles on the piers clinging

  in the littoral drift. Whatever it is in me

  that crawls like a wasp over the remains

  of a picnic, used napkins blown

  over the senseless grass—tell me

  how to kill it. How to let it go out like the last

  disaster of love, last boat guttering in the wave-swell.

  WINTER SOLSTICE

  I can’t think about the black slick on the river or the deer

  corpse at the base of the tree or how one lover is

  too young & sometimes indifferent & another is

  lighting candles with someone else neither

  ever mine for more than a rare evening the days will

  lengthen now but so slowly it will still

  feel like darkness is winning the battle between

  it & what people call good or God a few fallen trees

  are always there in the woods turning back

  to earth rump torn open a kind of caul

  over the eyes maybe a coyote thick

  film on the river a lover’s hair lit fallen

  trees lengthen now but so slowly I can’t think

  indifferent base God between either darkness

  ALL HALLOWS

  It’s bad to be alone on Halloween, worse than spending Thanksgiving with a Styrofoam cup of Turkey Noodle

  or a sober Christmas after a breakup, surrounded by happy lesbian couples discussing condo timeshares

  You have to turn off your lights & hide from the doorbell

  You have to cover your eyes from knife shadows on the walls

  & your ears from sinister music scores, smashing window glass, & terrified girls

  You have to remember that time as a kid you vomited all over your fairy outfit at the shopping center

  & then peed out of shame, with your ripening talent for making things worse

  You had a talent for singing, too—twice you lost competitions to boys playing the drum solo from “Wipeout”

  You should have just stood up in the auditorium & done your retromingent trick in front of the entire school

  Now you do it in poems, laying a golden sheen over the paper, inviting people in

  to the dirty gas station bathroom of your performative loneliness

  Princess, French maid, ladybug, cowgirl, zombie

  It’s the Night of the Living Ex-Husbands

  The souls are pouring out of Purgatory or steaming up from the animals
they were trapped in

  My father wants a fresh beer, my mother some Fritos with a single bourbon-and-Coke

  My brother just wants to go fishing one more time

  Cheerleader, angel, skeleton, witch, imago

  Round about the toilet go

  In the fatal kisses throw

  Oh my weird sisters, we’re not bad, just lost—look at Anne Sexton swirling overhead

  behind Plath & her impeccable broom, look at all the blottophiliac girls

  longing to faceplant in Mr. Death’s crotch

  Ladies, women, darlings, bitches, you

  Stop it right now & pay attention: Virginia Woolf is rising

  from the river, sloshing home to Leonard in her Wellingtons

  nothing in her pockets but bread

  You have to take out the stones & put them back where they belong

  You have to carve the names of the dead & then let rain & years destroy them

  The moon weakening like a cheap flashlight while your heart blinks on

  ALIENMATCH.COM

  I am trying to center my spacecraft

  over a volcano. I am six trillion years old

  but am often mistaken for an asteroid.

  My body type is indeterminate.

  Sometimes I resemble a white marble floor

  on which stained glass light diffusedly falls,

  at other times an aortic clot.

  The first thing people notice about me

  is the caul over my third eye.

  I would like to engage in heated conversation

  about which is the dish sponge

  and which the counter sponge.

  I would like to date you

  if you would acknowledge my special qualities

  without my having to exhibit any.

  After six trillion years, my spacecraft

  is a little tired. Sometimes I spend

  whole nights trying to phone

  my dead parents, running from tigers,

  looking for a condom. Mostly I feel

  confused as a daffodil who didn’t get

  the memo about fluttering. I keep trying

  to wake up in my dreams. If I didn’t

  know better, I might think you were in them.

  TO THE WOMAN CRYING UNCONTROLLABLY IN THE NEXT STALL

  If you ever woke in your dress at 4 a.m. ever

  closed your legs to someone you loved opened

  them for someone you didn’t moved against

  a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach

  seaweed clinging to your ankles paid

  good money for a bad haircut backed away

  from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled

  into the back seat for lack of a tampon

  if you swam across a river under rain sang

  using a dildo for a microphone stayed up

  to watch the moon eat the sun entire

  ripped out the stitches in your heart

  because why not if you think nothing &

  no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

  WAYS OF BEING LONELY

  Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over.

  Like a taxidermied grizzly in the Student Union.

  You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear.

  That time with him in Houston.

  Sometimes you flame into a scary flower.

  An eruption of coherence in the post-modern seminar.

  You stand in a shallow creek & your reflection floats slowly downstream without you.

  Alcohol is your emotional support animal.

  The fan hums erratically.

  An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the baggage carousel.

  Like an amoeba without an e-scooter.

  An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-equity horse.

  You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel.

  A Zen koan blooming in the White House Rose Garden.

  Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of an abandoned friendship.

  You’re the queen, but you’re a bee being sucked into the pool’s filtration system.

  Like a version, touched for the very last time.

  Spooky piano music rising from the dishwater.

  You wake up alone to a bird reciting Keats.

  GUITAR

  Sometimes it sleeps in its case all day like a stringed vampire

  In the store down the street its friends are hanging like hams

  Guitars, like hearts, can be anything

  If you really want to break your lover’s heart it’s simple

  Just immerse yours in tepid water & walk out of the kitchen

  Go call someone you always wanted & play them a song on your new guitar

  Don’t break your own guitar unless you happen to be a guitar god

  in which case go ahead & smash it with the impunity befitting a god

  Also feel free to smash your chosen people while reminding them how much you love them

  My guitar is often depressed because it takes itself seriously

  as the instrument of a few generations of sensitive singer-songwriters

  The ukulele has lately grown in popularity but a uke is so babyish

  Playing it is like trying to placate a god by ritual murdering a sacrificial blankie

  When my guitar is sad it glows eloquently & goes berserk

  thinking of light thinning in a hospital gown

  & the sound of paper slippers on gray linoleum

  like a voice being mopped off the tiles

  A guitar, like a heart, has a hole in it

  It heaves out its music like a twerking volcano

  like a faucet leaking bluebells in a gutted house

  Heart like the last Red Wolf

  in the decimated population of eastern North Carolina

  looking for a mate

  Heart like a target

  Hole like an exit wound

  Play on

  III

  CONFESSIONAL POETRY

  Writing it is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror

  or slowly shaking a souvenir snow-globe of asbestos & shame

  to quiet an imaginary baby

  It’s like sewing rhinestones on your traumas so you can wear them to a pain festival

  or beating a piñata selfie with a pink rubber bat

  so you can pet the demons that fall out

  No, the confessional is a mode among other modes

  Right now I’m getting fingered in a museum bathroom during a Cindy Sherman exhibit

  while discussing Susan Sontag’s “The Pornographic Imagination”

  & live streaming it on Instagram

  Why don’t you follow me

  A beef-witted male critic is indexing my sins

  in a highly regarded literary publication

  Supergluing my clitoris forever to the pillar of historical irrelevance

  It’s shitting your fancy gown in a home movie & everyone who loves you recoiling

  while you shrug because it’s only a movie

  Doing a clever impersonation of roadkill in glitter eyeshadow

  then lifting up your dress to show everyone your invisible dirty panties

  Not wearing waterproof mascara while you’re being tasered

  Staging your copycat suicide, leaving lipstick on your noose

  You open a vein of hematite & convince everyone it’s blood

  then bleed out on a white shag carpet

  All over the world, depressed, narcissistic little bitches

  are filling notebooks with their feelings

  Sloppy, boring, grotesque, unfuckable feelings

  I really like feeling something when I stagger into a poem

  & having a place to lie down & cry

  I woke up this morning from uneasy dreams & put on three pairs of tiny high heels

  Embed me in plastic, pass me around

  Put m
e onstage so I can stand over a grave trap

  & a man can explain what’s wrong with me

  Rape me by the light of the moon shining over a nuclear reactor pool

  Is there a single idea in my pretty little head?

  Let’s have another cocktail & find out

  while I remove these sticky bandages

  IV

  ARCHIVE OF RECENT UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTIONS

  PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW

  You have no idea what’s inside them.

  Slipped gears and downed wires, rotted-out floor planks.

  Maybe anemones.