by Neil Hilborn
Copyright © 2013 by Neil Hilborn
ISBN 978-1-943735-22-8
Published by Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press
Minneapolis, MN 55403
All Rights Reserved
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you do choose to share it with your friends, or if you came across this eBook for free, please note that Button Poetry is a small, artist-run organization, and we rely on your support to continue doing this work.
Thanks!
I would like to thank Anny, Hieu, Sarah, Abbie, Ryan, Michael, Sam, and Dylan, without whom this chapbook and the poems in this chapbook would not be possible. I would also like to thank Orange Quarterly, in which “A Catalog of Things I Hate about Her, to be Displayed in the Event that She Leaves Me” first appeared.
Author photo courtesy of Hieu Nguyen.
Cover photo courtesy of Hennepin County Medical Center.
Cover design by Hieu Nguyen.
https://www.buttonpoetry.com
https://www.facebook.com/neilhilborn
Table of Contents
American Museum of Natural History, Butterfly Exhibit, New York, Winter
Independence Day
A Catalog of the Things I Hate about Her, to be Displayed In the Event that She Leaves Me
On Being Hung Over as Balls and Eating a Pickle
Loving the Impermanent
Hey Mr. Weekend
Mr. Gone
Como Conservatory, St Paul, Winter
Clatter
Otsego County
Downtown Greenway Extension, Minneapolis, Summer
Leaving Sonnet
Como Conservatory, St Paul, Summer
The Drunk Gear
Museii Vaticani, Vatican City, Summer
The Fence I Never Climbed, or, There Is a Parking Lot where Once I Broke My Arm
Leaves Falling on Toilet Paper
In Which the Author Uses Dance as an Allegory to Describe Healing
Popp Butterfly Conservatory, Oneonta, New York, Summer
English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet or the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache.
—Virginia Woolf
The lights dimmed, the singing stopped.
—Louise Erdrich
American Museum of Natural History, Butterfly Exhibit, New York, Winter
A butterfly’s wing is broken and immediately
I think “That butterfly doesn’t work”
like a window or idea works, like the butterfly
is something that needs fixing but this butterfly
in this exhibit can get from arm to flower
and it will be dead inside of two weeks
anyway and it’s not going to breed,
so what is it supposed to do
other than look pretty? And it does,
in the way that all those Greek sculptures
would bore us if they had arms.
Independence Day
We celebrate by never leaving
each other’s side, ever. It’s not codependent
because we don’t live in the same state
and we never get to see each other,
damnit. My first kiss was under fireworks
and I know this isn’t my last kiss
but I imagine it is in the way that I always
imagine I have leukemia or brain cancer
or testicular cancer or sometimes, you
know what, I know I’m not dying
but I do have bipolar disorder and that
feels like dying once every two or three
days, it feels like going under the unders,
it feels like your heart exploding slow,
and I’m not going to die, I’m not, not while
she’s here, not while there is something I have
yet to do, but I am only twenty two and I hear
it gets worse. If it gets worse maybe she won’t
love me anymore. If it gets worse I won’t even
be able to tell her how it’s getting worse.
A Catalog of the Things I Hate about Her, to be Displayed In the Event that She Leaves Me
All of the food in her fridge has rotted
or is rotting. She duct tapes her bed frame
back together and declares it fixed. The bugs
are always pouring in her windows. There is a candle
that is actually the remains of hundreds
of candles. There are books
she will never read and a typewriter
she does not know how to use. She complains
about the mess as the throws her bra
on the floor. A stack of books is holding up
her bed now. She is cooking now. Once, a squirrel
climbed into her window and she wanted
to name it. She wants to keep the cats
with mange. She buys boxes upon boxes
and leaves them empty. The lightbulbs
are burning out one by one. She is sitting
in the dark, reading
On Being Hung Over as Balls and Eating a Pickle
Oh, pickle, you are the best pickle
to me. You are the exact opposite
of the person I am and much more
like who I want to be: someone
who doesn’t drink lots and lots
of rail whiskey and then wake up
because someone is literally using
a jackhammer outside. A jackhammer.
Really dude? Fuck you. I’m gonna eat
this pickle and then murder your pets.
Loving the Impermanent
You will know it has to end soon when,
in the car, she puts on your least favorite
song by your favorite band. Sing along
with her. Smile
like you wrote the damn thing.
After the fourth time, fully clothed, you make her
orgasm and she does not reach for your belt,
masturbate in the shower again
because you are not yet desperate enough
to pull her into the nightmare that is the way people
have sex with you. In bed, you will face away
from her while she holds you so you can cry
without her noticing.
When she asks what you are
thinking it will have been the same as this entire week
I want to kill myself I want to
kill myself I want to kill myself
but you will say breathing. Just her
breathing.
When you are writing this poem
in front of her, you will actually feel nothing.
You will like it. Do not make eye contact.
Scribble so she can’t read this upside-down.
Scribble more. She is so curious. When she
laughs at the book in front of her, don’t ask why.
You have read it. You already know. She is asking
what you are writing. You are saying nothing. You are
scribbling. She already knows you are
writing you are writing you are writing.
Hey Mr. Weekend
In an alleyway off 7th Place
I watched my friend as he entered
his forty-third hour of a blackout
and then as he entered
a cop car, though “entered” is
a kind way to say “was thrown in.”
The alleyway is boring and smells
of urine. I walked through it
yesterday and I won’t say I had
a flashback because flashbacks
are for people who have actually
experienced things, but I did
see Bobby. Bobby like a drunk
> ghost. Bobby like I stared at a mirror
in the dark and said, too quickly,
Whiskey Bobby Whiskey Bobby
Whiskey Bobby and there he was,
staggering and saying hello to my shoelaces.
Bobby has been sober for a year now.
I saw him at work today, and he still
has the scars on his head from the time
he misunderstood a windshield. The hair
no longer grows there so he shaves
his head because the past is a megaphone,
the past is always yelling and Bobby’s
just saying welcome home motherfucker.
Bobby has been better for a year.
I haven’t let him hug me in a year.
I don’t let anyone touch me, but that’s
my problem, not Bobby’s. In the year
Bobby has gotten better, I have
been losing friends like they are shitty lines
in a poem I want so badly not to
hate but I’m a red pen, the biggest
red pen you ever seen, and here I am
acting like Bobby is the sick one.
Mr. Gone
I guess I believe there simply was a fight,
that there was some penultimate then last straw,
and, burning, he walked out into the night.
My father is a good man. He is often right,
so often it turns out to be a flaw,
the flaw that makes him impossible to fight;
I am kissing his hand now. In my sight
he is still my father, not the man who clawed,
screamed, and, burning, walked out into the night,
no, not him. He recently began to write
me letters. At my house now we receive mail
from, not for him, all written while in flight.
The letters are fading. Once in a while
he manages to turn on his phone and call
and explain why he walked out into the night
but why explain and bring it all to light?
I want there to be a reason he is gone.
I want to believe there simply was a fight
and, burning, he walked out into the night.
Como Conservatory, St Paul, Winter
Today we are in the Sunken
Garden. We have come here because
outside of this greenhouse it is cold
and dry and the nosebleeds
are beginning, but you have come here
because I asked you to. We watch
as a family winds its slow parade
around the fountain. These girls
are climbing onto and jumping from
everything. These girls are indestructible.
I am thinking about what our children
would look like but when you ask
what I am thinking I tell you nosebleeds.
You tell me about your ex-boyfriend’s
brother’s wedding, three years ago
in the very spot where we sit, and this
seems wildly appropriate given both
that we will definitely not be married now
and that, in moments after you had fallen
asleep on my chest, those endless, nightly
moments in which I imagined our wedding, it was
always here, in this spot, this fucking spot where now
we sit and I want to kiss you now but I do not
tell you because it is no longer
surprising or sad. You are getting up
to leave and maybe if I sit here
long enough, here in this place I have
seen in dreams, in dreams from which
I barely wake even when I am awake, dreams
of waiting, waiting for god to appear
and touch both of us and say I Am Here, if I sit
here long enough our children will climb
out of the flowers; if I sit here long enough
you will go out, try on other loves, and come
back to me; here long enough you will appear
down the aisle, white, white dress, your father
beside you, flowers in hand.
Clatter
It is impossible to imagine a color
you have not seen. I can’t call my mother
because she makes me panic. When I
say I am crying what I really mean
is that I want to cry but can’t. Instead
of dying, the jellyfish simply ceases
to move. Glass moves like any other
liquid, but slower. Sex is another way
of communicating with your body
like self-harm or sign language. I complete
five crosswords a day because it stops
the panic. Trucks are downshifting
on Main Street. Most of what I do I do
to stop the panic. I never cry at things
outside of my head because they all
seem so far away. Hair is partially
composed of cyanide. Napalm
is just gasoline and plastic. I am just
carbon and bad timing. If I were someone
else I think I would still be mentally ill.
It is impossible to imagine a color
you have not seen.
Otsego County
You have come here, out of the rain
that is your life’s work, and you find instead
that this is your life, this right here, this girl
you are kissing who you have flown
across the country to kiss; if our lives
are made of the moments we are
supposed to experience and the moments
we use to avoid those moments, then your life
is built from those running away times, those times
in which you were actually happy as opposed to
just saying you were happy, your life
is made of suitcases: you are, in fact,
a suitcase: you are built to hold
only what you need and as what you need
becomes what you needed you empty
and fill yourself and you have come here,
out of the rain, mostly full already,
full as can be expected from an emptier
such as yourself, and this girl, this girl
of sun hair and the always fingers, this girl chromatic,
this girl who is enough you to know you
but thank god not enough to be you, this girl
is filling up the last, not desperate
but almost, before unfillable bit.
Downtown Greenway Extension, Minneapolis, Summer
The train runs by this bike path. I know
a train is coming because the rails
are singing. The train shifts, first blue,
then red, and I am thinking about how
I know what red shift is and can picture it
despite never having seen it. Two Somali
women are walking down the path. They are
here in Minnesota because someone
in their country wants to kill people
like them in their country. The train blows
back their hijabs like we actually are in
a Western not a Midwestern. If we spend
our entire lives believing in the impossible
or, in the absence of that, the unseen,
if we are all only the sum of what we put
out into the world, then where do we go now,
and where do we go when we die? I was sure
I would be dead before turning twenty one,
sure I would never drink, sure my father
would come back to me, I am twenty
two now, my father texted me once on my birthday,
I drink more often than I don’t, and where
did all that belief go? I spent so much time knowing
what is now wrong, knowing like I know
> the scars on my face and red shift, and I hear
the train now. I know it’s coming because the rails
are singing. I can’t see it yet, but it’s there.
Leaving Sonnet
You told me once that you would break my heart.
I asked you not to be such a goddamn
cliché, but then you left me because part
of you was still broken. You say some man
pried open the cracks of you, dug holes where
once there were none, so now you just cannot
love me how I deserve, and darling, therein
lies the problem: you can you can you can
you can you can you can you can you can.
Your reasons why are no good reasons why.
We said we should not fall in love and then
we showed each other our most quiet
scars: my wrists, your upper thighs, and now you say
this too easily: you say you cannot stay.
Como Conservatory, St Paul, Summer
I am, again, again, in the Sunken
Garden. I am no longer in love
with the woman I was in love with
mostly here, mostly in dreams, truthfully,
and it hurts now like my gone
wisdom teeth or the limbs I imagine
losing, all the amputations I will
not live long enough to need, and I keep
coming here expecting to write The Poem,
by which I mean the final thing
that makes me completely not
miss her, but I keep seeing her in ferns,
track lighting, lilies, radiators, pilot
lights, new paint, and I miss her like, like
I said, what once was a part of my body;
I have heard that I am the sum
of what I put into the world, and for
so long I put “I love you, darling”
into this and every other world
I could get to listen, so what am I
now, now that that love is gone?
The Drunk Gear
You bike slower when you are inebriated.
You call this The Drunk Gear, as though it were
funny. You have not gotten in accidents
because as of yet you only drink at night,
but once it was November and it began
snowing. First you pretended
you were in space. Then you biked by
your ex-girlfriend’s because why not