by Donna Masini
out of your hood of pall. Goodbye last journal, wretched parentheses,
awful grieving sentences in which my sister died,
my two cats, sister’s dog, niece’s dog, brother’s dog.
Goodbye diary of the time all hell broke loose—and
nothing can get it back in its cage.
Deleted Scene: Diagnosis (.23)
(Kitchen: Interior)
First they said allergy, then we worried.
Now she’s on the phone with the doctor, motions:
Thumbs Up! Haha, we say. Thumb cancer!
She hangs up. Pneumonia. Hooray!
Pleurisy and pneumonia! Such old-fashioned diseases.
But we’ll take them.
The Port
When the veins give out they stick in a port.
She rewraps the thin gown they gave out,
lets phantom chance chart the range in the next report
as blood draws its inevitable decimals.
Once I imagined the cave a soul makes to house spirit,
plush dusk where a girl might hide her hectic book,
her portal into the thrum of what would vein her song.
Movie
My mother is scissoring strips of paper bag, fringing
the edges, stapling layers of feathery brown to an old jacket,
then, rings glinting on her wedding finger, whisks
the scissor up each ribbon of fringe, tricks it to curl, to turn
my brother into an owl. It’s fall in the late sixties. She zips him in.
Cut now to this other fall. Invisible
exclamation points shooting through everything:
Wind! Trees! Shaky mums! The city’s lousy with academics
a man on Houston Street says to what appears to be his date.
Suddenly it’s cold to dine outside. In the window of Paradise Thai
two women lean across a flickering candle, glasses of bright wine.
A chilly tableau framed by night, a lustrous couple
of inscrutable statues, pineapple crowns rising into spires. At this point
everything is still possible. I wish they could see this. Moonlit spires.
Their lustrous doubles. Every time, every single time I’ve followed desire,
my friend said last night, pressing her palms on my kitchen table, every time,
disaster. It’s late. The babysitter will be fifty dollars.
Moon! Time! Fifty dollars! What an expensive movie.
Sometimes we walk out of ourselves, blinking into the light,
pulling our sweaters tighter, unprotected, regressed from our time
in the dark, the crowd snaking through the lobby, eager to enter
what we have left. We’re always waiting for the next thing
to change us. Facelifts, my ex-husband said last week, a new cure
for migraine. Light flickered its misty nimbus, his face breaking up.
I held my head. Jews have over twenty-five words for schmo, I said,
apropos of nothing. After so much pain, imagine, we can laugh.
Though if you think in anagrams, parades and drapes, diapers, rape,
despair and aspire all come out of paradise.
What was my mother thinking as she made my brother an owl,
as an ordinary man and woman leaned toward one another
at a railway station table, away from their marriages, across our TV screen
entering the movie, heading into, then averting, perhaps, disaster. Perhaps.
We feel change coming. Season of exclamation points.
Fringy mums shaking their yellow frazzle!
Last week, still summer, a young attendant in the designer jeans store
held out our change, announced the world will end in _____.
Might as well, he said, keep drinking the plastic
bottles of Poland Spring. Well, it’s a doggy-dog world
as my sister says. My friend throws up her arms,
waves her free alterations. Look how much we’ve done
in just a few minutes! Look how we wait
for something to change us: love, jeans, a “Train of Thought”
hanging in the subway car: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning
from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed, etc.
What did he dream? Did we find out?
Why remember the creature but not the dream?
What was my brother thinking as he flapped and whoo’d
across that stage? Whoo whoo whoo, he hooted for days.
Storylines
He was fond of phrases like “the grim reaper”—the very thing
not to say the night he picked up the skinny hitchhiker
is the kind of story you can make up in thirty seconds, conjuring
a riot of possibility and violence, two unnamed—ok, call them
Harry and Larry and imagine there’s a place
for these potential extras, mindlessly invented, suspended
in a kind of protoplasmic limbo Dante knew something about.
They haven’t done anything yet, but lie mewing in their bluish onesies
beside the social worker who met the foster parent in a gritty café.
(He was covered in cat hair, something she’d later tell the police.)
What happens to these people we keep making up? I like to think of them
incubating in an adjacent world—Inciting Incidents, Abandoned Drafts—
where one cop begins to have a body. Overweight. White. Significant
Details poisoning his mother’s cats with random eucalyptus.
Invention is reckless. Or do they exist before we pluck them
from their yeasty ether, eager to nurse them, foster, pet, and send them off
in the hope they’ll rise and . . . Sometimes I wonder about the infinite.
So many words. Endless combinations. So why so hard
to sit in this dreaded plenitude increasing the population?
I can’t even think of a name for my cat.
“Gone Girl”
What twist of puppet-strung manipulations gone
wrong, what jerked-up dumb show, know-nothing, nothing
but strings jerking on strings, unloved, over-governed, outline plotted
dolls hog-tied to other dolls, stringing them along, egging them on,
what short-order mannequins and blood-drenched negligees.
Want to know what’s gone? My sister’s dead. That’s gone.
And this jerry-rigged pretender no more heart
than a seven-year ball of rubber bands is a soul.
What is prayer but a rigged-up jerking doll hefting
its measly petitions—don’t let her die, don’t let her die—heaving over
and over our over-willed stillborn over-determined begging.
When it’s over and the nauseous credits roll what’s gone
is time. Gone the girl praying to the puppeteer. That girl
strung out on prayer. She’s gone.
;
Water Lilies
for Karen
Water Lilies 1
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Water Lilies 2
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Water Lilies 3
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Water Lilies 4
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Water Lilies 5
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Water Lilies 6
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Water Lilies 7
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Water Lilies8
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(Water Lilies Floating)
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;
Deleted Scene: Bargaining (.56)
He
re I come again
with my abra
cadabra, my gang
of language, to beg,
harangue. Oh Divine Airbag,
I stand here in your rabid Niagara,
with nothing but prayer’s ragbag
incantations. Need me to gin
up? Watch me, mere gnat,
up the ante: I’ll take the angina,
you take the brain
cancer. My loss is your gain!
Leave me elbow-deep in
your whole grab-bag
of disaster. But bring
her back.
Woman on Cell Phone Dragging an Empty Cart Through Washington Square Park
It’s called Sisyphus. No. Sisyphus. Yes. Apparently
some Greek myth. This guy is punished for—punished—yes—
for something, and has to roll a rock up a hill every day
and every day it rolls—a rock, yes—
and every day it rolls back down.
Something about the absurdity of life.
Camus says—Camooo—says it’s
about the condition of man and that
it’s meaningless and we have to just keep
doing it and—the rock, yes, rolling the rock—and that
gives our life meaning. Yeah. Well
if that don’t drive you to God—
Point-of-View Shot: Celeriac
I can smell it from the living room—tenement yellow, medusa roots
snaking out of bruised bone, the muslin color of mummy wrap—
climbing the flights with its own sweating fever.
I had no idea what it would look like, I just ordered a taste I’d tasted:
sweet, greenish. Not this snaggled hood of twisted reaching, waving
its withered flippers, like those smirking skulls in fetid caves—
what you are now we used to be, what we are—cryptic
cartloads of stiff friars posed with their scythes and plaques, poised
like noisy Day of the Dead dioramas—playing Scrabble or shaving,
binge-watching a TV drama: a girl snarling into her own horror,
grabbing out of her grave, carried in a boatload of the dead, its awful
oars rowing past an ancient city, where, beside one dig, a pious cleric
lifts a goblet that will one day sit on a shelf—just another relic
in a damp museum with its graveyard promise, its mass of gaping griefs.
I look into its eyes, lift it to my lips—earthy, humid—I can see
it will smush to a grimace like a ten-day Halloween pumpkin before
I touch it again. An unsung, many-eyed maniac waving its ridiculous fins.
Trying to Understand Irony
Even the harbors are ironic,
I said in my dream, leaning
over the side of a ship into two bodies
of water, a kind of map, the word “harbor”
sort of lapping back at me. This morning
my home page says I can watch
a teenager interview a prisoner
in Guantanamo. I hit play.
The safety of this life, a pop-up advises,
cannot be determined.
Is this ironic? What is ironic?
Sam asks from his crib. Well, I say,
those pajamas are ironic. I point
to the explosion of planets and stars,
the rock and tumble of spaceships and fusions
he is wearing to bed. How can he sleep
while those stars wobble across his tiny body?
Oh, he says, already sleeping.
My Child
Then I carry you, sleeping, out of the quiet
car seat (we’ve been driving all night,
traffic, no traffic, the indecipherable
signs and storms, roadside accidents,
your breathing and dream speech)
up the dark stairs, and place you, sleeping,
in your crib. My girl, I say,
or my boy, depending on my mood. Sometimes
I speak to you in Chinese, though I know only
hello and three numbers, sometimes
in show tunes, semicolons.
I tell you what it is to be childless
to listen for you across supermarket aisles
(what trouble I had buckling you into that tiny seat!)
to study your face on milk cartons, worry
about your tests, your fevers. Sooner or later
you’ll come crooning into my bedroom.
In every kitchen of the city, your socks and vigor.
Last night slicing fingerling potatoes it occurred
to me I’d left you somewhere. On the subway?
In that shopping cart?
Tracking Shot: Subway Lines
Are you depressed? Have a disability?
Need a divorce? Are you haunted?
Do not lean on ample time,
others will think you are a target.
Flying through history? Everyone wants to
hog poles, find New Lots. Everyone
wants an emergency exit. Are you at risk?
Dog tired? Pregnant? Everyone wants to look
their best, step up, stand out, be held
by the dispatcher. If you see something, say
a clipping, the past, an alarm will sound
like a true story but we think
the soul is primping, seamless, anyway
you swipe it. Just like regular people
in Wakefield. See someone at risk? Remember
you can cook when you’re dead. It’s a temporary
ferry, a film festival, an express to Gravesend, so always
watch the devices, keep personal gaps
personal. Do not. Do not. Do not. Hold on.
The Blob
I’m a blob, our mother used to say, pregnant again with that
blobby wobble. We had siblings. We knew how a blob became a baby,
the mother bulb oozing out another child, and now there are four
and it’s Steve McQueen Week on the 4:30 Movie, The Blob
ending with its ominous question. The End? This was before
I understood irony. We’d seen the drunk old man
prod the ooze and disappear, watched it grow and roll, the little dog
barking its warning . . . barking, barking, then the barking stops
and the blob rolls on, insistent, engulfing the doctor.
We’d seen his face as the thing he didn’t believe in—
what has already absorbed his nurse—came over him.
Town after town it rolls, amassing citizens. Now it is itself
a mass. A malignant mindless mob. How do you fight a blob?
Nobody believes Steve, the blob oozing
under the diner door, past the revolving pies.
His name was Steve in the movie and Steve in real life,
cigarette pack rolled in the shoulder of his T-shirt sleeve.
Desire oozed through me. I don’t remember how the horror was contained.
Of the ending I remember the question. My sister and I
screaming in the living room, as the horror that was our mother
said, only a movie horror . . . ended? 4:30 afternoons.
We’d seen Dark Shadows. Seen the way the dead
past comes back, eats you alive. The future will find a mass
in my sister’s lung. Size of an orange? Why not say size of a grenade?
Sometimes my childhood closes over me—
enormous, hypnagogic, and I am the crowd
trapped in one of those neon diners of the sixties,
the mob rolling, a bloated demagogue, as now, waiting
in the neighborhood cheese shop, a man’s red hands lifting
the rennet and curd out of the boiling
salt and steam, I see my mother, the typeface oozing
down the title screen, my mind, thoughts, nothing
but blob blob blob. The billionaire politician blobbing
across front pages, TV screens, rolling through towns.
Mindless, deadly, malignant. Amorphous, devouring monster.
Why didn’t we laugh? Why didn’t it seem, well, cheesy?
Surely the director snickered. Surely Steve/Steve understood
it was made of tinted silicone. This happens in sci-fi:
the ordinary nodule transforms into a race of aliens. You’re next,
a woman barks. You’re next, the crowd shouts. The man with red hands
scowls. Step up. They’re late. They want their cheese.
It’s only cheese. Why am I so frightened?
Split Screen
Scene: Two times, two sisters,
two sets, two spies.
Present: one sleeps, one ripens.
Past: one watches the other creep.
Listen, however unlike their lines
each might be the other’s stencil.
It depends on the lens. Précis:
on one screen, the I,