"There will be stars"; Sara Teasdale

There will be stars over the place forever;
   Though the house we loved and the street
   we loved are lost,
Every time the earth circles her orbit
   On the night the autumn equinox is crossed,
Two stars we knew, poised on the peak of midnight
   Will reach their zenith; stillness will be deep;
There will be stars over the place forever,
   There will be stars forever, while we sleep

Sunshine cinquain

Shine! Beyond old sun,
the jealous moon still rises.
a New Year has come at last;
and though lovers hearts beat fast
peeking babe dawn betrays them.

A Working List of Fear

1) Outside the church: rain
falls too heavy for her heart--
the weight of the ring

2) Outside, the rain falls
a church overhead, not
hers, but indulgent

3) No words in English.
German, maybe, liebe mine.
Our future, Seattle gray

4) Find a better love,
give it to a better woman;
bury your empty heart

5) Make my body strong
as my mind as immortal as aerials
spinning, spinning

The Spindle

You use me too much.

Write me into something new,
do not leave me to dust and rot
as year after year another
girl longs to prick
her finger, or have seven shirts
to spin.

Put me in the knit of
your baby's blanket, the
wool scarf you hold onto when the
fairy queen rides by with your love again.

Do not leave me to dust, and rot,
do not leave me to ruin 
their chances at falling in love
alone.

Please Stop Writing 9/11 Poems

Ten and half years ago,
I feel like I wore my red All-Stars.
I put my shoes on and ran to the parking lot.
I found Carolyn’s silver Passat,
got in the passenger side and we drove to Lovers’ Ridge.

We made it in time to see the second tower fall.

Dear poets from other places,
I know you are America’s heart
and the story you are trying to tell is relevant.

But this is not something you know.
This is not your gap-toothed awkward skyline ten years later,
in a false pubescence,
this is not your scaffolding and avoidant glances on drunken walks home.
The unbidden tears on the PATH when we catch skeleton support beams in construction lights,
the tracing of fingertips over our parents names on days when no one is looking.

A few days ago, someone posted online that they didn’t understand why New Yorkers get offended when politicians include 9/11 in their stump speeches.

I answered in the same way I have been answering since after the second tower fell:
Those are not my words.

People don’t like to talk about cultural appropriation outside of Asia or Africa.

As an American, most people say I have no culture to appropriate;
when those men flew
those planes into
Our Home,

they divorced New York City from America without our consent.

And we no longer live in the same country you do.

We voted against the Patriot Act, half of us are still convinced it was an inside job,
there was enough information that it could’ve been stopped,
we’ve read the 9/11 commission so many times the binding has broken -

You never knew that we smiled,
did you?

We’re hard stone-faced finance warriors,
nothing ever hurts.
hey we’re New Yorkers, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

When the ashes piled three inches high over all of lower Manhattan,
and the sky blackened all the way to the Jersey Shore,
where was your best friend’s father?

Ten years later when the first response teams are fighting for their lives,
fighting for money to pay the medical bills to keep them alive
because their insurance companies drop them and the new ones
call heroism a pre-existing condition,
succumbing to the permanent iron lungs in their bedrooms
where is your best friend’s father?

For all of your sorrow,
for all your perfect precious words
that stir strangers in strange lands,

Where is your wallet?
How much of your barista’s salary did you donate to the Firefighters Widows Fund this year?

Your words are beautiful,
and unlike the ones the politicians are still spouting,
I believe in the heart of you -

You think you’re giving a voice to the voiceless,
but sweetheart,
this is New York, believe me, we have voices.

Please stop writing 9/11 poems.
My culture is not a play for points,
my broken skyline is not the ace up your sleeve -

We’ve all sewed our wounds shut with yarn as best we could,
our best surgeons seemed to die in the aftermath.
We’ve scabbed and scarred,
started over,
we know our neighbours and their beautiful hijab-wearing children.
Please, stop tearing open our wounds.

Today, at 1 World Trade Center,
A 105-story building is nearing completion.
It looks just like a penis,
the politicians wanted to call it the Freedom Tower -
we told them that was a really dumb name.

Its scaffolding makes my commute more difficult,
its fences guard cranes and jackhammers instead of warped steel and broken dreams.
It will always be a redheaded stepchild to me.

But, I like to look up at the workers harnessed in,
sealing the windows at floor 102,
marrying New York to the sky once more.

(Half-)Birthday Poem

I set alarms with my smart phone that wake me when I sleep lightest,
that throw open night time windows so the rain can clean my dreams.

It’s my birthday. I want some goddamn coffee,
but twenty-five years has brought two roommates -
one won’t leave until 11,
the other won’t leave at all -
and my good-intentioned 6 a.m. will disturb them.
So no coffee.

It’s a running day, but I can’t be bothered with the rain.

It turns out at twenty-five,
all girls develop teleportation powers that can only be used at great cost;
this is how your mother always managed to be where you needed her to be,
every time.
It’s also how she aged so quickly in your teenage years.

Most spend the years off their life on their children,
I’ll spend mine on you
and chasing nightmares out of your firstborn’s bedroom -
teaching her how to make shadows into soldiers,
the wolf in the walls into an ally,
the witch in the corner into Jesus.

I’d teach you but true love negates all monsters.

It’s my birthday.
I’m going running in the rain.

The Invitation (6/30)

I drowned in the Atlantic -
oh you want poetry, let me give you poetry
with something I don’t care to admit.

I want to crawl into your bed and add whispers to the symphonies,
the sound of fingerskins brushing and your arms in the small of my back.

But the plainest English I know is silenced silence.

So I will go isolated islanding on the Bering sea
with the wolves
and the silence of heaven
breathe deep in a snowbank
and never come home.

The Offspring (5/30)

“You will be a great mother.”
The excess testosterone in my body at puberty not only dictated the jungle that covers it,
the breasts of permanent D-cups,
but also the hormones that will drive my body to addiction
and death
should the government dictate
I must carry this child to term.
No spina bifuda here
just a wandering Y chromosome
that fought too hard in utero and settled in my organs -
It makes a rare symphony of me,
And I compensate with fluted skirts, feminine pageantry
to distract from the rest of me.
That my well of patience is 3 shallow buckets reserved for holidays doesn’t help.

“You will be a great mother,”
breaks the bones I forget I have.

The day the OB/GYN looked straight in my eyes and said,
“There is a ninety-five percent chance you will miscarry,
and a seventy-five percent chance you will require medication -
medication that will cause birth defects and retardation -
just to survive your pregnancy….”

that was the day I chose publishing over family,
machine over man.
I love my children.
I will murder them when they are a cluster of cells
too small to register a heartbeat,
rather than with neglect
or a Lady Macbeth scene of out out damn spot,
out out damn baby,
Holding infant heads underwater
and sitting in jail all of my remaining days for a case of Alien Body Syndrome.

I am pro-choice because I love my children.

Not every womb is built to sustain life,
not every body is capable of keeping it.

I'll Eat You Alive (8/30)

tell me a story
I am greedy for them
want them to come from your lips to my mouth
so I can bite ‘em,
let ‘em juice smush on my cheeks run down my neck,
color my hands rainbows like five years olds eating popsicles

i want your stories to cradle in the hollow of my clavicle while I’m sleeping
a burrito in fleece blankets with your story
wrapping lazy around my eardrums,
curling nose to tail around inner ear bones when I wake,
setting my day off balance.

Tell Me All Your Loves, Love: A Conversation in Five Parts (7/30)

i.my love for you is an exponential marathon
of unstoppable anthropomorphic force that won’t stop until
there is nothing else to expand into:
sun's going away, it's getting cold.

ii.stop building latticeworks of cause and effect
around the notions in my head,
everything I do reminds me of you:
my love for you is a desperation because it's February.

iii.i love you more than electrons love the superposition:
new york makes me physically ill
and the idea of not seeing you for however long
is even worse:
I think I'm losing my mind.

iv.wandering naked in my house,
It’s February, I’m getting cold.
come here, gimme your clothes:
i love you more than sleep but sleep loves me more than anything

v.i love you more than i love breathing,
and i love you more than i love gin
but gin loves me more than anything

Star Trek Senryu (4/30)

Commander Riker,
Deanna is a dumb broad.
I’d do you beardless.

Captain Picard,
Beverly is a dumb broad.
Your flute does not need holes.

Captain Picard,
if you and I were on Risa
I’d excavate you.

Commander LaForge,
injuries are common -
but this one... is new.

Double Rikers swing
double Riker dicks -
Yes, I should be so lucky.

Flower Tongue (3/30)

Yesterday English was not enough,
so I went to Brooklyn
looking for Creole or Haitian French
dark lips laughing near jerk chicken barrels
and sweet corn
knishes in the pizza joint,
dreadlocks.

It’s hard to tell you how much I like being in the minority.

My toes curl in my red converse,
houndstooth scarf hides my neck,
it’s cold but not too cold -
the men ignore me here,
the women ignore me here or
make nods at my hair they’ve asked me what I do to it
I ask them what they do to theirs
we answer at the same time,
“Nothing”.

It’s hard to tell you what being white feels like,
but it never feels invisible until I’m twenty stops in on the 4 train
crossing Eastern Parkway.
It never feels like English wasn’t my native language
until I’m paragraphs deep in island tongues.

If the eggs of my ancestors had not roamed,
I would be a very different person today.
I can hear the drumbeats of my great-great-grandmothers home
all the time,
hear her poetry and laugh on the seawind
as she wanders in britches on the deck of her husband’s ship,
but my feet don’t move like hers,
my hands can’t clap to find the dancing
the people who are my people
but will never be my family do.
How would you feel if some white girl showed up on your island,
saying, “Hello family,
teach me your ways because I’ve missed you.
One of your daughters was kidnapped and put in an orphanage by one of my fathers -
she had to leave you behind to escape them.
Then she married one.
Here I am, family,
I love you.”

I am the whitest girl you know.
I wear tortoise shell glasses, knee-length skirts,
I write poetry, am an athiest, and pro-choice.
The list of my bloodlines is impressive and inexhaustible:
Henry the Eighth, Charlemagne,  Jerusalem, Brandonburg, Mayflower, Washington Irving -
I can play six degrees to My Family Used to Own That Country all day
and never lose.

I am the whitest girl you know,
who is furious she wasn’t birthed two generations earlier
to carry her grandmothers bones back to her people,
that no one bothered to write down the name of the Cree woman
who married the fur trader as he passed through Saskatchewan -
arguing that generational racism doesn’t make it right in Alabama,
you don’t need hate to be a racist,
why the hell are Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben still on boxes and bottles
in bandana haircloths and string bowties.

I am a fighter because every time her grandmother calls you nothing more than skin tone,
I end up throwing kitchen plates at the wall,
I wear my skin as a badge of privilege,
so I get to say “No, other white people, you are not allowed to talk like that anymore
With your blueblood lines and Tory leanings and English paradise,
Kerouac-worshipping, Komen Cure running, Asians-aren’t-minorities-they’re-just-like-us households
Girl in the mirror, you aren’t allowed to talk about me like that.”

My badge is pressed silver gum wrappers.
It falls to dust and tears so easily.
I’m uncomfortable in it.
I cling to what blood of the earth I can find in me,
because my other blood built houses to find God,
and I found him first in the trees.

Yesterday, English was not enough,
so I went to Crown Heights to feel human,
to allow myself to be so much more than what you see.

Weakness (2/30)

Temper, temper, full of fright
In the bathroom’s shadowed light,
How could mortal’s hand or thigh
Stop the mouth in one more lie?

When it was all over, they said it was like nothing they had ever seen.

She came in shadow, first spotted from the corner of the mirror
out of reach in the frame
close enough to smell
attaching to the spine tightening over
the cord wrapping through sacrum
low enough to growl
high enough to hurt
low enough to be mistaken for hunger
high enough to know better

She never lit for very long,
stories weren’t her thing she liked the staccato burst
jazz piano but not
the meandering kind she had
no patience for men like Monk
she liked Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker played Be-Bop
she liked Ray Charles
Ray Charles liked heroines and heroin
in dichotomous doses she liked
the color red for all the wrong reasons she
wrote bloody on hallway floors

The sequins scattered from her dress that night
she left seamtress entrails trailing
behind as she left the party she didn’t
like parties she liked
war
and nihilism
she was every twenty-something anarchists’ wet nightmare
her uterus spread ejaculate like disease
staining dollar store mattresses she was cheap she wasn’t
a whore it was more that
she liked vodka more it liked her
she liked tequila more than
it loved her

The angel-headed hipsters ashed her body
weighing out the door
she wrote bloody on hallway floors
spread death as orgasm clung to
shoe bottoms sticky pink bubble yum
the kind for nickels at the corner store
it wasn’t that she was cheap it was more that
she liked girls more than
girls liked her
she liked tequila more than
boys loved her

The Living Will (1/30)

My rational thinking I leave to the worms,
it’s lost on girls like her.
My tongue, thick with personal truth,
she only sees as bulbous with rot.

My sense of timing I’ll leave to the wind,
it suits gales better accompanied by torrential tears and hurricane screams.

To the palms of her hands, I leave Acting With Your Best Intentions at Heart.

To my legacy, I leave assertion,
dominance,
the ability to say no.

My lips I leave to dust,
let them wither where misunderstandings interfere with mixed signals:
the inability to be unafraid of men,
and shared affection.

I leave to the corners of closets my apologies -
solid reminders of transgressions past;
let her skin flake to cover them,
and I’ll really be under it.

To bridges I leave only lighting the candle at both ends,
a cartoonish barrel of TNT,
a spitfire Kamikaze so full of intention
it cannot help but burn.

Bang, Bang

The future is soluble,
he melts yours with soap bubbles,
a piece of the scattered shell
that broke when they tossed you off the wall,

Away. They put you away
where young men could not touch you, away.
Found truth where there was none.
Understanding was sought and never found,
Lady, sweet Lady, I never knew you.

Setting sail alone, a packet ship,
on the bound from Christchurch
undulating on the Pacific seas to
nearest Honolulu, you met a man,
Danced. Kissed. Married.

But your hips are in me now,
and I’m not allowed to tell
no, white girl not allowed to say,
good is my blood, like your blood.

Bastards locked up my blood,
another native pseudo orphan face,
not worthy of your attention, but white girl?
Gets your good.

The Boys Club

Let me into your clubhouse.

I carry your chapbook in my tote bag
like the heart I wear on my sleeve,
full of notes in pencil and holes
where I’ve erased too hard against the marks I’ve mistakenly made.

It sleeps under my pillow,
on the corner of the bed my boyfriend doesn’t like because
my pen leaked ink like a canceled blood transfusion.

In dreams I’ve slept on each one of your chests, sometimes changing pectorals for sleeker shoulder,
switching ears to hear your creaking floorboard hearts,
 the rise and fall of the roofs your breath builds me to live under

Stop walking on me on your way in,
I am a woman, I’m not untouchable or invulnerable
I might be invincible,
you only have to look at the holes in my heart for that.

If it is my waist that gives you pause,
long locks that stop your mouth from including me,
Please remind your heart that I’m not a threat,
my breasts don’t ache for your shuddering touch -

I want your hungover mornings over hollandaise and homefries,
after getting trashed and wasting the pre-dawn hours draped over one another, picking apart Mallrats on TBS.

Don’t misinterpret,
I just don’t believe in self-imposed gender segregation:
poetry is not a place for the battle of the sexes - penises violate vaginas every day, and vaginas snap dicks in half in ecstasy.

Pull up your floorboards.
Let me into your clubhouse.
I won’t redecorate - I just want a beer and your impressive lexicon impressed upon me.

Rescue Me

You say you truly know I will have the same wedding you did.
We are poets,
you believe in fairytales, and my prince will rescue me, too,
you’re so sorry he wasn’t my matched groomsman.

I say, 51% of college educated women don’t get married until 30, if at all,
At least not conventionally,
my lack of interest does not make your hetero-normativity more or less valid.

You see, I was a child bride.
I married the planks I stand on,
when this ship rocks, if I fall,
I will drink the ocean dry -
it’s only made up of my tears after all.

My father walked me down the aisle,
red carpet drying backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House,
gave me away to Bizet as Carmen’s vows poured out of my babe’s mouth.
We sold my heart for thirty-dollar an hour voice lessons
and a dream so far away it hurt -
I danced with six other little girls that night,
ta ra ta ta ra ta ta ta ta

When I left Bizet’s house for the love of Verdi,
he watched me fold sorrow into meringues as we baked for the neighbor’s potluck,
we paced grooves in my mother’s rug waiting for Julliard’s answer -
when they said, yes, full scholarship,
my mother said:

Go west!
Go west and be free,
you are more than a mezzo-soprano,
Ginsberg is in your bones.
Go claim him.

And then, I met you, my sun and sky,
and you sang with me in predawn bonfires
as I burned the corsets I came from.

I don’t know how you missed the tower I was locked in.

It's not that I don't believe in fairy-tales,
it's just that Perrault and Grimm littered my bedroom floor.
I've seen dozens of Cinderfellas and Sleeping Beauty's merely waste away.

I waited so long for a living lover’s kiss,
and it splashed on my lips in my first wet dream -
I awoke to fiery orgasm, punched my fist through glass,
licked the poisoned apple wounds on my palms,
and swallowed that damn spindle whole.
With the shards of my coffin,
I cut off my hair,
and climbed down the tower to find the witch that put me in it.

She wasn’t there.
She had never been there,
only my own reflection in the pond beneath the thorns.

But you,
you must’ve had a witch at your wedding,
she threw you to rosebushes of blind ideology;
I remember when I tried to claim my bouquet with many other men,
you held me firm.
Said I was better off without it.
It wouldn't save me.

So, open your ears to see me better, princess.

I want you in your castle,
in the heart of your prince.
I want you to keep your kingdom under locks of love
and keys of kisses,
and yes, you should rejoice in every moment you have with him,
and relish those baby cheeks when they get here.

I hold mankind’s heart in the spell of Schubert’s song -
I’m a reigning queen in my own right,
the Queen of the Night,
and I have no intention
of sullying my father’s good name
for a man who cannot live up to Wagner,
for anyone who cannot love my voice as Mozart does.

I will never be lonely.
I've got the sea.

For Kate: 42 Days

Today is your birthday.

You've expanded consciousness where
my feet remain on sand.

But you are the moon now,
the tide pulling earth beneath my toes.

When my breath calls your breath,
the wind answers now.

With the gale at my back,
your hands rush me forward.

With your hands in my dreams,
I am living piece by piece.

Today is your birthday.
Today is.

Boy in the Office

Dear boy in the office who never wears shoes:
You asked me if there were any pears left
even though you saw my boss give me the last one.
I don’t even really like pears.
I offered it to you, hand outstretched, fruit like a kiss waiting to be snatched
but you said no, keep it.
I said,
I have pears at home.
You said,
But these pears are so fancy! When are we ever going to pears wrapped in Christmas paper again?
 

I couldn’t speak to that, so you smiled.
Reached out as if to take the ripe-to-bursting fruit
and closed my fingers over it.

Boy in the office who never wears shoes,
I will bring you a pear every day for the rest of our lives
if you smile at me like that just once more,
as if I am some secret no one has unraveled,
like you are a poem
before I know what poetry is,
and the only safety in this world is found in bare feet.

I Wanted Rainbows For You

You are the sum of your dream minus the reality that you've found here.

If A is the grey day to day of an eight-person household
in a home built for five,
with a shell where a mother was,
and a television never silenced -
this is your family now,
and they're as broken as the one you came from -
you remember yourself and sisterlings biting back to cause tears,
but these pieces of matched femininity,
perfect modern military brides
have married a stoicism usually reserved for generals
as they send their best and brightest to the fire.

Then B is the grit and dust of a Manhattan skyline,
a brunette you can no longer touch.
She's a page from a vision you had,
all black coats and berets,
burning cherries and tattooed angels down under the El -
You think she said, 'take the F train' -

you blinked
and found something that was supposed to be better,
so she stands a temptation in pearls.

You draw her static between your fingers,
a faint pop of neon against the distinct black and whites of the whats
This is.

A muse is to temptation
as amuse is to laughter

You think she might be sick on sweets,
she knows you're sick of the rain.

I digress.

If A is just Asquared, but minus B,
that's only Zero,
the scariest of imaginary numbers.

Imaginary numbers are messy,
they don't suit our standard equations or engineered algorithms,
they fall into string theory which has 12 dimensions
and no common thread binding them all together but your biology -
which is love -
which is an imaginary number,
Clementine.

It's messy.
You can only try to keep yourself clean.

I See You, ICU

With the pans you baked my first birthday cake in
I bake cakes for your youngest daughter,
blanche and saute broccoli for fried rice
which was the first thing we ate together that I remember.

You furnished my apartment with things
I didn’t realise I needed -
extra-long towels, plush bathmats,
you recognized this love of luxury in me from such a young age
and it’s been a half-joke ever since -
your last gift to me:
black velvet persian slippers.

You furnished my apartment,
which should have been your eldest’s
posessions cared for sloppily and passed to your youngest.
I am not niece or cousin
or even daughter,
a God we used to believe in 25 years ago called us together -
you call me Goddaughter,
and you are bound by the laws of Heaven to not leave me yet.
The Lord commands you.

See, the scariest acronym in good old US of A for a spoiled twenty-something
who has both sets of grandparents,
never lost a cousin,
has attended all of two funerals in her life and she didn’t need to cry at either -
that acronym is not FBI, CIA, DEA or even DHS.
It’s ICU.

It’s me seeing you through the glass partition I haven’t even approached yet,
swollen with tubes everywhere,
wires taped to your breasts,
medicinal track marks from IVs in and out of elbows,
skin so pale it matches the roses I brought you.
The roses the nurse will take away because you can’t have flowers in the ICU.
God forbid you should be able to see anything prettier than Vanna White’s face hour after hour after aching hour of not being able to move,
with no breath other the 95% oxygen going into your nose -
you can see me. I see you see me.


ICU where the attending comes by every half hour to adjust a dial,
I see you trying to cough and the nurses holding your shoulders
as if the fluid your lungs betray you by retaining will drown you
if they aren’t careful
if there are roses left on the bureau
next to the couch where your husband barely sleeps,
and your youngest daughter is not allowed to go.
But, I am not a liability. I am over 18.
I am family: the God only the nurse believes in says so.
Still I am denied entrance like my roses,
so I say again,
the Lord is in the ICU.
And I see you.

So. Hail Mary full of Grace,
the Lord is with thee -
I can’t reconcile your last gift to me,
the shoes on my feet.
Let me be barefoot, Ave Maria, and go childlike with grass stains on my toes -
blessed art thou among women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb -
whom I will take to the dog park every weekend,
drive back and forth to track practice,
attend parent-teacher-counselor conferences for,
let terrorize my boyfriend,
teach how to make perfect fried rice and pineapple upside-down cake.

If you open your eyes,
I will give you my lungs.

Open your eyes.
I will give you my lungs.