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.

To My Brothers

(N.B.: SB 1070 in AZ was given the nod by both brothers in reference to state's rights; they are not racist, homophobic, or sexist - the politicians they support are.)

 

I will have to teach your son

that a starched blue uniform and polished silver badge

should never hold the power

to pull a man over

because his skin is the color of deserts.

His hands, like old leather —

creased by carrying his sons out of nightmares,

and worn, nursing his daughters through fevers, —

don’t smuggle their laboring wives into Arizona

to birth an anchor baby,

don’t make plots

against the twin towers of capitalism and commerce,

don’t hide opiates in a child’s shoes

to sell to a Columbia grad student.

I will have to teach your daughter

that a business suit, high definition make-up

and a flag pinned to a lapel

does not a patriot make.

She’ll know Daddy handed that man power,

but he holds none

over her growing body,

has no right to define

what love means to her,

can’t lock her in a cell

because she didn’t say no loud enough.

I should warn you, brothers,

I am prepared to drive your them across state lines

and sew my lips shut to keep their aborted secrets,

prepared to love them more than you,

ready to be the black sheep only mentioned at the drunken holiday tables,

because neither of you

hold a candle to your father.

He was a Times-worthy front page against the arms race,

demanded accountability from his government ten years before Obama entered Harvard Law,

ordered Congress to give our grandfather his due veteran’s rights,

and defended our mother’s right to choose at the age of 21.

He is still marching the streets in the name of peace -

our motherland is a warzone

and you are Helen Keller in an air raid,

with no sense to where the bombs are falling.

 

I need you to protect your children

like our father protected us,

so when they grow up

no one can arrest your dissenting daughter,

or bloody your precious son’s face for daring to sleep in Zucotti Park.

so no one can murder them

for standing outside a building,

voicing what you purposely blind yourselves to:

something is desperately wrong here.

Love As a Fat Girl; or, There's Nothing to See Here

Renoir used to paint pictures of me with roses at my ladyparts,
one arm flung above a mass of autumn’s fiery curls,
the other all graceless elbows and imperfect fingertips
cradled softly, looking for another hand to hold

Mais oui, Pierre-Auguste, I wish you could see me now
one hundred and eleven years into the future,
my living room rug the same shade as the chaise we adored,
and a plethora of fetishizing sweethearts saying,
“You’re a big girl, but you’re not fat”,
“You could lose weight, but I don’t want you to”
as they slip red foil Russell Stover boxes, wrapped
in cheap static-y cellophane beneath my door and leave
wrinkled, sticky packets of peanut butter M&Ms on my desk at work -
they’re desperate to blow me up,
artificially enhance each limb with enzymes and preservatives
so they can fuck my still-breathing corpse
after slipping their powders into the pill that they slip in my drink
because
I can hear those boys at the end of the bar playing Fuck, Marry, Murder
and one of them just said
I’d make a fine Christmas ham.

I know what those slick lipped lovers want, always licking
their teeth with slug tongues
at the ample bosoms and buttocks
of the girls walking past:

they want to dig their fists into the fat at my belly and
carve out their piece of flesh to suckle deep in the night where
it is safe to love me.

But Renoir used to paint me with roses,
and I’d rather be there
because I’ve been the voluptuous skinny girl with strawberry lips -
that body was jumped in the park at twelve when it was too dark to see,
invaded at fourteen with a filthy sock crammed in the opposite hole to stop the screams,
trapped in the designated driver’s bed at eighteen with too many beers consumed,
and when the cries of “No” brought his mother running,
he yelled through the deadbolted door that
I was only having a nightmare.
It’s okay,
I’m only dreaming.

So, no, I don’t worry about thin anymore,
because my ten minute mile
can’t outrun the trauma of a twenty-eight inch waist,
can’t outpace the breath sneaking up on my neck,
or the fingers clawing at the my face,
can’t close the distance between my eyelids any faster
when my boyfriend’s sweet kisses pull a trigger in my memory
and I can only freeze or make him shame me.

But Renoir used to paint me.

Renoir used to paint me
to rise again and again in the immortal phrase
of J’taime
and color the love
so violently splashed across his canvas.