write me in--11/24/09

i always wanted to be a figment of imagination,
a doll in the attic, mint at first glance,
but lined with saliva and falling apart
at each disjointed seam.

the poet is a whore, no better
than the freudian voodoo doll that you keep
under your pillow, no grander
than the magazine squeezed under your box spring.

so write me in, stewart. i have been dying
to be in a class rage fairy tale.
fitzgerald's glamour in salinger's squalor.
i'm a costume jewelry diamond necklace,
the grand dame's folly.

and so, for the gods of comedy,
you'll sacrifice me on the altar of belly laughs
and alligator tears. imagine it!
the college dropout in connecticut,
the librarian in LA.
the lemon in your eye
(spit take)rousing applause. the camera loves you,
baby doll.

ghosts (9/3)

ghosts

Stewart and I made love, and the fog climbed into bed with us
casting white shadows on pale figures.

I can read your thoughts, Stewart:
too many times have you put me in daisy gardens,
too many times have I seen a blur of myself
trumpeting through the woods.
Too many times have you pictured me as I was.

In my mind, though,
I am always near the frozen lake
under a yellow light
and in that stillness, I search for you beneath the ice.

I am always birthing something.

martha in europe

Martha in Europe

I.
That summer, I travelled alone,
like we all must do when we grow old.
I cut a perfect diagonal line across Europe
for once, all things were exact.
I left my home without any promise of return.
I made ghosts of my furniature, of photographs,
of the moose head mounted on the wall.
Of course, I asked nothing of the mirror anymore
I already knew it's answer.

II.
In Germany, I wandered with a pocket of coins
(out of all of these countries, it was most like home.)
I passed by his old apartment, wherein I once came apart
stripped and shaved.
I shed enough blood to keep his heart alive for twenty minutes,
drunk on his roommate's stolen beer.

Maybe I wanted to be captured. I was in a dark womb, so
maybe I craved the adreniline rush in that moment before death.
When you taste the wet paper of cabbages and bruised sausages
and you see the shadows over the faces of everyone you've known.
I did not enter that room, charm the new tenant,
some leggy fraulein to see it one more time
I was looking for something more unexpected.

III.
England should have stoned me for my sins
but I lay alone in the heath, thinking of the hill where
I had once made love constantly for an entire month in autumn
with a boy who gave me nothing but sweetness and black tea
which I, of course, clouded with milk.

In a red birdcage of a phone booth, I dialed
he answered and his glasses lay on the coffee table.
We did not undress. We did not wish to see what we had become.
"Martha, my dear. What happened to us?"
was what the phantom whispered.
I did not reply, I just tasted his withered lips
and watched the rabbits dance in his garden
and listened to his record player skip.
In the state I was in, I couldn't say:
"Oh, my gentleman, I could have you
but I do not want you."

IV.
I put on my black dress and headed south
for Greece, maybe Sicily
if time would allow. I never felt
in those days when I wore the red bathing cap
that I ever had enough time.
My skin, still too pale for that region
made them stare, that, at least,
had not changed.

What I was looking for was unattainable. I knew that.
Through new moon sunglasses, I watched
drunk on torsos and stomachs, I sunk
into the Mediterranean, careful not to let them study
my legs, think as olive trees with purple rivers
surfacing like cuneiform.

At sunset, when they had gone to kiss their sweethearts,
the village girls (dumb as kittens)
or play soccer in the foothills
I pressed my feet into their footprints
following their path at a slow pace.
I got a busboy drunk on the patio of my hotel room,
but I didn't dare to touch his face
(not even when he lolled his curly head onto my shoulder
and called me something that I knew had to mean "grandmother".)
I just looked to the stars and wept.

V.
Last of all, the Paris cemetery.
I'd gotten lost, but I had an old map and sturdy leather shoes.

I'd purchased nothing in that city to remember it by:
just train tickets
and a citron presse to stir
as if I needed to pass the time.

A transvestite in Montmartre read my palm
smacking her lips, she told me in broken English
that I had many more years to live.
I paid her and thanked her
but I did not believe her.

Another hotel, my last night on earth.
I could not sleep with the lights clamoring outside my window
like gawking angels waiting to watch me die.
The phone did not ring. God did not call to warn me
or offer me some last chance.
I crushed my cigarette,
and said good-night.

random poetry from the last couple of weeks....

Listening to the Oldies Station at Work, July 2009

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it, let’s make it last.
I peered out through the weeds
(as Eve must have done with Adam)
and our eyes danced and shimmied like peacocks.
I walked past, and you got a bad case of vertigo
looking up my skirt.

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it, let’s make it last.
I’m glad I didn’t listen to my well-meaning Catholic mother
when she said “Nothing good happens after midnight.”
I’ll compulsively eat tic tacs and hope to god’s empty throne
that you don’t notice my tobacco-stained fingers.
Oh, for fuck’s sake
just kiss me
I’m ready!

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it
let’s make it last.
Let’s sleep in our clothes.
Let’s smoke two bowls.
Let’s make frozen pizza.
Let’s talk about Nietszche.
Let’s break in
end before we begin.

Baby, let’s dance
because it won’t last.
Ashing into an Empty Heineken Bottle, April 2009

Oh my god! You’re so punk rock!
Just try to squeeze that beer belly
into Joey Ramone’s skinny jeans.
It would be justice (she’s a sweetheart
but not too bright. Just your type.)

Oh my god!
The train is crashing through the toll booth
but it only made the sound of paper plates against linoleum
and a few shattered 40s.
So no one looked up from their magazines.

Oh my god!
You’ve got a pile of my discarded clothes in a plastic sack,
but you can keep them as personal relics of your failures.
Write a song about it, you son of a bitch,
make some of that food bank mac and cheese
and remember, the world is my ash tray
and my most convenient spot, your sock drawer.
El Dorado

I thought the cup was overflowing
but the wine had run dry.
We walked home from the party
as if we were tearing down Parisian alleyways.
I whirled like a kaleidoscope
and you popped like a cork.

In this orgy of mirrors,
everyone is beautiful.
and we emerge with red ears
and bitten bottom lips.
It is the carnival of eternal youth
but I have a secret…

I watched our fuse burn
and it was short
disintegrating into ash.
Virus

Once a satyr put a curse on me,
one autumn night in his sticky grove.
There were no magical apples to cure me,
no handsome prince could lift it,
no fairy godmother to baptize me
and make me pure again.

Morning in the leper colony:
a dog waits at the gate
dreaming of mangling a man like a chicken.
I crawl from my cave
begging for scraps of food from your table.
I clutch the brim of your hat:
“Please, sir! Make me pure again!”
but you ran shrieking down the hot black streets,
“Unclean,
unclean,
unclean!”

Last winter, they stretched me out
setting matches to the roots of the tree inside me,
and burned it to white ash.
Like hydras, the branches resurfaced,
and they could not make me pure again.
Tattoo Parlor

Your pen is not like mine.
the ink can’t be washed away
in a basement flood or a madwoman’s campfire.
It is eternal as math
and you paint π on someone’s neck
in Einstein’s black spit.

In this savage planet,
all the men are sailors and soldiers
and the women, trapeze freaks and burlesque dancers.
There are no puritans,
no fluttering aristocracy.
Anchors are buried deep in flesh
and our lovers occupy only two dimensions.

The wound oozes and flakes off,
the amniotic fluid wiped from the baby’s skin.
It reveals this:
I am fragile, tiny as the three bones
hiding in the inner-ear.
My children are false gods
not muddy lotuses or butterflies caught in thorn,
simply bruises and woodcuts.

I wake to the sound of bees.
Something is being born.

Letter to My Mother

Dear Mother,
I wish I could have been you in 1975.
Nineteen years old, your round wire glasses
taking in the cold rush of Minneapolis
sneaking around the Walker’s sharp white angles
to glimpse Warhol’s soup cans behind a closed door.

Standing before it, did you have a moment
where you saw the future?
Did you see that you’d forsake art for god
(anything to get that man back on your side)
and that you’d tell your little blonde girl the horrors of Greek proportion,
the piss-christ sacrilege of photography
the eye-rape of a life drawing model
so that she’d never fall into their oily hands.

And when you knew I chose the pen instead
did you weep when I did not write prayers?
O bleeding saint,
save your bats in your Japanese silks.
I no longer fear them.
House Party

Picture yourself here:
a small town house party in the mid ‘70s.
My father, who never claimed to be a rock star or cowboy
who had always dreamed of that blonde California girl,
that freckled, Protestant Cheryl Tiegs
smiling as she emerged from his can of Busch Light.

Imagine my father
the alphabet not yet hanging from his nose,
the Buddha not yet sitting on his weak right knee
pulled from the orange velour couch
by a friend, some shotgun buddy or other:
“I want you to meet this girl.”

Imagine my mother
two years younger than he, her shy brown eyes swimming and diving
through that little pond of acquaintances
to see my father turned inside out.
Through the curtain of ironed hair, maybe she smiled
and turned away to light her cigarette
and thought of that night years ago
when her own mother met her father
in that post-war dance hall
eight babies swinging over their heads.

Picture yourself here:
my father, craving sobriety.
Three Dog Night record skipping, people passing joints
my mother, shutting the screen door behind her.

The President’s Au Pair

Thank you, Mr. President
that was a great sandwich.
I wouldn’t be surprised
if you adopted me
a white, working class Catholic poet (nothing like
a Kennedy, but just as cursed.)
who could live in the White House basement
and make your daughters s’mores
and sew buttons on your jackets.

Would you be my benefactor?
Would your wife give me interview fashion tips
(smart suits and black patent pumps)
and I’d rise like a red balloon
out of a den of tobacco and ashy knees.

seven deadly sins: class exercises

Sunshine (Yellow Persona poem)
When the princess spun in her buttery skirts,
I was there.
When you were three and painted that maniacal grinning sun,
I was there.
When you sat on the park bench after getting high and fed fleecy ducklings,
I was there.
When you sang incantations into daffodils and durges for maple leaves,
I was there.
When your summer tan faded in that first month of college,
I was there.
When you puked up Easy Mac after one too many shots,
I was there.
When you painted the nursery a gender-neutral color,
I was there.
When the baby god jaundice,
I was there.
When you poured honey into your chamomile tea,
I was there.
When you gummed bananas,
I was there.
When you bought your sullen granddaughter a butterscotch sundae and realized you'd grown old,
I was there.

***

Special Sauce (prose poem)

I am a compliment and nothing else, a culinary color wheel that spins like a Happy Meal kaleidiscope
and ends up smashed onto a red plastic tray. I am a secret known only to toothless meth-heads
and soft-spoken immigrants. They are my gatekeepers, they are like magicians who will never reveal
their tricks. They are like prisoners who are always innocent of their crimes, be it of murder of selling
marijuana to nurses or fucking seventeen year olds. The answer is obvious: it is right between your lips,
but like my counterparts we will be lounging on your hips like the yellow foothills on the coasts of America.

***

George Washington Carver's Dream

There are some things that are eternal,
interchangeable, blatant as god.

I wanted to create something that could shift-shape
that could feed millions, that could sit as I sat
in dusty shelves, waiting like a fat, sweet-toothed guardian angel.

I wanted to create something that could bring peace to nations,
that was the united colors of us.
A compliment to the darkest fruit or the whitest bread.

I wanted something to mend the tears in these feeble fabrics
blot out the negative space. "How did we ever live without it?" they'd ask,
and I'd shrug humbly.

I wanted something that couldn't be ignored,
but ketchup was already taken, and sugar was a cop-out
nothing more than salt's ditzy cousin.
So I crushed 'em,
crushed 'em
crushed 'em.

And so I will be remembered, praised, repackaged and sold
cast in bronze, but only a tiny figure in some pastoral corner
of a Midwestern state university.
Peanut butter.
Big. Deal.

rouge--7/10

Rouge

I will never be pure again.
I was a melancholy princess
but I had yet to bleed.

I have a confession to make:
I am a monster, Prince Charming.
Watch as my delicate hand trembles
in it's red satin glove.

I am transforming...

and you will gasp and faint as disgust
floods in and drowns the lust.
Lover, excuse me,
I am giving birth to my teenage journal.
The pages seemed endless
and some words clotted together.

I am Mademoiselle Werewolf,
and the moon drives me insane.
I am not a modern woman made of sterile linoleum.
I am a witch, an effigy made of apple skins,
an oracle prostrating herself to the virgin goddess:
Mother, my third eye is bleeding.
In the maple grove, I hear her answer...
repent, repent
she says through the red curtain.
you have weeping to do.

the attic--7/9/09

This is a prose poem I wrote last night. As they say in the Wall Street biz, I'm "diversifying my portfolio". Let's power lunch.
-d
***

The Attic

Step inside. We are two mushrooms exhaling our green smoke. Here, things come in pairs
Two arms that will twist into you like vines over bicycle handlebars. Two empty bowls that
once held the meager cuisine of bohemians. Two sets of eyes that stare out of the hollows
of shadows. The macabre mother whose feet we kiss in the psychedelic armpit of mid-summer.
Step inside, but mind the broken glass and rusty nails jutting from the floorboards. Mind the
fleecy darkness and cold light. Mind our cat (she is a madwoman) Mind the dust on our stolen
board games. Mind the ghosts that hover in the soft jutting of our hips and the gaps in our teeth.
One day, maybe two, a swarm of bees had a wild family reunion in our skylight. They lost
themselves in the outlandish sunlight and fell to their death. The Icarus family Thanksgiving,
a ritual to the jealous sun god. I swept those foolish boys into the dustpan and went to work.

seven deadly sins

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest/
I'm taking a "Seven Deadly Sins" poetry class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival this week, and I'm pretty much a gigantic poetry burrito at this point. I'm amazed at the things I'm learning, one of which is that I really don't fit in at wine and cheese receptions. I ate my brie and finger sandwiches and bailed.
This is my instructor's work. She is rad.


You know you're a huge nerd when...
You attempt to write a cento and sort of feel like you're being buried alive.
Verb tense pisses you off.
You're excited by phrases like "and the stars in the sky are still boss" (that's Corso. I want it tattooed on my body).
You brainstorm about poetry series while drinking Dr. HyVee in the wee hours of morning.
You get maniacally excited about all these contemporary poets you didn't previously know about, then you attempt to get all your non-writer friends to become as obsessed as you.
A prose poem about disembodied ears is the class favorite.

boys--7/6

Boys

My ribcage fails to hold in my absurd heart
for it and the nerves in my skin
fail to reach symbiosis.
Once again, it must throw itself overboard.

I.
I laid with you in a red room
with a red curtain and red cheeks
red hands and red sheets
red hairs patchy as red stains
and we were young again.

II.
His sweat made my bed smell like a tomb
and I tried to tell him that the man on the couch
would rape up both if he could.
Hungry as a panther for our empty stomachs
and dirty hair.
So I clamped my jaw shut
and waited.

III.
Somewhere, your face is painted, my bedouin.
I write you letters, piecing together
remnants of my life that seem as innocent as we were.
I sneak in dried lilies, butterfly wings,
and let them sleep with ink and drunken night kisses.
Taste the gin on the sealed paper
and someday I will leave my gold sandals at your door.

Swamp Thing--5/30

Swamp Thing

How many times will you go belly-up in your toxic tank
just so you can try to reach the ocean?
You have worn out your welcome
and passed out naked on the couch.
Shut yourself in your shantytown
and let your failures become urban legends.

Your eyes have a second skin
a primordial glaze of a reptilian lush.
I have slept next to the river.
Voodoo embers fell upon my knuckles
and by morning I smelled of singed lashes
and burnt toast.

You can glide through the sewers
growing fat with the flotsam and jetsam.
You slither up through the drains of unsuspecting bubble baths.
Eel-like, you slither through the silt floor
trying to smother the brightness
of coral-haired gazelles
but I was always too quick for you.

Attics and Turrets--4/23

Attics and Turrets

There is more truth than you think
in those fairytales about those aloof princesses
kept in attics and turrets by spinster aunts
or hungry dragons.

Why, might you ask, did they not throw themselves
shrieking and kicking into the boiling moat?
Why didn't they dance off the windowsill
to meet the soft black earth cradled in thorns?

There must have been one cell of love in the dragon's tongue,
She must have felt some security in those leather wings.
There must have been good intentions
in the aunt's withered lips.

They must have known
that they would be no less trapped
in the arms of a prince.

Santa Annas--4/23

Santa Annas

You're an east coast baby
but the Santa Annas always keep you awake at night
this time of year.
Your black lungs cringe against the gusts
and your heart bleats like a windchime.

The ocean holds its breath with me
and you board up your eyes in vain;
the hurricane will always rip out the boards.
This weather, it drives you crazy.
Like the sky, I make my rotations:
each year, Cancer shuts me in it's shell as I scrape along the reef. Each year,
Leo steals the sunlight and give it to everyone but me.
The moon pushes and pulls
and I am thirsty for her again.

You're a landlocked sailor
and your weathered hands clutch women's limbs
like stalks of corn in autumn
but they will always bend for you.

caution--3/11

Caution

I would be very careful
if I were you.
You should be very careful
if you were me.
But if you were me, you’d learn to reign in
Apollo’s smoldering ponies
and pray the sun doesn’t rise on Medusa’s mascara-stained face.

Get out while you still can
because after me, you will see the world through bloody Oedipal eyes.
I will scar you worse than your mother’s back and wrists
but unlike the cripple she is, I will chase you like a vengeful Fury
or leave you like Homer’s wayward Muse
only to return at the most inconvenient hour
mid-fuck or in the middle of a hypnotic state
while you are trying purposely to forget me.

Proceed with caution, wandering bard
for you are in grave danger of a potentially pining Calypso.
I am madder than Cassandra,
drunk dialing in her tower.
Play on your burning piano
you have struck a chord.

trash

Trash

Really, what’s the difference
between Eurotrash and white trash?
Those bastards have just been around longer
and English food is just as shitty as Southern gruel.
I don’t see much of a difference
just hot noise, street pissing, and a few ruins
and exposed tits to gawk at.

Ça va, mon amor? (Je ne sais pas.)
Whatever the hell that means. Çe’st la vie.
The best way to lie is to say I love you in French.
I don’t measure my madness in metric.
I don’t see why anyone ever would.

I am the ugliest American, and I can admit it now.
I will not transplant myself, though many have.
I will not come bouncing off the plane with Chlamydia,
a Prada scarf, and a brand new worldview.
Oh, your semester abroad when you ruined your expensive jeans
and had too many rendezvous
with pretty boys in their Ikea-strewn flats to call yourself innocent
as if you were the first.

Man of Leisure, Man of Peace

Man of Leisure, Man of Peace

End it, go ahead!
Kick me out, you grab-ass landlord.
You are no lizard king.
You are a reptile of the most common fare.
The Buddha hides knives behind his serene smile
and all his followers are just greasy-haired whores
who look good in orange.

I am tired of your clanging finger cymbals at 4 am.
I am tired of your deaf and dumb psychedelia.
I am tired of your Mayan roulette.
I am tired of your cat-hair covered boxers
hanging around my floor like passed out partygoers
but the only one attending was you
and maybe a couple hits of blotter acid.

I am checking out of this haunted hotel
I am a lady of taste
and your lukewarm pasta dinners are squirming in my gut.
I got burned out like your opaque chemicals
and there is no safe place to scream.

psycho bitch

Psycho Bitch

but I prefer the term “train wreck”
see also: “hot mess”.
Virginia Woolf should have warned you in a dream
(hair full of seaweed and sand up her nose)
that you should not have gone home alone with a poet.
AA never worked for sex addiction
bitches like me always tuck and roll off the wagon
and board the blue bus with a wink
as they hike up their skirts.

You’ve got mail! And it’s from your worst enemy!
Apologies are like popping valium for a fine young lady like myself.
My hips are full of the awkwardness of a post orgasm sob fest.
It’s going to get ugly, my friend.
Stick with bi-curious rendezvous and self-pity.
It’s safer.

I am as short lived as nitrous oxide,
light as whipped cream and just as forgettable.
A stranger’s bed is my crack pipe, my dirty needle.
I clean up nicely,
but I’m bad news, baby.

valentine 2/13/08

Valentine

The blueberries you ate were bitter.
Each helpless blister burst beneath your perfect teeth
and the red dust stained your gray sweaters.
So when you said you couldn’t taste anything,
I made you a cake entirely of sugar
and it caved in the middle, in spite of it’s sweetness.

“What is the point?” you asked, “When I’m not going to eat it anyway?”

You wanted a poet.
You wanted a piece of history.
You were willing to make a wager.
It seemed easy to see my name in print.
In the between Cartier and downtown loft ads in some magazine
or on the marriage certificate as you reached for the next available ship
to whose oars you would cling.
This was not my maiden voyage,
you preferred a scuffed schooner.

“What’s the point?” you asked, “We were heading straight for the rocks anyway.”

In that gray cotton darkness of your bedroom,
Me, in a familiar haze,
a story of gunfire and scorned women staying remarkably afloat in my mind,
I tried to reach into you
but our spines, like those twin pisces,
lay in desperate parallel.
You apologized, the night after
drunk and screaming affection into the receiver
and promised me dinner.
I’d make you buy me wine,
I was becoming accustomed to bitter reds.

dangerous lover

Dangerous Lover

The oracle has nothing to say, so Apollo is homeless
and the whole sea is an icy mosaic of queens and sultans
with smoke in their eyes.
It’s a collective writer’s block, a great depression
whose wheels squeal, thirsty for the oil burned by foolish lovers
with tattoos of names that will be revised with black boxes.

Miss Golightly was buried today
and instead of roses, costume jewelry littered her grave.
There were lines out the door at junk shops and pawn-and-loans.
The glamorous mourners went to pay their homage.
I paid my respects, and I’ve got no money left.

I married Shakespeare’s humorless clown in a shotgun wedding
and we plunged into deep water with a thousand other desperate people
and tongue tied rebels covered in kitchen grease.
Like most poet’s unfortunate lovers, he was doomed to forget me.

I am no philosopher,
I am just a chain smoker, and my friends grow old
as they release their balloons into the threadbare sky.
There is nothing left for us but an empty pack of cigarettes
and beer cans littering the floor.
The party is over, and it will be awhile
before we get paid,
get laid,
get our say.

I need a glass of wine to call a friend, I need a string of lights
to compare to a string of failures.
Call me a dreamer,
call me a hurricane,
call me a slut, because I am not subdued and pale blonde.
I am not a reassuring bible verse.
I am a red, red stain.
I am a dangerous lover.

kissing ashtrays--1/7

Kissing Ashtrays

Would the moon have risen in the same way
in that perfection of dusk
with the winter trees regarding the sky with a philosopher’s third eye
if I had been with you as the bomb dropped
and spilled confetti in our beer?
Would we have laughed at the stars settling on our tongues?

I assumed you’d tire of kissing ashtrays,
and I knew that my bloody fits would be difficult to swallow.
You would slip on your headphones
as I kicked in the teeth of pan flutes.
I am that same hysteric, again.

I am the debutante of an impoverished society,
the handmaiden of the bohemian underground.
I spin in those cotillions that artists always throw.
I will be auctioned off to the highest penniless bidder:
She eats peanut butter sandwiches
and her lungs are collapsing along with her heart.
Who wants this slut?
Who wants to hold down her wrists and
roll her screams under your tongue?

They say the captain never abandons their ship
and I was no exception.
I watched many a vessel crack in half,
and more than enough times I crashed into icebergs in gin-fueled spasms.
More than enough times I sunk into all seven seas
not bothering to search for treasure or touch the bellies of whales.
More than enough times I wrote letters to god in dots and dashes
before the water flooded ballrooms and boiler rooms.

I am the bitch slave of tragedy.
He bought me a pitcher of beer and asked my name
and if I owned a pair of heels.
He had the upper hand, as most of my lovers do.
He made no promises, only proposals
and I still wear his rings heavy on my hands.
He has ripped apart every seam on my black dresses,
and I fall asleep with him filling me up just below the brim.
“I’m drowning,”
“Would you like some water?”
“My glass is half-full, asshole.”