bitter oranges: 9/15

Bitter Oranges

The tree was a mirror
and in it you saw only a door.
So with cats mewing at my feet, I picked three bitter oranges.
When I bit into them they tasted of dust.
I may have been inhaling a spirit-spore or two
to drag out the golden subconscious in a wheelbarrow.

But my ideas were thwarted and mute.
Fat with raccoon arms flailing dumbly on the forest floor.
My ideas had babies and they lay mewling around me
rolling their tongues and flashing their teeth.
Calling me mama.
Calling me papa.

I had forgotten what it had been like to sleep with a wolf
to lie motionless as he eats all the sugar cookies I made
and mutter, “you’re next”
dragging a claw across my thigh.
I had forgotten it until the numb juice ran down my throat
and I felt the mirror break
and the door swing off it’s hinges
and the terrible crash of the lover rolling over.
Curiosity wouldn’t have killed me
but it will possess you like a gambler
addicted more to light than anything else.

lazy mirror- started 9/10, finished 9/11

Lazy Mirror

I always pictured Snow White as a quiet-footed Asian girl
a red-eyed Cadburry bunny sniffing through the clover
looking for some pretty new pill.
Some geisha ditz, a thing to dress up
a thing to fling into the air and watch her light up.
A girl born small enough to fit in your pocket
a sexy preemie pretty as a lemon drop.
A ginseng tablet to help you remember
when you’ve grown old.

I always pictured the nameless evil queen
white and white and white.
A bastard child of assimilation
raped of her Persian jars and Mexican blankets.
A ball-squeezing power suit fixing her face at the bus stop
some rich bitch, cunningly smiling during her dagger heel commute.
A real contender
in a corporate beauty contest.
Oh you were born to be a stepmother,
you were born to be Freud’s voodoo doll.

Mirror, you saw me
drawing on myself that cold day in May
from your glass box you watched the Venus flytraps grow out of my ears.
and you said:
“yes
yes
yes
the fairest witch that ever walked the earth
but the princess will always get the job.
You’re no bouncing blonde secretary.
Though your awareness is ravishing,
you’re no blow up doll.”

I should have poisoned you, I guess.
I should have found you another prince that would keep your belly tight.
I know just the one, in fact.
But I’m a lazy dame.
My idea of revenge is dozing in a green tower biting black licorice.
Your beauty doesn’t concern me.

winner winner, pita dinner.

I won 3rd place at the Ames Slam last night at the Boheme!
I think it was the red striped dress.
http://www.boheme-iowa.com
There's my shameless plug for the day. Not only does the Boheme host slams the first Tuesday of every month, they have super fun dance parties every Thursday night and Open Mic on Sundays. Plus there's always good people, alcohol, and paintings of naked ladies. Don't you love it already? I think you do.

9/2-the fox's bride

I'm not one of those people who can read great poetry and sit back and appriciate it. No, great poetry makes me want to pick up my pen and write something of my own. I've had to read Anne Sexton's Transformations for a women's lit class and I'm considering making a shrine to her next to my shrine of Sylvia Plath. Since Transformations is pretty much recreations of classic fairy tales, I decided to do one on that vein, only mine is based loosely on the nursery tale "the Gingerbread Man"
It doesn't even compare to Anne's work, but here it is:

The Fox's Bride

As soon as my feet announced their arrival
in the quiet fanfare of a dog whistle,
you heard me.

A year ago I'd been in your corner of the woods,
flinching my way through life.
You saw me and instantly wanted to gobble me up
as neatly as a boiled egg.

Though you saw my invisible escort
his kisses glowing purple under the blacklight
smears I couldn't wash off.

So you waited
eating beetles and spitting dirty words
flicking your tail like blue stove flames.

You gathered your blueprints and with your tiny eyes
clicked them into your brain like Morse code
even I couldn't hear my own body being telegraphed.

So I ran, picking off only the tiniest pieces.
I even gave a woodsman one of my currant eyes
because of how he looked in flannel.

But I kept running until I met a stream
and I knew I couldn't cross.
I knew I was flat enough to soften like cold cereal
and laugh as minnows nibbled at my feet.

Then your arrived like a red submarine
and let me sit on the tip of your tail
high enough to see the buzzing neon and girls in white.

Once you let me cross the whole way, just as an experiment.
You let me pilgrimage to see my parent-gods
and the oven where my belly swelled brown.
To see the gun which drew on my smile.

There no one touched me.
No one fed my addiction.
So I replaced my gumdrop buttons with extra strength Tylonol
and out of the hemisphere of the window the woodsman stood
with a waxy rose floating over his head.

So I climbed on your back
because I didn't like getting my hair wet
and you can guess what that led to.
I climbed into your mouth and danced with your velvet tongue.

Just like every Thursday night thereafter
where you would come gather me in my red dress
you'd buy me a gin and tonic and lick the nutmeg off my skin.
You'd watch me dance with the seven dwarves
an estranged princess, some stray tattooed fairies
but you'd get your paws tangled in my hair
and drag me backward.
By then I knew better: gingerbread girls are meant to be eaten
after all.

8/26/07-Pogo Stick (song lyrics, let's say)

Pogo Stick

Would you encourage me to bring my toothbrush to your house?
Would I keep it in the bathroom near the sink
where it could fall into the toilet at any given time?

Oh gravity, your laws are giving me the blues
because I’ve been thrown up so far into the air
I can taste the clouds.
I’ll wait for the moment when I come down
I’ll learn some patience one of these days.

Would you pitch your mattress and find another big enough for two?
That way, we can sleep all day
or at least until we get hungry for tomato soup.
I’d make you a grilled cheese, babe, if you wanted me to.

Oh gravity your laws are waking me up
the alarm is ringing until I come out of another dream
where you and I are astronauts
on the moon no one can hear you scream
because you never need to.

Would you rescue me from a day of watching posters fall off walls?
of trying on clothes and eating too much.
Would you pull me out of the well
once I’ve chosen that as my landing.

Oh gravity I wonder what it would be like if I kept falling up
if I changed my legs to pogo sticks
and kept refilling my glass until I was drunk on positive thinking.
I wonder if I rearranged the letters of our names
so it was spelled the same
so it was spelled the same
both up and down.

communist in red lipstick-started 8/15, edited 8/22

Communist in Red Lipstick

Bolshevik tart
You smudged your revolution across the face of that boy.
You sent him stumbling out of the bar
Like a child scattering his sweat out of the ruined village.
Years after, he’d feel phantom pain in the center of his chest
when it rained or snowed
or broke out a few splinters of sunshine.
He’d feel your words like shrapnel.

You rushed across the barrier
Red and red and red, a fucking spectacle
Trashy as a dirty word in a foreign language,
you ran around Berlin your freedom songs
clamoring behind you, clinking like tin cans on a marriage car.

The flies buzzed around your tearducts in that unbearable Russian summer.
A single afternoon when you dreamed up that sugarplum acid dream
A big diamond and a home with a white picket fence
Painted an extra coat to hide the membrane of sweat from the worker’s backs.
Wearing paint thick as fur to conceal your naked phrase:
“I’ll make you see
Someday.
I’ll hold open your eyelids, made heavy by the imitation designer handbag
Slung over the weary shoulders of your waitress daughter, pregnant
with numbers, full of the blue cotton candy fibers
left over from the carnival of American dreams
which will someday fatten her for the kill.”

They shut you off in September, sedated with the balm of college amnesia.
life gave you more lemonade than you could possibly want
and there you sat, fat with their acceptance
mouth bare as a clean newborn
sterile in the arms of it’s new mother.

electric shoes-8/22/07

Here's something I wrote while bumming around in the library before my 2:10 Women's Lit class. This is the first real poem I've written for awhile.
And no, I'm currently not on acid.

Electric Shoes

I’ve got pair electric shoes
I walk up in the sky most every night, sometimes it breaks the heat
in a powdery shatter.
I give it to the swaying monks of 3 am
walking the streets unarmed, the peace girls
giving out their alms.

I’ve got a room with a few stray cats
that smoke cigarettes and stay up
to wag their tongues out the window
so they can sing their song to the wolves that pass outside
it sounds like laughter, and I become their sound.

I’ve got a dress that’s a certain shade of red
I wear it because an old man told me
I looked like a commie flag
only a bit more glamorous
a little less frightening
but no less willing to burst through containment
like a Chinese river.
I wear it most every night, holding hands with Bolsheviks
and drinking cheap beer with Japanese fashionistas.

I’ve got a swarm of bees in my brain
That make honey that drips out of my tongue, slow as melting wax
whenever I open my mouth.
They are quiet, though, or at least their rhythm
matches up with the way silence punctuates an accent.

I’ve got a pair of electric shoes
And when I make that clockwork stroll up in the sky
August sings me liberty
And I try to remember the word but it rushes to the back of my brain
And graffiti’s itself as if I’ll remember.