Life of the Party
Page 9
ODE TO MY LOVER’S LEFT HAND
There comes a moment on the first night,
after the first of everything, that you admit
the unremarkable talent of your right hand,
and what you don’t know is that in this moment
every constellation evolves into a different picture.
Orion’s Belt moves its bookend parts to the base, pushes
the middle star to the top to form a triangle.
What I’m saying is, if this right hand is not your best bet
then nothing is what it claims to be, suddenly everything
that calls itself ordinary must be a miracle, the romance
novels at Walgreens must be a Bible, cafeteria food
prepared by the finest chefs, your apartment is Boston’s
most coveted museum.
But this is not an ode to your right hand, the one
you call unnatural yet somehow knows how to move
like a cartographer over the map of me,
this is an ode to the moment you climb
to the other side of the bed, pull up the sleeve
of your left arm. What is the word for something becoming
more than whole? What is the word for a bird,
already stunning in its sitting form,
then opening its wings
and the watcher loses their breath?
Is it Yesterday was the best day but today is forever?
Is it believing wholly in your breath, until you reach sea level
and learn how easy breath can be? Is the word just shine?
Is it bloom? What is more beautiful than a hand
alive, nimble, and reaching? Ode to my lover’s left hand
is an ode to her voice in the shower,
an ode to the unlocking of our thought-to-be-open throats.
When you make the switch, you begin to tell me about being
ambidextrous, all of the things you can do with both limbs:
texting, basketball, cutting open an avocado for lunch.
But this, you say, this is for my left hand and my left hand
only. And then, of course, before I can praise the right
for its already perfect form you shine, or bloom, or become
the bird in flight and I lose my breath, drop my binoculars,
don’t care that I can’t see you anymore, because what is sight
really? Your hand unseeable, yes, but inside me also
and what is that if not sight? What is the sky if not my body,
a home for your open and boastful wing.
I AM ALWAYS TRYING TO MAKE MY POEMS TIMELESS
I’m always talking
around technology
like I get all of my information
from the dusty stacks
at the university library.
Like I know the man’s last meal
by heart. Like mentioning an iPhone
makes me a bimbo or something.
What I’m trying to say
is that honestly,
I think the stakes in Clueless
are higher than they are in Star Wars.
I think Cher preserving her Alaïa
red dress while getting robbed
at gunpoint is literally life or death,
while the galactic war is whatever
because it isn’t even, like, real.
Honestly, I found the man my mom
had an affair with on Facebook.
I know your ex just graduated from
nursing school. I think I’m prettier
than all of her prettiest photos.
I don’t write poems in my journal
because it takes too long.
I’m always like, I’m gonna delete my Facebook
but how will I know about the events happening
near me that I’m never gonna go to?
A rogue dream. Me, in a lilac dress
with an open back showing up on your doorstep.
I am holding your favorite Moscato.
I am holding your favorite fruit.
I am holding your hand as you lead me
through the house to the backyard.
No one was expecting me
but everyone is relieved I am here.
I am dressed perfectly for this weather.
I am so glad I chose this outfit.
I know exactly how to dance to this music.
I left my phone on the counter
in my apartment and I haven’t
reached for it once. I walked here with no map.
I ate the perfect breakfast for day drinking.
I am better than you. I smell just a little.
When the sky goes dark, I’ll shift
to an evening look with only a leather jacket
and a swoop of liquid eyeliner,
like the magazines promise
you are capable of doing.
Everything is so easy. I love my friends.
Let me tell you the truth, for once.
I don’t socialize because I’m afraid
I’ll disappoint people. I have spent
so many hours talking on the phone.
I still love chat rooms. The only thing I trust
about myself is how good I am with words.
I can make anyone fall in love with me,
as long as they aren’t close by.
ODE TO THE UNPAID ELECTRICITY BILL
To my lover’s selectively distant brain—how she lets
only the federal letters sit abandoned in the mailbox
but still checks it each day, hoping for something handwritten,
how she curates a care package for me and calls
the post office every day until it is delivered
to my doorstep, how meticulous she is for love
and reckless for everything that is not love, my lover,
who, after the first night I slept in her bed, woke
to an unworthy light switch, a useless outlet,
and apologized profusely, swore it was not a matter
of money, but rather of mind, promised it wasn’t
usually like this, This never happens,
the electricity company has a grudge against me,
and I sat in the dark, unfazed, while my phone
battery dwindled, computer dimmed to dead,
until I left for work, not yet knowing that this,
this messy girl, would be my great love,
but for now, dear reader, in this story
she is just a new, frantic girl, certain that her quiet
house is the deal breaker, that after work I won’t
return, and will instead find a new lover
who uses a credit card or autopay, and no matter
how much I reassure her, I cannot explain
that the smell of her scalp has enough electricity
to power the village of myself, her voice a reading lamp,
her stomach a power strip, each finger a thousand volts.
My love, if I could tell you I would.
Every day before this has been a day without electricity,
a dark house, digging for my wallet and keys—
Who needs light when I have you?
What is light if not your constant hum? Who are they
to tell me what light is, the men in their navy polos
and white trucks, who are they to name the power
of this house? And so,
instead of reassurance, I just
come back. And when I do, of course, my lover
is standing in the living room. There she is,
surrounded by forty candles, surrounded by light,
of course, my lover, there she is, in the organic
light, of course, my lover, there she is fumbling
the flame, telling me she tried her best.
SAY IT, I’M ALWAYS IN LOVE
they all do, when I scramble into dinner
unforgivably late with too many bags,
rambling about some new lover
& the way they listen better than the last.
say it, you don’t believe me this time
because last time i lost six months
mourning our demise, chain-smoking on a rooftop
next to the airport, where every four minutes
a plane would tear its belly across the sky,
until a new love came along, danced with me
in a parking lot & made sure i drank water.
yes, i thought that one would stay until
my birthday, & no, they didn’t, yes,
i was alone by winter, practicing some
familiar grief, my old heart’s sacrament.
okay okay, another rolled around by spring,
gone by the next fall, of course i know the pattern,
you teach me nothing when you say it
but say it, i’m always either in love
or heartbroken, say it, i should be alone
more often, i’ll admit, sometimes
i don’t trust the way i worship, okay?
sometimes i forget who’s who. i know
i know, how many gods can a girl have?
who will she go home to when she dies?
2041
but for real this time, they gave us a date,
warning that if we don’t change our ways—
our plastic fetish, hunks of hot tire, black smoke
thick as cream spilling into a bird’s mouth—ways,
something, i’m not sure what, will happen to make us
gone. so i’ve gone & decided to collect my avocado shells
& egg cracklings into a bin for soil, as if that will somehow
make the world let me love you longer. i’m not so naïve
to believe your reason is the same—that you dry your hands
on your pants & scold me for letting the sink run
while i scrub a pan, or that you’d carry two gallons of milk
in each arm like identical infants before you would ever ask
for a bag, that the oils & wax & soap in glass bottles
are because you don’t want us to die alone in the flood
but instead together somewhere with giddy crickets
& old trees, somewhere past 2040 where we drink from jars
& grow our own spinach, but i think love makes us selfish,
so let me admit that last week, over naan & yellow curry,
when you said that soon there will be war & though you don’t
believe in them, you’ll have to buy a gun,
because all we’ll have to protect are the people we love,
i thought maybe you meant it was me safe behind the door,
jugs of clean water propping up the mattress,
while you stand outside in our desert, rifle against
the spot on your chest where my head goes,
glaring into the filthy horizon,
ready.
AILEEN WUORNOS TAKES A LOVER HOME
So she’s a Pisces, right? which means she’s already in love
with a girl at the other end of the bar top who drinks
whiskey neat and has a mullet
just like hers, only red.
Pisces love to see some version
of themselves in everything.
Pisces only love things that say something
about who they are.
Aileen is here, at this biker bar
in Daytona, Florida, called The Zodiac
because she wants to put something
wet and alive in her mouth.
I don’t want to talk about the men
who tried to kill Aileen
or how she killed them first,
I don’t want to talk about how self-defense
doesn’t make you a serial killer,
about how she said if a hundred men
had tried to rape her,
she would have killed a hundred men.
Tonight, I want to talk about two girls kissing against a wall
in an alley behind a lesbian bar. I want to talk about the fact
that there are almost no lesbian bars left in the country
and one theory as to why is that queer women
are more likely to fall in love and move in together
and ultimately stop going to bars.
I was sad once, that there were no bars
for gay girls in my town,
and then I remembered
that love can kill an industry.
If I ever look back and think,
I should have spent more time going out
with my friends, at least I will know
I spent most of my life in love.
I want to talk about how Aileen and Tyria went home
and stopped going to Zodiac. How Zodiac is out of business.
I want to talk about
how they never went on a date,
they simply went home together
and didn’t leave the house for a week.
When Tyria suspected Aileen had killed
more than one man, it was because Aileen brought her gifts
that she couldn’t have afforded to buy.
I want to talk about how, in the end, Tyria said,
We were more like sisters than lovers.
In the end, Tyria was promised immunity.
In a phone call tapped by police, Aileen called Tyria
her right arm, her left arm, her breath,
how all Tyria could say back was Please tell them,
please say it out loud. But Aileen didn’t want to talk about it.
She wanted to talk about love. So Tyria would hang up,
unsuccessful, and the officer would tell her to
Say it like this, tell her she’ll get off,
tell her it won’t be so bad.
But how, each time, for three days straight,
the police listened to Aileen talk about love.
About her right arm. Her left arm.
Her breath. Her breath. Her breath.
[i don’t mean to skip over a whole life but if i told you everything we would be here all day. but here is something i can give you that is not meant to serve as a clue or tragedy, just a true story. when titanic was released on vhs, it was so long that it came in a box set of two tapes & the babysitter reserved a whole evening for us to watch it. we lay on our stomachs with our heads propped up in our hands, elbows on the floor of her plush-carpet den, & when the sex scene came on, she asked me to get her a glass of water & by the time i came back, rose’s hand had already run down the foggy window. when he drew her naked she let me stay. when the ship split in two i asked her if this was a true story & she said yes. when jack froze against the wooden door i asked if this was a true story & she said no. but if there was no love story, she said, it would just be a movie about a bunch of people dying.]
ANOTHER THING I KNOW ABOUT HEALING
is that it happened somewhere on the 101
between Portland and Arcata
where Maríajosé and Joaquina,
having remembered what I’d said
about the giant trees, how they remind me
that everything I feel is small and temporary,
would wake me up and point out
the window every time we passed
them, a family of those burgundy beasts
off the highway, some as wide as
our fifteen-passenger van. in the end,
the trees were irrelevant, it was the fact
that someone saw them and thought
of me, shook me awake
and made me look.
ALL OF THE MISSING GIRLS ARE HANGING OUT WITHOUT US
let this be the folklore. not in a field.
not in a river, not mouth half-open,
knock-kneed under the tall grass
behind the baseball field.
not in a park or at the bottom of a drained pond,
not in their boyfriends’ trunks, their boyfriends’ closets,
or between the floorboards
in his house. they are alive
but not in a basement, not scanning
a grocery store bulletin board
for a picture of their young and gone face. no, the girls
are having a contest: who can catch the most tineola moths
in a mason jar, who can sprint back to the barnyard
fastest to set it on the kitchen windowsill
during the golden hour, the amber light
and its brief devour.
the only prize is that the winner gets to see it first—
a horde, chestnut-colored and coated in honey,
slapping against the glass walls and tin roof,
unbroken by the human hand.
all of the girls will flock around it—a mob of soft and angry,
a lantern alive, kaleidoscope of wings—
for a moment they are all in the same place,
until dark, when the girls have lost interest
and gone to sleep beneath each other’s warm pits and legs,
at which point the oldest girl will carry the jar