Tropic of Squalor: Poems

by Mary Karr

We’re the naysayers, the risk-takers. I came here cowed

  and heartbroke. The first rat I saw scramble across my path

  heard a shriek. Now, the vermin catch my boot sole.

  Roaches flee from my light switch.

  Bring us your fuse lighters, your bomb wirers.

  Ply our teeth from our mouths we’ll scream bloody

  curses against your progeny.

  VIII. Obadiah: A Perfect Mess

  I read somewhere

  that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross

  Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,

  the whole city would grind to a halt.

  Cars would back up to Rhode Island,

  an epic gridlock not even a cat

  could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl

  of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved

  the unprecedented gall

  of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand

  up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.

  They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical

  as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,

  the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black

  as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant

  it burst. A downpour like a firehose.

  For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,

  pauses, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.

  And it was my pleasure to witness a not

  insignificant miracle: in one instant every black

  umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone

  still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera,

  the sails of some vast armada.

  And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress

  to accompany the piano movers,

  each holding what might have once been

  a lace parasol over the grunting men. I passed next

  the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled

  under the corner awning,

  in line for an open call—stork-limbed, ankles

  zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette

  around. The city feeds on beauty, starves

  for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,

  to my deserted block with its famously high

  subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure

  longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon

  opened its mouth to guzzle from on high . . .

  IX. Ecclesiastes: Amok Run

  Who could deny that one in twenty thousand would as soon

  Run among you wheeling an axe. I myself confined

  In a subway car befumed by the farts of strangers do wish them

  Heartily dead, which I text my son who texts back,

  You are so not a shepherd. My America has Glocks in it.

  I growl most days over the bones of whatever I’ve paid for.

  Mine own neighbor in his slot across the hall

  From my slot used to strike me as a bachelor eccentric—

  Collecting opera scripts and papers stacked floor to ceiling

  Like kindling. Then I came in at three a.m., up

  The old tenement stairs to find him squiring a street boy

  Perhaps fourteen out his apartment door. Furtive, this man

  Scuttling past like a scorpion, the boy moving as if drugged

  Holding the banister. He looked Native American

  And had a hickey on his pencil neck and black scars

  Inside his arms from recent needles.

  How long that night I stared at my spackled ceiling

  Till at dawn I knocked on said neighbor’s door

  To declare: We won’t have any more

  Drugged-up boys in here now, will we?

  X. Psalms: Carnegie Hall Rush Seats

  Whatever else the orchestra says,

  the cello insists, You’re dying.

  It speaks from the core

  of the tree’s hacked-out heart,

  shaped and smoothed like a woman.

  Be glad you are not hard wood

  yourself and can hear it.

  Every day the cello is taken

  into someone’s arms, taken between

  spread legs and lured into

  its shivering. The arm saws and

  saws and all the sacred cries of saints

  and demons issue from the carved cleft holes.

  Like all of us, it aches, sending up moans

  from the pit we balance on the edge of.

  XI. Hey Jude: Prophetic Interlude by the Ghost of Walt Whitman

  Out of the ether I have come to speak to you

  Off the right-angled sidewalks of this city,

  A place whose food carts scorch the flesh

  Of many slaughtered lambs.

  I am a scout sent to label what’s vanishing, to capture in bell jar

  The whiff of lime leaves and coconut milk from Go-Go Curry

  Where the prayer rugs unroll five times per day so men

  Can bow to the eternal while huffing taxis double-park outside

  Unmolested by pumpkin-orange parking tickets

  And the Now Baking sign never stops flashing. There are buns

  In many ovens, and I record their rise and the passing

  Of minor saints: the woman whose lavender hair

  Is the shade of faded irises as she conducts a discourse with

  The Invisible: finger raised in a pose that evokes Confucius

  or Socrates. I chronicle the industry of the Garment District

  Where a giant speaking some Slavic language into his headset

  Shoulders a box of rolled-up Chinese silks—gold butterflies,

  Scarlet dragons, white chrysanthemums like fireworks

  On emerald cloth. The rolls poke up like organ pipes.

  The pedestrians this day are not maggots on meat,

  But dancers who weave and heft their packages

  To clear a path for each gliding profile.

  XII. Malachi: Truckload of Nails

  In the bright stutter of neon, the truck’s driver

  feels the stock prices fluctuate

  across his newly shaved face. His shirt is white linen.

  His mouth is now shaping the name

  of Jehovah, who set us loose upon this hurtling earth.

  The truckload of nails is packed

  to explode among the soft pink and black

  and beige bodies running

  to and from their separate containers—many

  gnawed up inside, serpents

  hatching in heads, while in one of the city’s

  sewers oozing steam there’s a device

  wired to a cheap drugstore alarm, the scarlet digits

  counting down, and only the rats watching.

  XIII. Hebrews: The Mogul

  Some childhoods are so powerful

  they drag on a man’s soul like a magnet.

  By day, he stands in boardrooms

  silhouetted by the slide projector’s beam.

  Above twelve hanging neckties, a dozen faces

  tip up at him like kids watching a cake carried out.

  His laser light sweeps across a landscape.

  It always lands in the spot

  where the treasure can be dug for.

  At sunset, they escort him to the limo.

  Each man presses into his palm a card

  with name embossed. They wave

  from under the awning as snow falls.

  Because it’s Berlin, the consonants spoken

  are sharp as barbed wire in his head

  yet muffled by memory and snow.

  The black car glitters inside with crystal,

  amber spirits, VSOP. One sip, and his head

  nods. The man’s soul is sucked under time

  as through a pneumatic tube.

  He goes burrowing back and back

  to anot
her century when the mother figure

  slips her wedding band under his tongue.

  She ties a bundle to his back, her face wet

  as the train doors seal her away forever.

  Auf Wiedersehen . . . Then a long gauntlet

  of gargoyles his stubby legs flee

  across brown stalks in a frozen field.

  He balls himself up all small in a haystack

  as pitchforks jab, and every scream swallowed.

  Later, he’ll stand at the wall

  of windows on the world, snapping the neck

  on a water bottle as one might murder

  a wounded bird. The tower he stands in

  is flown at by two planes aimed at his unblinking,

  the sky flawless blue when his line ends.

  XIV. Lamentations: The More Deceived

  (for George Saunders)

  The jackhammer the man in the crosswalk wrestles with

  He also leans on. It shimmies the cage holding his heart.

  He wears royal blue tee over jelly belly, and his yellow helmet

  Casts a gray veil over his face. The shaking moves up

  Through my legs so the bone marrow shivers.

  The air swims with swirling particles that make us ghosts.

  At the crosswalk, the worker pauses to lift his face. We see

  Each other: Hello, fellow sufferer! Many ways to become dust.

  When the towers shed their flaming skins we’d first seen

  Bodies falling from high windows like acrobats.

  Those flights so brief, and Hell too endless to ponder.

  It lasts and lasts. That’s the point, repeating its evil

  Self to the damned in detail.

  Weeks after the attack, the masked firemen

  In rubber boots melting from the heat wore asbestos gloves

  Like oven mitts to labor in the pit.

  Alongside George, I clung to the hurricane fence

  Around the perimeter encased in stench of burnt rubber.

  We couldn’t stop

  Watching before everyone was saved,

  Though it was a form of porn, of course.

  The worst wasn’t when firemen found

  A bit of human matter — finger or tooth —

  And it was placed on its own stretcher (so small!)

  And some signal was given and all work came to a halt,

  And men cupped their helmets over their heaving

  Chests. The worst wasn’t even the work starting back up

  And men sliding their helmets back on and bending down

  To rubble again as the stretcher with human matter

  Snaked across the smoking pile to some tents —

  The worst was looking into George’s round glasses

  At his dark blue and brimming eyes

  As he said we were enjoined

  By that smoking scene to live fully awake

  Every instant after, for only presence

  Could honor the lost, and yet neither of us was capable of it —

  Not even for two minutes however much fasting and prayer,

  For that big slutty whore of a city was beckoning,

  And we wanted pizza and hand sanitizer, and had to hit

  A fundraiser and, ergo, must shower the stench off ourselves.

  And to escape the smoke, which we feared was scorching

  Our otherwise pristine lungs, we walked down over rocks

  By the water to find the fence where kids of the dead had wired

  With baling wire stuffed bears and dolls with stiff arms

  Outstretched for fucking ever and those last notes

  Laminated and drawn in listing block print

  By the small and weak and mostly illiterate.

  Blue crayon tear, x eyes, frown face, prayer hands.

  XV. Kings: The Obscenity Prayer

  Our Falter, whose art is Heavy,

  Halloween be thy name.

  Your kingdom’s numb

  your children dumb on earth

  moldy bread unleavened.

  Give us this day our

  wayward dead.

  And empower our asses

  that they destroy those

  who ass against us.

  And speed us not

  into wimp nation

  nor bequiver us

  with needles, for thine

  is the flimflam and the sour,

  and the same soul-

  sucking story in leather

  for never and ever.

  Ah: gin.

  XVI. Marks and Johns: The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God about the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives

  Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote

  all last night’s infomercials — an anorectic son

  who bought with Daddy’s Amex black card

  the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,

  plus a steak knife that doth slice

  the inner skin of his starving arms.

  Poor broken child of Eve myself,

  to me, the flightless fly,

  the listing, blistered, scalded.

  I am the rod to their lightning.

  Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.

  At my altar the blouse is torn open

  and the buttons sailed across

  the incensed air space of the nave,

  that I may witness the mastectomy scars

  crisscrossed like barbed wire, like bandoliers.

  To me, the mother carries the ash contents

  of the long-ago incinerated girl.

  She begs me for comfort since my own son

  was worse tortured. Justice,

  they wail for — mercy?

  Each prostrate body I hold my arms out for

  is a cross my son is nailed to.

  XVII. The Like Button

  Back in the before time

  those days of amber

  desire was an inner

  and often ugly thing.

  And if we wanted,

  my brothers and hungry

  sisters, we were oft flung

  far from each other. Think

  tin-cans-and-string far,

  plum-colored-smoke-signal

  far. No web wove the pinpoints

  of ourselves into a map. No

  upward thumb could be pressed

  to say yes or its detractor: no.

  Soon, we may each evolve

  a glow button maybe mid brow,

  so as we pass each other we can vote

  praise or scorn to light up yay

  or nay on a passing stranger’s face

  a thumb. At first the young celebs

  with asses you can serve drinks off

  will rack up zillions of votes

  till we tire of such bodacious butts,

  and then the smart, the brave,

  the strong will take their turns,

  but what if we start to like,

  say, the stout, the schlubby

  neighbor raking leaves or that

  subway sleeper who’s woven

  yellow crime scene tape into

  a jock strap—Police Line: Do

  Not Cross—till all the undeodorized,

  the unloved all their lives, start to feel

  their foreheads blip

  and blip as it becomes hip

  to love the oddest, the most

  perilously lonely. Imagine

  the forever dispossessed

  transforming as they feel the thumb

  of yes impress itself

  into the very flesh.

  XVIII. Petering: Recuperation from the Sunk Love Under the Aegis of Christ and Isaac Babel

  (for Amy Koppelman)

  If you spend all night reading Babel and wake on an island

  metropolis on your raft bed under a patent-leather sky

  with the stars pecked out, you may not sense

  the presence of Christ, the Red Cavalry having hacked
up

  all those Poles, the soldiers hugging each other

  with their hatchets. This morning, my ex-man

  is a caved-in box of disposable razors to ship back.

  He wore a white Y on his baseball cap. Night

  was a waterfall down his face.

  Marry me meant, You’re a life-support system

  for a nice piece of ass; meant, Rent

  this space. Leaving the post office, I enter

  the sidewalk’s gauntlet of elbows. All around me,

  a locust buzz as from the book of Job. Yet I pray, I

  pray: Christ, my Lord, my savior,

  and my good brother, sprinkle me

  with the blood of the lamb. Which words

  make manifest his buoyancy in me.

  If the face of every random pedestrian is prayed for,

  then the toddler in its black pram

  gnawing a green apple can become baby Jesus.

  And the swaggering guy in a do-rag idly tossing an orange

  into the crosswalk’s air might feel heaven’s winds

  suck it from his grasp as offering.

  His gold teeth are a sunburst. When the scabby man

  festooned in purple rags shoulders an invisible rifle

  to shoot the do-rag dude, he pirouettes,

  clutches his chest. Light applause follows

  his stagger to the curb. The assassin bows.

  These are my lords, my saviors, and my good brothers.

  Plus the Jew Isaac Babel, who served the Red Calvary,

  yet died from a bullet his own comrade chambered.

  That small hole in his skull

  is the spot on the map we sailed from.

  XIX. Philemon: Notes from the Underground

  Tonight this subway car is permitted

  to bear me in its belly through a black tunnel in rock.

  And in the evil of my pride, I get

  to forget I am You-formed—needlework of hair

  stitched to my scalp growing outward,

  stonework of bone, fret lines of tendon.

  In this dark vehicle, I sit unstrapped

  among other similarly shaved animals.

  The long light above us is sick green,

  the rivets holding our vehicle together are regular

  the way stars are not. They foretell

  fuck all. I place my palms together, fingers unlit

  tapers invisibly burning for you.

  Thirst is the truest knowledge of water.

  XX. Revelation: The Messenger