by David Lehman
my broad-boned mother, my corduroy
notre dame of worn knees,
mother of sidestroke stillness
and loose knots,
my mother who blurs from the effort
of being remembered,
O homely, deliberate icon of lamps left on,
and I have set out a dish for her fingerbeams
from FIELD
PATRICIA LOCKWOOD
* * *
Rape Joke
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”
No offense.
The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word “interesting,” as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.
Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.
The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.
The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.
Not you!
The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.
He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.
The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.
How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.
The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
OK, the rape joke is that he worshipped The Rock.
Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.
The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.
The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.
It gets funnier.
The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.
The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!
The rape joke is that he was your father’s high school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.
The rape joke is that he knew you when you were twelve years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.
The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.
The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.
The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.
Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.
You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.
The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.
The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.
It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.
The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.
The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.
The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.
The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.
The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.
The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
from The Awl
NATHANIEL MACKEY
* * *
Oldtime Ending
for Ed Roberson, Ted
Pearson & Fred Moten
Reluctant light light’s
evasion, faces lit. Soulin’
one of them called it,
they
sat around the fire . . . Re-
ticulate eyelight, life
outliving childhood . . .
Bottomless whimsy,
bot-
tomline wisp . . . All atop
time running out, what
the attendant buzz was,
gleam
seen somewhere else,
anyone else’s eye . . . All
to say they lay thrown out
of the car, sprawled at cliff’s
edge.
Their heads hit the dirt, they
saw stars . . . It seemed they
saw love’s low claw, rims
riding asphalt, road their
dis-
tended redoubt . . . Saw
themselves thrown from
the car, remembering
when,
skin’s old regard more
skin . . . The end of it
met the end of the world,
skid no out of which but
out,
dead or passed out, un-
seen outside face they fell
in-
side
•
Their heads’ hit of dirt
launched feathers. The
boy-god with birdlegs
lashed
out . . . A made-up
tribe’s tale of the tribe it
was they were caught
in, careened against all
hope
of coming thru but came
thru. Moot consequence . . .
Moody surmise . . . “If any-
one should ask what
this
was,” the what-sayer sang,
“say it was one for the
road the road rejected, some-
thing for Ed that Ed
might
have said, something for
Ted that Ted might’ve
said, something for Fred
that
Fred might’ve said, any-
thing should anyone ask . . .”
So went the old-time ending,
un-
ending. Something for
_____ that _____ might’ve
said echoed something
for _____ that _____
might
have said echoed some-
thing for _____ that _____
might’ve said, echoed
with-
out end or
amen
________________
Stories told wanting to
be where they pointed . . .
Flames they sat encircling
telling tales . . . The telling
come
to no end, they sat listen-
ing, flame-obsessed, ears
blown on by the wind . . .
What was it the singing
said,
they kept wondering.
Something about a crash,
they thought . . . That the
what-sayer sang smoked
out
certainty, they were un-
sure. Something about
rescue, they thought . . .
No
sooner thought than it
was time to get going.
Trip City loomed outside
the
woods’ theoretic rest,
bait they were bent on
reach-
ing that much
more
•
“A madman at the wheel,”
they heard him whisper,
the boy-god’s low-key
invective to no avail.
Rocked
from side to side, put
upon by chaabi, a madman
at the wheel beyond a
doubt . . .
Rocked from side to
side, a boat it might’ve
been, the birdlegged boy
its masthead had it been, a
slur
pulled at the side of his
mouth. This the ythmic
trek to Trip City: car
no metaphor, inveterate skid
no
allegory, the ditch they
ended up in literal, every-
thing resolute, real . . . So
they thought or so they
said
they thought. Thought
disputed it. Mr. P’s law
was that thought would
have
none of it. So much of
what they said they thought
thought refuted, Mr. P’s
ac-
complice, they complained . . .
No sooner that than the
skid they thought endless
ended. No sooner that
as
though complaint made it
so . . . An increased im-
munity came over them, what-
said cover, thought’s
qualm
and rebuff, cover’s what-
said complaint . . . Cover’s
whatsaid compliance it was,
what-
ever worked worked out ad
hoc . . . The tale’s torn cloth
what all there was of it,
the tale the tale’s rending,
not
enough. They awoke some
other morning on some
other side of morning, happy
to
awake but happy-sad to be
awake, unsure they were awake,
surprised . . . They were get-
ting to be chagrined again. No
one
could say what they made
of it, road gone from as it
was, awoke from what . . .
Sprawled in what was known
as
aftermath, light’s disguised
arrival, light’s abject ad-
dress . . . Light looking into
which
they could only squint, go
off the road where the
highway bent . . . That was
the
way the story
went
from Poet Lore
CATE MARVIN
* * *
An Etiquette for Eyes
I don’t know
if I wore glasses
when I met you
but I know
the last time
I saw you you
drank a drink
I bought you
with another
woman who
was far uglier
than I have
ever been. I have brown eyes, did I ever tell you?
Your eyes are too too blue, tell-all awful, and too
too pretty; you make all the girls swoon, and then
lament how harpies pound on your door, plucking
the very shingles off your roof, conducting through
their unanimous will a plot to kill your hive’s queen,
fix a hose from the car’s tailpipe to pump barnyard
dread straight into your ken, therefore you demand
I ought never wish to lie in your bed. I have black eyes,
did I tell you? But your eyes are damp blue, fingers in
winter blue, worrying about a prom date blue, never
washed a dish blue. Have I mentioned my eyes are
dead brown, dirt brown, stone brown, done with you
brown, screaming out in the streets I’m so drunk brown,
I’m just ignoring the noise rising up from streets asleep
brown? As in, as brown as dead leaves because my love’s
eyes were dead brown and when he shouted down at
that drunk on the street that New Year’s Eve from
my third floor window that drunk man called him
Whiskey Whore Boy. And his eyes were not wish-
wash blue, his eyes were mostly moss and trees,
not mojitos in a barroom, no, his eyes all gin-lit in
a hotel room on our last night were ice-cold, even
i
n his farewell he was bold, his eyes anyone might
have called plain, but they could at least cry. I am
sick to death of your blue eyes, fabric eyes, flower
eyes. I have brown eyes, plain and saying eyes behind
thick frames, glassy eyes handing themselves over
to you in buckets eyes, dig your hands into my black
soil eyes, my ugly eyes reaching into your eyes for
my twin eyes, look back at me eyes while your eyes
crawl the walls, cloud-blue, wandering off as milky
bosomed maids will look away from the eyes that
seek the crevices deep between their heavy breasts
that sway beneath the cows they bend to milk eyes.
Won’t you have another drink from my silty yonder
eyes? I may look
plain but I’ve got
roses in my blood,
can bloom right
out the soil of these
here brackish eyes,
wander a limb across
the chest of your
country, unlock
the footlocker of your
desire with the tip
of my vine eyes.
from Willow Springs
JAMAAL MAY
* * *
Masticated Light
In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center
my fingers trace the outline of folded money
and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there
is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend
but will spend on a calm voice that can explain
how I can be repaired. Instead, the words legally blind
and nothing can be done mean I’ll spend
the rest of the week closing an eye to the world,
watching how easily this becomes that.
The lampposts lining the walk home
are the thinnest spears I’ve ever seen, a row of trash cans
becomes discarded war drums, and teeth
in the mouth of an oncoming truck
want to tear through me. Some of me
always wants to be swallowed.
••
The last thing my doctor said before I lost
my insurance was to see a vision specialist
about the way light struggles and bends
through my deformed cornea.
Before the exam I never closed my right eye
and watched the world become a melting watercolor
