Maybe a billion spiral galaxies.
There’s the famously beautiful famous poet you once saw through an open bathroom door
projectile vomiting into a sink before the door swung closed again.
You’re afraid to open that boxed case of wine, certain a mouse got trapped inside
but it’s only Styrofoam rubbing against more Styrofoam
like the sex you used to have with people you didn’t know.
Some people smile when they hate you.
Wracking sobs are usually a good indication
they’ve been gutted by fire.
Liars are supposed to be betrayed by the direction their eyes dart
but good liars know this, so the truth is anyone’s guess.
Eye contact may be indicative of rudeness
or the early delusional phase of love.
The early delusional phase of love.
The early delusional phase of love.
When a woman at a party says, I like your necklace
a multiverse of possible interpretations yawns open like a meat-eating plant.
Sometimes it’s better to stay in the lobby, where the bar is,
so as not to discover the creeping mold in a room with a parking lot view.
Then again, if that stranger absorbing vodka a few stools down
would only glance your way, and give you a sign,
you just might go there.
EX
When I think about him now I think about the money he stole from me
I remember the mice in his couch & the dying fish in his aquarium
& also feeling like a gilded royal barge was ceremoniously moving through my blood
while LED snow fell theatrically in the folds of my brain
I remember thinking nothing could ruin our love which is what everyone thinks at first
but it turns out everyone is wrong
Some things are destined to be ruined
Cheap dresses student housing self-esteem romantic projections
Ice sculptures of dead jazz musicians turning to mush in the rain
Some of the fish did themselves in, leaping out past the filter & over the edge
Others just flipped over & floated up & started looking kind of shredded
Mostly I think about how little I think about him now
like he was just some decorative saltwater display in an overpriced lobby
or a hangover I sweated out in a single low-impact cardio-weight routine
when once he was the creature who swallowed me whole
in a huge religiously significant way
THE TRUTH
You could spend all day bored and unhinged,
counting to a thousand, closing the windows,
terrified by leaves. Look at your hand, it won’t
open to reveal what’s coming. Nothing
changes but everything has already and that’s what
you hate, prodded forward with a stick, stumbling
after some elusive, half-imagined creature.
Studying its entrails. Bending over its scat.
When all the time it’s stalking you. When
all the time it’s got you by the throat.
Below your window, some little kids are walking in
single file, roped together, through the intersection.
Their teacher—or minder—yanks them along.
You watch them without any feeling. Or with one that’s wrong.
ARCHIVE OF RECENT UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTIONS
The this haircut makes me feel ugly feeling
The however much I drink I can’t pretend it’s love feeling
The strangled by the foul and ugly mists of vapours in iambic pentameter feeling
The everything I write is shit feeling
The I’m sorry I gave you those blow jobs and did you not understand the meaning of “reciprocal” feeling
The it’s not my birthday anymore I’m just older feeling
The looking at X-rays of my teeth feeling
The something died in your eyes and I can smell it feeling
The literary recognition might be just another shiny object feeling
The darkling I listen and right now I think it would be kind of cool to die feeling
The Keats is dead feeling
The Leonard Cohen is dead feeling
The ______ and __________ and my __________ are also quite dead feeling
The I am Jean Rhys getting blotto in a dismal room in Paris with black specks on the wall feeling
The maybe I’m just getting blotto feeling
The trees are no longer my friends feeling
The my friends are no longer my friends feeling
The once I was a nineteenth-century Russian novel but now I’m a frozen chicken entrée feeling
The I can always return this feeling in the prepaid envelope provided feeling
The I am the prepaid envelope feeling
THE MIRACULOUS
The band starts the song over,
the rhythms still wrong, sounds that will never
alchemize to music. My brother’s
new liver is failing. There’s someone’s loud lover
swearing to Christ and the bar to get sober
but the moon is being smothered
by the trees and there is no ladder
far enough. I go down to the mouth of the river
ugly with waste. Yellow foam and trash. A tanker
crawling the horizon. What does it bear—
oil or chemicals. I was taught a man could walk on water.
That if I listened, and unhinged my heart, I’d hear
a presence stirring the air. And I do: God, the murderer
making things perfectly clear.
ARRIVAL IN ITALY
The train winds north, sounding like an accordion.
Here’s where the poet’s heart refused to burn.
Here the god killed a white bull who became the moon.
Robed martyrs are floating into everywhere heaven;
sheep are shitting gracefully in the sunflowers,
and Piero della Francesca has solved the equation
for Beauty. She opens her tent, inviting you in.
You’re a long way from gleaning dinner
from a freezer bag. Have some drizzled figs.
Cocktails will be served in an hour
in the castle hall, under the skull chandelier.
STILL TIME
in Severn’s letters Keats is still alive, though coughing blood,
one day he’s better, then things look very bad and if you stop
reading he’s still lying there, calmer again and clearer
before they take his body out and burn the wallpaper.
In books you fall in love with, you always slow down
a few pages before the end but then there you are
with only the back-cover blurbs that say
This story will make you cry and maybe an outdated photo.
When you photograph the famous fountain the water
stops moving, but water never really stops moving.
Your plush lion swirled away, your parents floated off, okay but also
that wine stain on your shirt only looked permanent.
After the horrifying bats in the cenote, little gold-flecked fish appeared.
You finally stopped sobbing in the bathroom at weddings.
You can’t go back to 1821 and invent streptomycin,
or stop the poet’s kindly doctor from bleeding his patient,
but you can climb the stairs to that room in Rome
and see the flowers on the ceiling, the same ones Keats held
for weeks in his fevered gaze. That’s as close as you can get.
Go home. Your miserable bitch of a neighbor is gone,
carried out and never to return.
HAPPINESS REPORT
I was happy when I was drunk one night in 1985
&nb
sp; squatting in the already pee-wet grass next to Jill Somebody
outside the graduate student poetry reading
And in spite of going off my medication
I was happy today under the hot shower, and again licking cappuccino foam
in front of the air conditioner before I went outside
and sweated through my new shirt like a lying politician in a TV interview
I felt happy while buying the shirt though it wasn’t a pure happiness
stained as it was with a price tag
It’s hard to find a happy artist because art
requires suffering, goes one theory nearly everyone buys into
getting free subscriptions for their friends
On the wall of the museum, patrons could finish the sentence
Before I die I want to ______________________ .
and someone wrote be happy
and another eat KFC
but a third wrote cancel my life and I bet that person was an artist
or at least more sensitive than the one with a bucket list
that included tortured chickens
I hate the term bucket list
which sounds to me like molded plastic instead of stainless steel and pocked
with little holes your feelings fall through
Some artist said it’s better to fall from a great height
but I don’t know about that
Maybe great happiness is an abyss
Maybe looking down all you see is a big lake and your own face floating there
looking back self-righteously
so it’s probably best to crawl under a sympathetic rock
I don’t know why the Declaration of Independence talks about the pursuit of happiness
when Jefferson originally wrote property
Life, liberty, and property
Maybe I would be happier if I owned some
Some of my ancestors owned slaves
and some were impoverished Italian peasants
Maybe all freedoms are stained
Before I die I’d like to see some changes made
but it’s probably too late
just as it’s too late to drink myself to death at a young age
That day at the museum I thought I want to climb to a great height and then fall through myself
the way a man falls through me when I’m happy and in love
Now I only want espresso and a little foam
To stay in bed all day, Christmas lights blinking against the August heat
Pigeons landing outside on the air conditioner walking around making soft noises
and then fucking off
Someone screaming in the street who isn’t me
I CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU JOHN KEATS
Even though you’ve been dead for almost two hundred years, I feel like maybe
I could fall through a wormhole or get knocked on the head or go through some stones in Scotland
& somehow make my way to you, wearing a complicated bonnet of feathers & ribbons
with medicines sewn into my pantaloons under my white muslin dress
You’d fall for me & forget about Fanny Brawne & the big difference in our ages, because
well, because that’s what I want to happen, John Keats, not the part where your brother
grows pale & mist-rising-from-a-shorn-field-under-a-sky-of-whirling-swallows-thin & yes I’m sorry dies
but the part where we lie on the grass & drink French wine & you lay your head on my breast
I can feel your eyelashes against my skin even here in the twenty-first century
like the legs of a fly as it lands on a musk-rose while a tiny chorus hymns around your head
That’s how much I fancy you, John Keats, like you’re an Amazon fulfillment center far out in space
& I have a Groupon code for an intergalactic shopping spree
like you’re the star of a miniseries about a Romantic poet unsullied by mycobacteria
& I’m a woman from the future changing literary history forever
writing your name in my diary while you steer our little boat out of Lethe & into the lilies
trailing my hand in the canonical water
Please take me away in my tight corset & wedding dress of sand
I don’t want to stay in this world watching Truth bound & gagged on the railroad tracks
feeling like a fish trapped in a European pedicure spa while the tiny, whining violins of privilege play
& Beauty slowly backs away
ART OF POETRY
Between coffee & fentanyl, between Love Me & Go Fuck Yourself
there’s so much life to be gotten through
So many mirrors to challenge in your ragged robe & collagen essence Korean facial mask
Eventually you have to go out & walk around in the world like you belong there
You have to smile at work, & buy things
when you just want to crawl into a closet & live in an old cowboy boot & write witty unhinged verses
which sometime before the death of the sun
an advanced civilization will discover, etched into the ancient leather, preserved in a rock formation
& display in a luminous floating interdimensional sphere
Q: Ever notice how many writers write about writing?
A few centuries ago Horace wrote approvingly of a poet
He intends not smoke from flame, but light from smoke
which I think is good advice if you can follow it
but he also said that to paint a dolphin in the trees or a boar in the waves
is an unnatural distortion & I thought about how much I’d like to see that
& how unrealistic it is to expect things to stay in their places
Why not someone’s grieving widow consoled by a nebula
A suicide vomiting flowers
In the twentieth century Pablo Neruda wrote his own “Arte Poética”
lamenting all the things that called to him without being answered
& reading it, I thought about that time in a tiny fishing village in Mexico,
a third mangorita waterfalling through my liver
the waitress coming toward me in a white T-shirt with black lettering that said
I HAVE NO TITS
which was clearly a lie although her stomach was kind of big which had the effect
of making them appear to recede
like the single taillights of two antique Model A Fords sputtering together toward obsolescence
Q: Does she even know what it says?
I HAVE NO TITS
What is the message, is this perhaps a code, could it be from the future
Is it a “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” situation like in that painting of a pipe
or a new far-reaching campaign from the U.S. Ministry of Enlightenment & Propaganda
The thieving president wearing a golfing shirt that says I HAVE NO CLOTHES
Q: Who killed poetry again & who cares?
Between false flags & homeless laundry lines
Between long-lasting eyebrow gel & little-known destinations profiled in the New York Times
I don’t know where anyone is going or where there is to get to
The days & nights keep drunkenly arriving, the guests are all dying
& I’m starting to feel pretty sick
BABIES AT PARADISE POND
from a lithograph by Sandy Skoglund
I don’t know what to make of these scary babies
Pale babies naked on their backs flailing in the grass
crawling & staggering baldly around
like abortions swarming in a dream, full-grown & seed-eyed
like newly molting cockroach nymphs flushed out of hiding
like a medieval brochure for Baby Limbo
on the Banks of Pristine Paradise Pond:
As Close as They Can Get to the Beatific Vision!
They look like dolls dropped from outer space
&
nbsp; by a giant petulant girl creature with twenty-six arms
throwing up her twenty-six hands all at once, then running out of the galaxy
& slamming it behind her
A picture of so many babies should be happy & maybe it is for some people
if they don’t look too closely
which is the only way I know how to truly be happy
Things look so much better in the subaqueous glow of the bar on a third glass of wine
I love the world most when I can barely make out what’s going on out there
The little dog down at the edge of the pond might be licking that baby
or eating it
Even the grownups are scary, gazing out over the water
toward the dispirited trees & the invisible source of the light
Creepy pre-birth or post-death light
Spaceship tractor beam of the many-armed mother
Now We're Getting Somewhere Page 3
