by Mary Lambert
fathers and uncles are not claiming your knife anymore,
are not your razor, no—
you put the sharpness back.
lay your hands flat and feel the surface of scarred skin.
i once touched a tree with charred limbs
the stump was still breathing
but the tops were just ashy remains
i wonder what it’s like to come back from that.
sometimes i feel forest fires
erupting from my wrists and the smoke signals sent out
are the most beautiful things i’ve ever seen
love your body the way your mother loved your baby feet
and brother, arm wrapping shoulders, remember,
this is important:
you are worth more than who you fuck,
you are worth more than a waistline,
you are worth more than beer bottles
displayed like drunken artifacts,
you are no less valuable as a size 16 than a size 4,
you are no less valuable as a 32A than a 36C
you are worth more than any naked body
could proclaim in the shadows,
you are worth more than your father’s
mistake or a man’s whim, your sexiness is defined by
concentric circles within your wood—wisdom & truth
you are a goddamn tree stump
with leaves sprouting out:
reborn.
My Weakness Is a Crooked Wheel
for C.R.U.
when i was little i used to cup my hands
over the flashlight
and watch my blood glow pink
i imagined the light piercing through my fingers
like an alien scanning me to another planet
the nice thing about disappearing
is you only think of the light
///
idaho is a goddamn piece of fuckity fucked shit.
you are living here, inside of the epicenter of shit
you are still pretty, still kind, wearing a vest
because you know i like to fuck women in vests.
so here you are in the chasm of an armpit
telling me that you hate it here too.
this is the steel door of reality,
watching you fail to grow up or make sense of your life,
too scared of your own greatness.
you left your job at party city in washington and then
got a job at a party city in boise, and i can’t laugh
at you struggling to age in a comatose town—
in the seconds it takes to say your name
i am simultaneously asking for forgiveness.
I’m sorry I left you back there.
you deserve the home of my palms,
i can save you from this awful city,
love, i am all that i have ever been:
only for you, waiting for the light to
shock me out of my own body, you,
gravity on a lovely pair of legs. this
longing, this wrought history,
this quiet ending, a stupid town,
the small porch, we kissed through tears, my guilty
star, my stuttering tongue, my tenacity,
my old heart, the chemistry of the
language of glances, the way your unhappiness
is a small flood i cannot
sandbag into a song, the way that walking
toward you felt like rescue, the
way you want out of your own hurricane,
the way i am the boat, the way
i cannot swim either, the way we are both
folded into the riptide of this
odyssey
o, the weeping violins,
o, the anguish of memory
o, the beauty of the brush of hands—
I cannot leave you again.
i made myself a rose of clay around you, and now
i cannot fit the mold to a different cast,
love
my memory is a crooked wheel that perpetuates sadness
my memory is in love with you
i am trying to remember that these are just letters,
they do not talk.
a palm is a part of the hand.
i watch it light up.
i watch it disappear.
The Art of Shame
My mother found a rabid dog
And wanted to hug it
Wanted to give it all her glorious honeylove
Wanted to bathe her children in a two-parent household
But the dog didn’t want kids.
The dog would scream it in the hallway at 4 a.m.
Oh the sheer art of it
how the monster could panic into my body;
sometimes I still hear it in my darkening sleep
the way some paintings haunt you
I am a museum,
I must be a museum
When I was seven
The dog told me I was going to be a slut
No one came over to our house to play
The dog made me write “I Will Flush the Bathroom Toilet”
seventy-five times. I would have remembered
to flush the toilet
but I started blacking out around then
forgetting basic things, praying that Oprah would save us all
I took snapshots with my memory camera, hoping
there would be justice for this kind of violence
that is more fear than breaking
no one knows what to name it
The teachers at the daycare offered apology eyes
and extra sequins for the art project the day
after the dog screamed me around each room
because I forgot where my other shoe was
When you are a child, and your mind is a fire alarm,
you lose the ability to remember simple things
I haven’t lost a personal item in months.
Do not laugh when I say this is a victory.
Shame is an ocean I swim across
Sometimes I call it drowning
Sometimes I call it Moses
Sometimes I say Good Morning
and sway to its murky dirge
Sometimes I win and cut off its crest with a pink machete
Sometimes I want to fuck it and marry it
and kill it all at the same time
Sometimes I spend my whole day
apologizing on shame’s behalf
Sometimes I think it must be an art form to feel this bad
Sometimes I outrun all of its psycho history
Other times I repeat the language from my child mouth
while beating my head against the wall
All the time, I am forgiven.
Jesus Loves My Crop Top
“These women need to stop glorifying unhealthy obesity”
—some dickhead
I like my belly button.
2 My belly button does not interrupt your life.
3 Why do you hate so much my belly button?
4 Is it maybe because someone was mean to your belly button?
5 I’m sorry someone was mean to your perfect belly.
6 You cannot love what you hope your body turns into without loving it for what it is, right now.
7 When I was in high school, I obsessively fantasized about taking a knife to my stomach like a bagel slicer.
8 One night I found a website that just had photos of girls with stomach rolls and back rolls and they were smiling and I cried because I was uncomfortable and envious of their joy.
9 I used to drink a fifth of tequila and smoke a pack of cigarettes every night.
10 No one criticized my health then.
11 My body is what it is what it is.
12 The mirror is what it is what it is.
13 Celebrating your body
is a revolutionary act.
14 I feel my own self breathe. I feel my organs when I breathe and when I shower, I feel my skin on my skin. I know that it is mine. I listen to what my body asks for. I put on a shirt that shows my stomach. I wing my eyeliner up and I ride my bike into the sunset and I will pick wildflowers with my love and later I will eat brussels sprouts and maybe a martini with lots of olives in it and I will do all this because it makes me feel good and because I am worthy of love and cute clothes and happiness.
15 Feeling worthy has taken a very long time.
16 I am my own holy revolution, welcome to the church of my thunder thighs, I am awake and alive, I’ve come to wear all of the crop tops that the glittering world has to offer, I’ve come to dance the shame out of my childhood, I’ve come to win back my joy. You may not snatch it from me like a purse.
17 I win whether I have a mouth full of pretzels or a mouth full of kale; you have not been granted the privilege to know how I consume my world and what makes me most delight in my skin. I will glorify the shit out of my body.
I Was Thinking About You Today
When I loved my first real thing, I fell into her like Winter.
I call this love my “first love.” With sugared nostalgia,
I murmur “first love” to my college friends,
to my bandmates, to the neighbor’s dog.
It is no secret that I had emptied the truth of myself
to many before her. I suffocated doubt
with two hands, collapsed the neon parachute
of my ambition, fit all my lovers inside.
No questions.
I heard they liked women who drank whiskey
so I became the best at it.
I heard they liked women who thought themselves ugly
so I slammed my fists into my stomach
in the dim of a bathroom light.
I begged God for erasure, for newness, for thin,
for a body that shuts up.
I dyed my hair and then I dyed it back.
I shaved my armpits, and then I
grew them out. I wrote miles of music,
I found God all before my “first love.”
I am older now and some of these things
have become me. I have had twenty incarnations.
I have taken some of the things I liked—
meditation or asking cashiers about their day—and
I have discarded others.
Just because I evolved, doesn’t mean I am spineless.
Just because I am malleable, doesn’t mean I am undeserving.
I will not apologize for being the shape of light & when.
What a blessing it was to be hugged gently
in a church. What a blessing it was to hear Rosie
Thomas in Rachael’s truck. What a blessing to witness
true love, a wedding in a hospital courtyard,
what a blessing to be loved by the boy
who understood I could not kiss him the way
he wanted to be kissed, and let me go.
Love is a mirror, a map, a lesson in unfixed gifts.
TWO
the good things are still flawed
and
i think i got intestinal problems because farting is really hard to do when
you’re in bed with a hot person
Valentine’s Day
“relationships are just little cults” —Sam Sax
every day i want to write a new poem to you
because my heart is SO LOUD. so loud, all the time.
my heart is a pack of puppies
wagging their tails at each other
my heart is a camp counselor—first day
my heart is a boat, full of smiling people
in bright shirts dancing the cha-cha
my heart is beach day. no shoes.
i mean to say you make me feel like
the sun isn’t trying to kill me
you make me feel like someone just paid for my groceries
the flowers you bought me two weeks ago
are still yellow and bursting
I forgot to tell you
my heart is still yellow and bursting too
sometimes after we kiss I want to crawl
underneath the floorboards
and giggle to myself
i think: “this person keeps kissing me on purpose!”
i also think: love is a delicious weapon
i keep hurtling myself into the sky & sand of it
when you are gone, i sleep with your
hologram in a pillow dream
and i say goodnight from the aquarium of heavy eyes
smiling lazily ear to ear
I can’t believe I’m the one you tell your good news to.
Saturday Night Extravagance
It is Saturday night in Belltown.
The bars are thumping of techno and bad decisions,
the sidewalks alight like schools of fish,
bodies painted in short silver skirts, glitter and
axe body spray. The straight people are out
tonight and they are very shiny! When we enter
our apartment, the sidewalk sounds like a
nightclub submarine, an overhead speaker of
warbled bros hitting on woo girls and something
about Stephanie needing her bitches and hating her shoes.
You and I have spent the day at IKEA,
because while eating dinner on the
floor is very “primitive-chic” of us,
it is uncomfortable for my modern
ass. After assembling our dining room table
and chairs for three hours we are
quietly sitting in bed. I am picking out more
furniture I want to buy online, saying
each product name out loud and giggling, “IVANSKA
BLENKAR! WHAT DOES IT MEAN!” You are
beside me, sorting through the mail in an oversized
T-shirt, now razor-focused on clipping
coupons from the Valpak.
Simultaneously we look at each other, as if we’d had
the same sad thought. This is our Saturday Night.
This is our extravagance. I am twenty-three!
The question pooled around in my head, making
circles within itself: “Is it okay that this makes
me happy? Is it okay that I am content in this normalcy?”
You smile at me in a white shirt with hot sauce stains.
Yes. With all that my foolish, domestic heart
possesses, I love this. Our little apartment
with all of its stories of brick and doors to nowhere, I
love that you hold my hand before you fall asleep,
that you love to cook me every meal, I love
that my heart is a window I didn’t know was open,
I love your frugality, that you clip coupons to get
The Best Deal, and you’re remorseful when you don’t,
I love that our fights are fair and infrequent,
I love the way my mouth says your name, like music
crawling out of a cave, I love that when we kiss it is
the champion of all other things that lips can do
or have done since: the bells that ring and the snow that
sits and the city of my
talking hushed from the
simple sealing of my quiet mouth resting on yours.
This Saturday night, every Saturday night,
far surpasses any distilled grain, any
pair of fishnet stockings, any diamond parade.
Yes, I want the promise of the cathedral
of your mouth for the rest of my life.
Yes, I want to be the temple of your unraveling.
Yes, I want to be your chosen partner in the
IKEA shit-show supermall
where couples go to die.
What an extravagant love.
> Portrait of the Lover as a Dalí Painting
On the phone I hear myself say
“I’ll take what I can get from you”
and I feel stupid, like I’m one of those
romantics forever pasted in a
Salvador Dalí painting, yes, there, that’s me
My body, a boat’s sails, the boat’s sails are butterflies
That’s me again, just a casual wild
elephant with a tuba for a head
Yes, I love you, also my love is kind of like a clock
melting in a desert
I mean to say that when I met you,
time felt like it bent itself
I forgot what proportion was
because I felt infinite and forever changed.
As you turn to leave me for the last time
in front of my gate,
I purse my lips to form the word “bitch”
instead all I can think to say is Please.
Please don’t go.
Please let your fingers itch
for the phone a little longer
and don’t stop yourself this time,
please don’t let your legs slide
under mine when you’re sleeping
unless you mean it, please mean it
please show me the woman you are
when you are honest, when you are weak
please hold my body like touching
the dog-eared pages of a book
like I am precious and well-loved. Wait!
I can be better!
I can be skinnier! I can be funnier!
I can care less, wait!
let me try undressing without my back turned,
I can papercrane myself into a mold,
any mold, what would you like me to be
please be careful with my folding wings
please have more to say than sarcasm, say rose
floating in the desert, tell the truth,
say you’re scared of me
I Am Asking You to Be a Crowbar
When your hands rested upon me,
it was like someone brushing cobwebs
from a family heirloom. My body, a silver
candlestick. A painting of geese on the lake.
Your eyes glowing like a welder’s torch.
