Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across

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.