by Will Walton
filled with tulips. It’s dreadful.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. I wrote that, you know? I lived it too.
And what’s in here that we want to keep in? I asked.
The soul of a poet, she answered. We have to protect it.
By now, we had finished sealing the door.
She took the duct tape from my hand, and then came a knock on the door—it was dreadful.
Sylvia hit the deck.
It’s the tulips! she whispered. Get down!
8.
Oooh-ooh-ohhhh, went the tulips outside. Ah-
ahhh-ah-ahhhh.
Ha, one tulip went.
You know it sounds just a little bit like we’re having sex.
The other tulip, a male, trilled with laughter.
9.
I know those voices, Sylvia said. I’d know them anywhere.
Should we let them in?
Oh heavens no.
But then we heard a sharp striking against the garden room door.
And we knew the tulips had a tool. Something that would easily overpower the duct tape.
They were suddenly inside then, and they were walking toward us.
The tool was an oar. A white lady with brown hair. A white man with a bushy gray beard.
Sylvia, we thought you were going to help us, the woman said.
Anne Sexton.
The man, I believe he was John Berryman, huffed.
10.
I brought the oar, Anne Sexton said, for crying out loud! This was your idea, Sylvia. Your idea, and you abandoned it!
And us, John Berryman said. Lest we forget, you abandoned us too!
John Berryman seemed very hurt by this.
The thing is, I’m tired of rowing, he said.
I’m just fucking tired of rowing.
You and me both, babe, Anne said. She dropped the oar and stepped over to him.
The only one missing was Emily.
Where’s Emily? I asked.
Oh where do you think Emily is? Anne spat. God!
I’m keeping an eye on this poet soul for now, Sylvia said. So that my own soul has a purpose.
We had purpose enough, John roared, before!
Oh hush, Johnny boy, hush.
Anne read, Once upon a time there was a poet soul and it was very loved, and it had purpose, and it was called by the name of John Berryman.
John Berryman was loved dearly by all who knew him, and he continues to be read and taught to this day.
John Berryman fell promptly asleep on her shoulder.
Anne said, Can we use this? She pointed to the bed—So, what all have you written, poet?
Well, if you go in my backpack—I gestured. Sylvia was on it. Sylvia riffled through and found a copy of “I’ll Never Eat Fish-Eggs …”
She showed it to Anne, while I opened my notebook to my works in progress.
Anne read.
She looked stern and was completely silent.
When she looked up, she said it was brave to be ruthless toward the mother.
It is brave to be ruthless toward the mother.
But that’s all, really, I can say, really, for these poems, as I don’t very much care for them otherwise, if I’m honest.
She passed the poems to Sylvia. I felt exposed and like I might start crying.
John Berryman was snoring.
11.
You’re right, Sylvia said, after having read a few herself.
He is not a great poet. But then again, neither was I, really, when I was his age. Some even say neither was I when I—
Oh hush, Anne said. You were a great poet, Sylvia.
Right then, her kindness made Sylvia cry.
I held out my sleeve.
So how do I become a great poet then? I asked. Do I just practice more?
12.
Have a lot of sex! John Berryman piped up. He was awake now, but maybe still half inside a dream.
I laughed, sort of embarrassed.
He’s not wrong, Anne said. And when I looked at Sylvia, she was nodding.
Have you ever had sex before, poet?
No, but I’m sort of planning to, soon.
With whom?
My best friend.
And what is her name?
His name, I said, is Luca.
13.
Fascinating! Anne lit a cigarette.
I find sex between men fascinating. Cigarette, John?
I won’t say no.
Have you ever thought about homo-sexuality in relation to evolution?
I shook my head.
Good, Anne said. Don’t think about it. No, the key is to live your life free of the burden of evolution.
Desire, passion. That’s what’s real. That’s what feeds your poetry.
And if you can make yourself into the smallest version of yourself, John added, write that. That will feed your poetry too.
His eyes were closing. He was about to doze again.
14.
Now may we use your bed tonight, poet?
Anne flicked some ash into a ceramic pot from which some dead nettle grew.
We are very tired from all the constant rowing.
Constant rowing, I repeated.
And John’s advice: If you can make yourself into the smallest version of yourself, write that.
We fell asleep. I dreamt then about my teeth rotting. They were like chalk and my saliva kept dissolving them.
I tried to go to school. Tried to convince myself it looked normal.
When I woke up, all the poets were sleeping facedown, hands down their fronts.
I didn’t know what they were dreaming: I wanted to be dreaming it.
Sunday, Babs came in with her Bible and cups of tea. “You know, you are a Job.” She opened the Bible. “Because you are facing so much right now, and I’m sure you are just like, ‘God, what is going on?’ ”
The tea had Saint John’s Wort in it. I sipped. “I don’t honestly feel like that,” I said. I actually felt sort of okay, in the moment. I had written a poem that I liked, that interested me. It was under my bedsheet like a heating pad. Babs kissed me on the forehead.
“Oh, there go the Abbaticchios.” She nodded at the window. Luca and Gia piling into Gia’s yellow sedan. “That’s two prayers getting said for your mom today. Well, three, including mine.”
I wanted the Abbaticchios to see me. Maybe what I wanted was a prayer, or maybe what I wanted was to be missed. Maybe after noticing the copper plant first, and then me sitting up behind it, the Abbaticchios waving, “Oh look, there’s Avery! There’s Avery!”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997); notable works Howl and Other Poems, Kaddish and Other Poems, Mind Breaths, White Shroud; famous poems “Howl,” “America,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “Kaddish”; death, after failing to be treated for congestive heart failure, Ginsberg spent days calling up loved ones to say goodbye,
& when he died, he was surrounded by them.
I read Kaddish and Other Poems from start to finish, and began it again immediately. I couldn’t get over how this was poetry, how it was messy and perfect and how that made it everything. It made me antsy, like caffeine; and the lines from “Kaddish,” how when Ginsberg learns his mother has died, he brings her words into the poem, her words that she actually spoke: “The key is in the sunlight at the window in the bars the key.” I repeated those words again and again like a prayer. A fourth person, potentially. Praying that day for Mom.
Another poem, called “Poem Rocket,” was shaped like a penis. I showed it to Luca, who went “Dick in the aiiiiir!” from this song we love, called “Dick in the Air,” and I think that’s how we both got horny. Studying Bio that day, when we struck our bargain, it was raining. Luca and I’d been back and forth between our houses, cobbling together notes and cards with definitions: receptor—organ or cell that responds to external stimuli, sends signal to sensory nerve.
My chest was damp from the rainwater. One day when we were in fifth grad
e, Luca had suggested our moms were alcoholics. We were learning about alcoholics in school. How if you abuse alcohol while pregnant, it could mess up the baby. Symptoms: drooping eyelids, big nostrils, thin lips, deformity. “Do we have any of these?” We checked. We took our shirts off. My dent in my chest, my pectus excavatum, was there, is there still. I was born with it. “Does this count?”
Luca balled his fist and pressed inside the dip in the breastbone: while studying, he pressed the receptor card in, definition down. When he pulled it away, some of the words stuck. “Now if you forget, just check inside your shirt.” He climbed into bed with me. He was looking for the definition. “I know it’s still stuck to you, cheater.”
Now, we tipped the fern off the bedside table. It didn’t smash, but it spilled soil all across
the blue tarp. We got nervous. We stopped. Later, Babs asked, “What happened here?”
15.
(sigh) today I blew
on a gardenia leaf petal
until it turned brown
16.
That summer, to walk down our street was to be overcome by a sense of hot, sticky dread: Babs in her garden, Pal in his shop, radio blasting, the boy with the bird-in chest beneath the tree, buried, all too serene.
(How do I tell this story?)
“And if you can make yourself into the smallest version of yourself, write that.”
—J.B.
17.
Where there was first a boy with a bird-in chest, there is now but a bird-out chest (a nest) without a boy. And his mother is out looking for him.
Meanwhile, the nest incubates.
(Try an egg.)
18.
“So, what we have now,” said the father to the mother (who’d since vanished), “is a bird-in chest without the body—without the boy, without the bird—so just the nest. And what are these?”
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
“Those are eggs,” answered the mother (who’d long since gone), answered on a telephone; they were states apart. The agreement: never to have to see the other’s face again. Voices were permitted, and certain decisions.
“And what is to be done about the eggs?”
“The grandparents.” The mother, long since disappeared, takes a sip from her solitary bottle. They no longer share, she and the father, the bottles.
“My parents are dead,” the father said.
That’s how it boiled down to the mother. It always seemed to boil down to the mother.
Boiling bottles (sterilizes), long since past, motionless, still frame, taken from the vantage point of the unhatched (the sole survivor, yes; the father ate the others) at its high-chair-level height.
The egg.
It was bad, I knew. I called it “The Egg.” I was outside under the oak tree. Babs was in a flowerbed. “Oh, that’s nice! It’s nice to see you outside. It’s a good tree; nice to sit under.” Across the yard Pal’s shop with the window open: B08.1-The Trolling Motor blared “—always!” and “—always!” again. I think it was getting Babs’s goat. I think she was craving a little quiet.
“I don’t know how you get a thing done with that damn radio playing.” It was the first time I ever heard her curse. She went inside for a little while. I cracked open Sorry, Tree; I had crutched out to the tree and sat under it to read. I couldn’t read a book called Sorry, Tree inside. Right in the first pages, a queer
love scene, and why had I spent all this time reading straight poets? Ms. Poss should have told me right away: Skip to Ginsberg, skip to Myles! I wrote down:
19.
Poetry is queer really, just by nature.
I needed to think about that. I was right: I knew. Poetry’s queer, but I wanted to figure out how, why, I knew it to be so. How, in what way, poetry and queerness are productive.
I wanted it to be more than a feeling. (But why, when feeling had always been good enough for me?)
I jotted down a sentence: “I’m living inside today’s bright edges.” It just came to me, so I let it sit a while. I didn’t quite know why I wrote it or what I meant by it. It wasn’t a poem, really. But I liked it. I thought it might be about sadness, about hiding from it. On the line beneath it, I wrote, “But I’m happy (and it may not be, whatever, but I’m) just waiting for her to come home.” So, today’s prayer for Mom, it turned out. I read it in a whisper. I felt good. I hoped she was on a beach, but not getting her shoulder touched in a way that was condescending, and that maybe if she was having a bad time, at least she was looking forward to coming home.
Babs stepped to the edge of the porch. “Pal!” (“Pow!”) He didn’t hear: He was in his shop: the radio was too loud: “—always!”
“Always! Always!” Babs mimicking the station, “Always!” stomping. She carried an empty ceramic planter in one arm. It shattered against her hip bone while she knocked. “Pal! You have got to turn it down! I just got a call from Mrs. Shivens next door. It’s too loud!”
When he opened the door, she asked, “Are you deaf or something?” She almost whispered it. He looked past her to me, under my tree. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“So embarrassing,” she said.
20.
She stooped to pick up the clay shards from
the doorway. But there turned out to be too
many of them. So she left them there.
I crutched across the yard to Pal’s shop: counted buds on the scuppernong vine: eleven or so, a small crop. “Pal?” On the inside, I heard a bottle clink. That’s how I knew he was drinking. As he put it away, inside his mini freezer-fridge—“Partner! Come on in!”
That was a great poem.
(Ms. Poss pats me on the back)
Better than what you normally get at a funeral.
(I laugh)
(otherwise, I’m crying)
(we aren’t doing graveside)
He had good taste, didn’t he?
I can see where you get it from.
(I keep crying)
(I’m glad that Mom isn’t standing next to me)
(to see this)
(all hitting me)
I wasn’t really using the chair anymore, but Pal wanted to have it just in case. We didn’t fold it up or even put on its brakes. It was just rolling around back there. Its final buffer, flimsy tailgate, and we had to return it to Luca’s church. Every time there was a loud kerplunk, I gritted my teeth.
“You okay, partner?”
“Yes,” I said.
We were on our way to the Chinese restaurant: Babs, me, and Pal. Friday: seafood night: all-you-can-eat crab legs in the buffet line.
“I am going to have crab legs. What are you going to have, Babs?” Babs hadn’t said a word since she broke the ceramic planter. The shards were still there, a little mound of trouble outside Pal’s shop. She didn’t reply to the question.
“What about you, partner?” I sort of wanted him to stop talking, stop trying to make us talk back. It is hard for me to admit right now that I was angry at him. So much time he spent in his own little world, on vacation from reality. Sometimes I swear he
couldn’t see us. The reason he bought Babs chocolate on Valentine’s Day. The reason he thought I was clueless about his drinking.
The radio being off made the chair’s every budge seem loud.
“Chair or crutches, what do you think?”
“I think crutches,” I said. Babs gripped my elbow while I steadied. “Well, I hope nobody steals the chair while we’re inside,” she said, like she was aggravated we’d brought it.
Inside was crowded, and the air was dense, sticky with salt. It made me sweat a little. By the time we got to the table, Babs had ordered our drinks. She ordered waters. Pal asked th
e waiter if he could have sweet tea with Splenda packets, and the waiter said of course. His name was Christian. He was cute. The whole place smelled like seawater. I felt seasick: I identified that as the feeling. “What can I get you from the buffet, partner?” Pal stood. I didn’t want him to call me “partner” in front of Christian. Christian was cool. Had an earring and glitter eye makeup. I wanted to leave my place at the table, leave my number behind, if you’re single, or open, and if you’re bored … I told Pal just some rice would be nice. He said, “A-OK!” He understood I wasn’t feeling quite myself. He wouldn’t try to convince me. He came back a moment later with white rice in a shallow bowl. I had two forkfuls and felt full. Babs returned with her plate from the buffet: a few small crab legs. “The dregs,” she said. “We might have to go stand in shifts.” Pal polished off an egg roll. “I can go next.” He took a sip from his tea. He hadn’t mixed the Splenda in yet. He made a face. It made me laugh. Christian looked over at us and smiled. Babs sucked the broken edge of one thin leg. “I’m just not getting anything.” Even when Pal took his shift in line, he only brought back small pieces. “People are poaching the line. It ain’t fair.” Babs got up, brought back a plate of rice and chicken. She had wontons. She put one on my plate. “Vegetarian.” I took a bite. “I think it has crab in it,” I said. I set it back on her plate. She rolled her eyes, and when we were leaving, by the register, she put ten dollars in this little clear box with a coin slot and modest pink label:
GAP: Grandparents-As-Parents: A Local Org.
Avery,
(I look up)
(Babs)
(don’t know what to say)
Well, can I hug you at least?
