Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals

by Patricia Lockwood

Most letters were love letters until they were not.

  That was when the mail began to change—

  and “enveloped,” the only word that was believed

  to contain its meaning, was opened and found to be

  empty. Back then it meant something when my letter

  never arrived, and now after ten years reaches you,

  who are dead or in love with a lookalike, or so full

  of hate for me that you can barely see to read this.

  If you’re not reading this then it never got there,

  and both of us are married to someone else.

  The body of the mail still waits for your knife.

  Why haven’t you written. Why don’t you write.

  Rape Joke

  The rape joke is that you were nineteen 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.

  The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love

  Piece human, piece hornet, the fury

  of both, astonishing abs all over it.

  Ripped, just ripped to absolute bits,

  his head in the hornet and his head

  in the hum, and oh he want to sting

  her. The air he breathes is filled

  with flying cheerleader parts. Splits

  flips and splits, and ponytails in orbit,

  the calm eye of the panty in the center

  of the cartwheel, the word HORNETS

 
—how?—flying off the white uniform.

  Cheerleaders are a whole, are known

  to disassemble in the middle of the air

  and come back down with different

  thighs, necks from other girls, a lean

  gold torso of Amber-Ray on a bubbling

  bottom half of Brooke. The mouths that

  cry GOOD HANDS GOOD HANDS.

  The arms he loves that make the basket,

  the body he loves that drops neat

  into them.

  Oh the hybrid human and hornet, who

  would aim for pink balloons.

  Oh the swarm of Cheerleading Entity,

  who with their hivemind understand

  him. Rhyme about the hornet, her tongue

  in her mouth at the top of her throat! Clap

  one girl’s hand against another’s. Even

  exchange screams in the air.

  The pom-poms, fact, are flesh. Hornet

  Mascot is hungry, and rubs his abs, where

  the hornet meets the man. Wants to eat

  and hurl a honey, in the middle

  of the air. (No that is bees I’m thinking of.

  Like I ever went to class, when the show

  was all outside.) The hornet begins to fly

  toward the cheerleaders. “Make me

  the point of your pyramid,” he breathes.

  And they take him up in the air with them

  and mix and match his parts with theirs,

  and all come down with one gold stripe,

  and come down sharp and stunned,

  and lie on the ground a minute, all think-

  ing am I dead yet, where am I, did we win.

  The Descent of the Dunk

  First no one could dunk and then they all could.

  The dunk evolved, and then stood upright, was even

  perceived to be intelligent, with too big a brain

  at the top of it, the ball. It grew upright and smooth-

  skinned with a tendency toward religion, the dunk

  stood up too fast, they said, and consequently has

  headaches, and trouble breathing in spring when

  it is so beautiful. The childhood of the dunk

  was no childhood at all.

  He practiced on a paper route, throwing The Sun

  to the same place each morning. Did not sleep long

  but when he slept, the springs of his bed imparted

  something to him. At night the streetlight floated

  down and let him dribble it. Then there was school

  there was every day school where he crumpled up

  tests and tossed them in the trashcan. He shouted

  TWO POINTS and had to stay after and copy out

  the “football” page of the dictionary, which could not

  keep him down—he saw writers of the dictionary

  at their desks, performing small silent neat dunks.

  The crowd of the devoted watching. Like watching

  is reading. Like it isn’t. The dunk felt like a leather

  study in space, and someone thinking how inside him,

  and a perfected body in a leather chair wondering just

  how high he can jump toward heaven. A leap sometimes

  occurs within an animal, the dunk felt that happen

  within him. He landed sure on his feet again and then

  he was wholly himself. A joint so surely in its socket,

  the whole city could go walking on it. All the rain

  comes down at once in a single bounding drop,

  and the wells of the countryside look up at once full,

  and no open mouth is thirsty, and every mouth is open.

  A great heavy body it weighed the dunk down. The dunk

  and the moon pulled it up like the sea. The crowd of us

  shouted his name to dunk him deep into himself. More

  than half-moons in his fingertips, and rising through the air

  in a loud round translation,

  and the air right then breathing him back.

  Was the only complete thing in the world, was the dunk.

  Well that and everyone who watched it.

  Goosebumps even on the ball. The ball spinning like

  bodies could live on it, and whatever led up to the bodies

  too. It stood up too fast, it got taller and taller, its women get

  bellies like basketballs. A woman dunking! That’ll be the day.

  Yet here I am sailing over your heads, and then,

  with the sound, slamming into them.

  The Third Power

  Little boy he is learning to see

  Magic Eyes. Little boy hidden objects

  leap out their way at him. He covers

  his walls with the pink and red posters,

  and pops his black eyes at them, and sees

  all the objects that live in the sun, objects

  so tan they stand out against sand. More

  than words the boy wants to see something

  undress, even if only a lake and a sailboat.

  They jump out and he longs to jump in—

  he would cannonball into that lake and

  just float. Here he is in a room that smells

  all locked up, like men and the imprison-

  ment of lizards, and he stares at Magic Eyes,

  in fact he stares so hard it hurts, and says

  oh my God a heart, and oh my God a pair

  of lips, because what is 3-D after all? When

  the air in the room becomes apparent,

  and carves itself out around a her or a him,

  and now little boy’s father he bangs down

  the door, and strides in and stares so hard

  that he hurts, says, “We had 3-D in my day

  and we called it AMERICA! We had 3-D

  in my day and we called it bare bosoms!”

  but the pictures refuse to open for him

  or show even their innocent parts:

  the dog and the sphere and the American

  flag will never undress

  for the first time again.

  He slams the door behind him, and thinks

  getting into heaven is hard. It is the cube

  that does not open. It is the cube that is only

  to look at, but look. There behind that door, look

  there. There the cube is, leaping out of the square.

  Natural Dialogue Grows in the Woods

  Along with the poison berries,

  and it’s your job in this life to spit both out,

  and spit both out if you want to live. Listen

  and learn to me and the woods: the Ummm

  of the little crickets. The fresh and slangy

  crows, who end every last word with the letter

  A. Rats, say the mice in the woods, and What’s

  the fuckin difference, Dad? My PawPaw

  always says, says the voice inside the fruit tree.

  Good ears and great ears and even uncanny

  are trembling here in the woods, perked every-

  where are ears for speech as it is spoke. Stiffies

  of dialogue circle the trees and look for holes

  in the conversation, and wait to get Red Riding

  Hood as soon as she leaves the wild.

  She says she never will, and stretches the word

  giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl so long that we all become

  women during it. The woodsman lives here too,

  and he stretches the word maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

  so long that we all die out before he’s done.r />
  Death is so random, deep here in the woods.

  In the woods the eternal Daaaaaamn and Gonna,

  and the small exact birds saying What it is. Like

  like like from morning to night, till even the night

  is like the day. Nothing dwindles down to nothin.

  Maaaaaaaaaan and giiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl flee to the woods

  to forget their proper usage, and after what seems

  like endless fuckin—well you know and you know

  and you know what I’m saying. Know what

  I’m saying and know what I mean. They fall hard

  to the grass like the oldest trees and lie a while

  listening, and then begin to speak, their mouths full

  of the air of natural dialogue: Hopefully, hopefully,

  totally, totally. Where are you from I have nowhere

  to be. What are you called can I axe you a question.

  Can we stay here forever. Probably, probably.

  With the probly and the prolly and the loblolly pines.

  The Brave Little Goes to School

  A–Z animals hunger for learning. They hunger

  for learning, you sneak them to school. A mouse

  in your pocket, a frog in your pocket. They talk

  or you think they can talk. A cricket hides in the dark

  of your desk and glitters like a great black IQ point.

  You carried a housefly to school in your fist, now

  repeat after me the teacher says and the fly makes

  vowel sounds one by one and sometimes y the

  fly says. Now what other animal goes to school—

  a nude in your pocket, a full page of nude!

  She shines with concentration all over her skin, trying

  so hard to learn to learn. Man is an animal too says

  teacher; you brought a man to school today. A man

  from the past is visiting you and the one place

  he wanted to go was school and his name is Benjamin