Franklin, Ben. He sits at the desk next to yours, learning
each little quote he’s going to say and then lavishing
the learn of his eyes on the nude, whose skin is bursting
with the exports of Ecuador, mostly and mainly rain.
Ben Franklin should not be in school, the word
in his mouth should not be in school, a word that is where
a girl pees from. A fresh sheet of ditto is laid on your desk.
Don’t worry, you tell Ben Franklin—the unlearningest
animal of all, the Answers, came to school today
in your closed left fist, curly-tailed like they taught you
to write them, impossibly small and already bleeding.
The teacher writes QUIET PLEASE on the board. The pig
who came to school today is unprepared for the squeal
of chalk. It asks is something else in here dying the way
I’m going to? The cricket and Ben Franklin raise their hands,
the Answers somehow raises yours.
There Were No New Colors for Years
Before neon came along, was made, did not grow
like the rest of the colors, or grew as a tumorous
growth on Art
wherever sun touched it too much,
and we went to see that tumor in museums
whenever our parents would take us
and brought replicas home from the gift
shop—before neon there wasn’t a way
to buy plastic packs of plastic stars and put
the Big Dipper on your ceiling,
no way to put stars on your ceiling at all
unless you went outside and slept there
which we stopped doing years before
when all adults woke up and wanted
to touch a firm camper between the legs—
it was a new kind of fruit like the maraschino
and they craved it every minute of the day—
so we stayed indoors and reflected the glow and
all adults were jealous, they turned old-timey shades
of green and they hated our head-to-toe neon,
because:
The names were the same just
with NEON before them like colors woke freshly
divorced
and demanded that people call them Ms.,
this made parents uncomfortable and sexually helpless,
they pictured nipples like eyes on stalks, they thought
why was I born too late, and thought how much scarier
it would have been when Orson Welles lied about aliens
if they’d been able to see neon
in their minds back then, and they banged the doors
angry on their sleeping children, no doubt dreaming
neon dreams that would have killed the parents
with how scary they were, so hard the biggest stars
fell down
and fell into our mouths, and we woke
in the morning tasting them, and the stars tasted
toxic and perfectly new.
Perfect Little Mouthfuls
What have we dumped in the ocean? All
the dolphins have begun growing breasts.
Now dolphins are women when you want
women and fish when you want fish,
at last. The breasts
they are more playful
than the rest of the dolphin put together!
No nipples according to us, the nipples
the brains of the breast, if the dolphins
had nipples their intelligence we think
would add up to more than our own.
Men of the world
rejoice, it is no longer girly
to own a calendar of dolphins, bursting
the surface of the water and themselves,
thickly spread with the glitter of nature.
Time to turn to the next luscious month—
it’s the sluttiest one, April, all covered
with droplets of spring. People who suffer
from extra desire can pay one hundred dollars
to ride them, fifty dollars extra if you want
them to leap, seventy-five if you want them to dive
so deep all the blood rushes into your ears,
and they fill with the crackling sound of sea-
foam. A triangle pokes above the water
and says better shapes below—circles are
the most sought-after shapes of course
but teardrops are also accepted.
In a childhood room of the Pacific,
a mother gets a glimpse of her mutating daughter
and deeply indraws a gasp of sea. “I thought
you would stay a dolphin forever!” she cries
out to the blue at large. Who could have seen
this coming? On Minoan jugs all the dolphins
stare knowingly. Dolphins you swim so often
through literature, now we will see even more
of you. Quick pour glowing runoff into the water
and add nipples the brains to the breasts, why not,
now dolphins will be smarter than all of us, we think,
smart enough to read
this even, quick pour glowing
runoff into the water, let’s give them a fresh new pair
of eyes to read this and read their new run-on with.
The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics
The father and mother of American poetry are back from the dead for just one day. They are standing up out of their graves, turning to each other, exchanging their tit-pics, and then retreating back into the earth and their silence, and the handfuls of dust all over them that were not their tits at all.
Thank God they were able to do this, or we might never have known what the tits of them looked like.
When you want to say a poet is mysterious, say, “Very few tit-pics of him exist,” or “Reading his letters and journals, we are able to piece together a pic of his tits—they loved butter and radishes and were devoted to his sister.”
Neither of the poets were Transcendentalists, but their tit-pics rose up and floated over all, and filled up the sky with rose-colored clouds.
I admit that I brought them back from the dead because I was standing in front of the mirror taking picture after picture of my tits in order to establish for once and all time what a tit actually looks like, since according to the dictionary lots of things can be a tit, even including a bird and an idiot.
“I have birds and idiots all over my body, but not where my pecs are,” I shouted. I was furious. “Let me set down the meaning of the tit, and get the last word on it.”
Commence me taking hundreds of boob photos, and studying them closely, and thinking most of these don’t even look like boobs.
They look like birds and idiots.
And I thought, “This is not something Emily Dickinson would have done. Or is it.”
Emily Dickinson was the father of American poetry and Walt Whitman was the mother, suckling grizzled wild dogs at his teats.
Walt Whitman nude in the forest, staring deep into a still pool, the only means of taking tit-pics available at that time.
Too many people fell in and drowned, in that age before we learned to really swim in the tit-pic.
Raindrops fell into the still pool of the tit-pic, rippling it outward and jiggling it, since the jiggle within the tit-pic is what we’re really after.
The wild dogs they grew up and grew tame, and learned to be owned by American poets, and take them for walks around lakes, as a poet isn’t happy unless he is walking in a circle with the double meaning of the word tit just bouncing away on h
is chest.
And meaning on the writing wobbling there like Walt Whitman’s tits on the lake, how beautiful, almost like a part of nature.
Walt Whitman with a bra on his head, which is keeping his thoughts from being totally bare. The bra is too small and the bra is made of lace and his friends are saying, “Walt you are falling OUT” and “Wow Walt you are giving everyone a show” and “Why are you giving away the cow for free when I only wanted to hear the moo.”
The boys when looking at Walt Whitman would nudge each other and say “A body like that could never drown.”
Meaning I guess that his boobs would float him? Or that his lungs were really big so there had to be a lot of breath in them? I never really understood that one.
Or when he was riding the ferry and leaning over to look at the glittering river the boys would nudge each other and holler, “Careful not to tip over with those huge jugs Walt!” But wouldn’t his huge jugs just scoop up the water till the river was dry, and then he would go walking home on the riverbed with his triumphant jugs balanced in front of him threatening to spill but not spilling a drop and even the glitter still intact in them?
The gulf between a word and what it represents is still so great, but a shocking reflection of perfect tits floats and will always float there.
What I am TRYING to say is that metaphors are dangerous!
If teeth are like pearls, and if skin is like a pearl, and if the gates of heaven were twelve pearls, imagine the pearl explosion that would happen if someone bit their own boob in the afterlife.
Which we have to assume Walt Whitman is doing, to make St. Peter upset, which is not very mature, but I’ll tell you what IS mature, Walt Whitman’s incredible boobs.
I mean he’s had two hundred years to develop them.
Perhaps that’s why breasts have gotten bigger, because American poetry is accumulating in our lungs and has to push its way out somehow.
But back to how metaphors are dangerous.
When he is old his boobs will seem to him like raindrops trickling down and attempting to join a larger body of water. Thank goodness they are trickling down a window so all of us can see it happen, and we are a girl and we’re reading a book as the human rain pours relentlessly down.
Emily Dickinson for instance the father of American poetry is reading Shakespeare there just through the window, and her own body is so fierce and so hot that any droplets that landed there would instantly burn up.
Emily has a beautiful black-and-white beard that reaches down to the ground, and lightning streaks zigzag out of her mouth.
(This is disputed by her photographs, but her photographs know nothing and half of them aren’t even her.)
The beard flows over her chest and to look at it is literacy, since the handwriting found in the beards of the past was so curling and flourishing and so feminine, everyone could read it.
When she trims the beard the trimmings fall onto the page and never move again except the dashes, which rearrange themselves in the night.
We have thought two things about her—one that she was a little woman-prune and two that she was an almost mentally overripe plum that was bursting all over the place and calling the wasps to it.
The general assumption has been that HER tit-pics would not be worth looking at if they existed at all, which is false, since I have secret information that they were actually four-dimensional and measured in minutes rather than cups, and wouldn’t you like to get a load of those deep and boundless pools of time.
Though maybe you think time doesn’t exist, and that’s where you got the idea that she was unblessed in the boob department.
What I’m saying is that her boobs were so big they were practically geological ages, and the beard of Father Time flowed over them.
The reason she always wore a white dress, for instance, is so that men would every minute be aware of the soft mounds of time shining through them.
“Eyes up here buddy,” she would say, when their eyes drifted down and lingered on the white and pulsing handfuls of time, and beheld them with huge hunger to touch all the little milliseconds at once.
“Wow, disrespectful!” she once shouted when Stephen Crane burst into her house and grabbed a fistful of her and then dropped dead, too young to hold so much heart-stopping boob of existence in his hand.
Tits roam the earth in search of a body, and they knock on Emily Dickinson’s door, but we’ll never know what they said to each other, and the sound of the knocker itself was so soft.
The ideal tit would be so big that it would include everything else in it, and you would be part of it, and you would be surrounded by it, and it would be wet and nude and in a white bikini that was see-through enough to show you, and leave nothing of you to the imagination, right down to the goosebumps you got in church.
IS IT COLD IN HERE men shout to the boob that contains them. CAREFUL NOT TO PUT MY EYE OUT WITH THAT THING they shout to the boob that contains them just before the darkness closes over.
There is felt to be a huge heartbeat just beyond them.
On her deathbed, Emily Dickinson whispered, “Destroy the negatives of my tit-pics, the ones where they look like moon-rocks, or else people will think I was from outer space.”
Her ideas are often spoken of as being “out to here,” accompanied by an exaggerated juggy motion of the hands.
The hands bounced up and down slowly to imply heaviness.
Picture her hidden breast, and a shocking tanline on it, from even she knows not where, from a sun inside her dress.
Who is not an atheist about Emily Dickinson’s body, which is totally unbelievable. It is the Number One Beach Body every year, for the way the letters wash up on it.
Walt Whitman is the Number Two Beach Body every year, because look at the way he snapped back into shape only months after giving birth to American Poetry.
In order to sing louder, pretend you are singing to someone across the room. In order to get bigger tits, pretend they are five minutes ahead of you into the future.
Pretend that more than the rest of you they move around the sun.
“Mommy!” cried the men to the boobs of Emily Dickinson. “Did someone say Mommy,” Walt Whitman shouted, kicking open the door of his body and running into the room of hers.
“I am the dad here,” Emily Dickinson said gracefully, rearranging the black-and-white curls of her beard.
“I’m the goddamn mom,” Walt Whitman bellowed, detaching a dog from one of his breasts and throwing it into the crowd, where it woofed tremendously among the sexists.
They exactly exchanged their gazes.
“Well, time to die,” Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson said to each other, and they fell backward at exactly the same moment, toppled at last by their tits, which stood upright with nipples like perfect pink erasers.
Both of them naked, and arrayed in all the invisible words, like said and just and and and oh, which are there but the reader never sees them.
Above them floating their tit-pics.
And floating above their tit-pics our eyes.
The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks
I was born as a woman, I talk you to death,
or else your ear off,
or else you to sleep. What do I have, all the time
in the world, and a voice that swings brass back
and forth, you can hear it, and a focal point where
my face should be. What do I have, I have absolute
power, and what I want is your money, your drool,
and your mind, and the sense of myself as a snake,
and a garter in the grass. Every bone in the snake
is the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips.
The first sound I make is silence, then sssssshhh,
the first word I say is listen. Sheepshearers
and accountants hypnotize the hardest,
and lookout sailors who watch the sea, and the boys
/>
who cut and cut and cut and cut and cut the grass.
The writers who write page-turners, and the writers
who repeat themselves. The diamond-cutter kneels
down before me and asks me to hypnotize him, and
I glisten at him and glisten hard, and listen to me and
listen, I tell him. Count your age backward, I tell him.
Become aware of your breathing, and aware of mine
which will go on longer. Believe you
are a baby till I tell you otherwise, then believe
you’re a man till I tell you you’re dirt. When a gunshot
rings out you’ll lie down like you’re dead. When you
hear, “He is breathing,” you’ll stand up again.
The best dog of the language is Yes and protects you.
The best black-and-white dog of the language is Yes
and goes wherever you go, and you go where I say,
you go anywhere. Why do I do it is easy, I am working
my way through school. Give me the money
for Modernism, and give me the money
for what comes next. When you wake to the fact that you
have a body, you will wake to the fact that not for long.
When you wake you will come when you read the word
hard, or hard to understand me, or impenetrable poetry.
When you put down the book you will come when you
hear the words put down the book,
you will come when you hear.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDIT: GREP HOAX
PATRICIA LOCKWOOD was born in a trailer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. Her debut collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, was released in 2012 by Octopus Books. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Tin House, and Poetry.
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