by Sarah Kay
with a fat trunk, and you will argue for a bit,
but he will love you anyway.
He is asking a question now and no one has
answered it yet. So you lower your eyes from
the plaster and say, The twenty-first, I think,
and he smiles and says, Oh, cool, and you
smile back, and you cannot stop your smiling,
oh, you cannot stop your smile.
HERE AND NOW
Here and now, I have only these hands,
this mouth, this skin as wide as a shoreline,
this beehive between my ears, this buzz, this buzz.
You are the best thing I never planned.
This is the widest I can stretch my arms without
dropping things. This is the first time I don’t care
if I drop things. This is what dropping
things feels like. This is what happens when
the flowers wake up one morning and decide to
smell human: it confuses us, makes us
reach backwards into places that are sharp,
feel around for things we’ve dropped. I have
forgotten what I was looking for. It doesn’t
seem important. You brought me flowers.
You made the bed. This is the widest I can
stretch my arms. This is all I have right now.
OPEN
Sometimes, when we kiss, I keep my eyes open. I know it’s impolite. It started when I was in high school, the first boy—the one who tasted like peach vitamin water and sweat—he kissed me as though I was made of tears and he had never seen the sea before. I was scared he would look at me, scared that if he opened his eyes, I would turn into a pillar of salt, so I peeked to make sure he didn’t. First one eye and then the other, our mouths a tightrope, my eyes a set of cheeky clowns trying not to fall. I had never seen another person so up-close before. Things happen to God’s perfect aesthetic. Noses are mountain slopes, cheeks are fields, lips gape and pull, morph and stretch, we are no longer faces, we are landscapes. I was not kissing a boy, I was kissing America. And America tasted like peach vitamin water and sweat.
Now it is a habit. Now, it is less about fear and more about curiosity. Today I opened my eyes, and this man—the one who makes the bed when I leave—his eyes were open too. I was embarrassed, and I was furious! Nobody opens their eyes when they kiss! How dare he look at me when I did not know! But when I pulled away from him, he was smiling; he had not blinked. He does not kiss me like an ocean. His eyes do not turn me to salt. This is new terrain.
A PLACE TO PUT OUR HANDS
My wheels are finally
slowing down.
You are trying to find
a place to put your hands.
I am trying to find
a way back to India.
Maybe we are both looking
for the same soil:
it is red, smells like clay,
the way it must have smelled
when God put it there.
I am not scared
the way I was once.
I have bled through
the train to Agra,
fought the cockroaches
with my bare hands.
I have seen the Taj Mahal
at sunrise, I remember
what love and pain can build.
You are looking
for mountains to climb.
I am looking
for the words to a poem
I can’t remember.
TODAY’S POEM
Sometimes the writing
should be put on hold: a boy
who smells like springtime.
GHOST SHIP
In the second grade, every song was a handful of orange Tic Tacs
rolling around my tongue: I knew all the words, could feel them
tangy, round, and smooth, but didn’t care which one was which.
I could sing back the Beatles perfectly with the words
all smashed together. I was the first one to memorize
any song the music teacher sang us. My favorite was The Ghost Ship.
The words meant nothing to me, but the melody was full
of ragged sails and midnight hurricanes. It was all port and starboard,
I sang it ‘til the winds ran out of me.
My little brother was four years younger, but two steps ahead.
He memorized the shapes my mouth made, practiced them tirelessly.
We shoved the words at each other as though it was a competition
to see who could get them out the fastest, who could
draw them out the longest. And the cold wind blew.
By the time it was his turn to learn it in music class four years later,
he already knew the song so well, he confused the teacher.
My fist-chested brother. A fireplace shotgun, waiting for his chance.
*
Little girls learn how to sing The Perfect Man
before we ever know what the lyrics mean.
Strong arms, good hair, wide eyes, brave heart, big money, kind hands.
We build model ships in bottles,
whispering life into the toothpicks and wire;
we make plans and blueprints for the one we hope is coming.
And come they do. Fleets of vessels. Battleships and barges.
They arrive on the horizon, flags to the sky.
I have seen what can happen when a woman tries to make a dinghy
into a galleon. Sometimes a rowboat is all you need.
Sometimes a whaler. A ferry.
Our model ships look perfect in their bottles,
but we do not know if they are seaworthy.
Sometimes the one that reaches your harbor
has already been through the storm.
Sometimes you cannot see the leaking until you are so close.
Until you are already out to sea.
Trying to batten down the hatches.
Bailing the water pooling at your ankles.
Manning the rigging alone.
My little brother pushed off from shore before the tide
had turned his way. Always two steps ahead.
For years, I didn’t want him going under.
I tried to anchor him against the storms,
threw him safety nets and buoys, trained myself in CPR.
I have known so many men whose hulls have been made hollow
by the salt of this sea, whose sails are pulled so tightly into the wind,
whose rudders no longer point to anything but drowning.
How do you keep a boy floating?
How do you keep him above the ache?
Men will drift eternal. Men will say, It’s just a scratch,
when the cannons have shot them full of holes.
They will look at their tiny driftwood tied with strings and say, Ship.
They will look at the broken wheel between their hands
and say, Captain. They will look to the men
who have jumped overboard without them and say, Crew.
Today my brother is twenty-years handsome. He is smirk and motor.
Femur strong and decision heavy. His decks have been worn down
by the feet of others, but his compass always points north.
I can hear the cabin creak. The chains rattle. The ladders sag.
It has been a decade since I heard him sing.
*
We are in Ireland, a country to which we have never been.
I have rented us a car I cannot drive and have been gracelessly
maneuvering us through the green, green countryside
toward the cliffs of the western coast.
The rain is a diligent mother who checks on us every few hours.
The sky is endless grey. My brother’s quiet fills the car
like a family holiday. I turn on the radio to mask the fog.
The coast arrives beneath us suddenly, the way all sh
orelines do:
full and vast, crumbling away at all our stubborn solidness.
And there, standing against the crashing sea,
sits the massive body of a shipwreck,
as though all of history has been gifted to us.
We are giddy with adventure. We are skipping over the rocks,
shouting to the wild horses and the ocean’s roar.
The jagged porthole opens to us, we pull ourselves
into the boat’s hungry mouth. It is empty and whole.
Full speed ahead. Prow to stern. Fore and aft.
We climb until we are scraped and muddy.
Rust children with lighthouse eyes.
And together we start to sing the words we have known since
childhood. As though they have been drifting through us, lost at sea,
waiting for the right current to find safe harbor.
Oh, Brother. No matter your wreckage.
There will be someone to find you beautiful,
despite the cruddy metal. Your ruin is not to be hidden
behind paint and canvas. Let them see the cracks.
Someone will come to sing into these empty spaces.
Their voice will echo off your insides like a second-grader
and her little brother—four years younger, two steps ahead.
Singing ‘til the metal vibrates. ‘Til the ghost ship rings.
(During his marriage to the poet Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes took up an affair with Assia Wevill around 1962. Wevill’s husband, David, upon finding out about the affair, took a number of sleeping pills and attempted suicide, but survived. After Plath’s suicide in 1963, Wevill moved into Hughes’s house two days after Plath’s death. Of Hughes, Wevill told friends that his lovemaking was so ferocious, “in bed, he smells like a butcher.” She helped raise Plath and Hughes’s children, and one of her own, but Hughes once again left on another affair in 1968. The following year, Wevill committed suicide and the murder of her four-year-old daughter, gassing herself in the same manner that Plath had done. In her diary, Assia Wevill wrote that the ghost of Plath had made her suicidal.)
LIGHTNING
To Assia Wevill
Were there nights
when you were sure he would grind you down to bone?
That you had not placed nearly enough wax paper on the bedspread,
that you would have to wash the sheets tomorrow?
Did you ever think of David?
His custard eyes
and balloon hands.
Clumsy with words
and careless with love.
Some of us are born chasing disaster.
From the moment we enter this world screaming,
we are looking for lightning,
the raw of our bodies
always searching for cleaver hands.
You memorized every love poem he wrote for someone else
and slept on a pillow that had held her slumber.
Some of us are born chasing poetry.
When you searched for the words,
was it her voice who spoke them?
THE TYPE
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else. —Richard Siken
If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,
you can let them look at you.
Do not mistake eyes for hands.
Or windows. Or mirrors.
Let them see what a woman looks like.
They may not have ever seen one before.
If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,
you can let them touch you.
Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for.
Sometimes it is a bottle. A door. A sandwich.
A Pulitzer. Another woman.
But their hands found you first.
Do not mistake yourself for a guardian.
Or a muse. Or a promise. Or a victim. Or a snack.
You are a woman. Skin and bones. Veins and nerves. Hair and sweat.
You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies. Not excuses.
If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,
you can let them hold you.
All day they practice keeping their bodies upright—
even after all this evolving, it still feels unnatural,
still pulls tight the muscles, strains the arms and spine.
Only some men want to learn what it feels like to wrap themselves
into a question mark around you, admit they do not have the answers
they thought they would have by now;
some men will want to hold you like The Answer.
You are not the answer.
You are not the problem. You are not the poem
or the punchline or the riddle or the joke.
Woman. If you grow up the type men want to love,
you can let them love you.
Being loved is not the same thing as loving.
When you fall in love, it is discovering the ocean
after years of puddle jumping. It is realizing you have hands.
It is reaching for the tightrope when the crowds have all gone home.
Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of woman
men will hurt. If he leaves you with a car-alarm heart,
you may learn to sing along. It is hard to stop loving the ocean.
Even after it has left you gasping, salty.
Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made,
the ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night.
And know this.
Know you are the type of woman
who is looking for a place to call yours.
Let the statues crumble.
You have always been the place.
You are a woman who can build it yourself.
You were born to build.
ASTRONAUT
I see the moon and the moon sees me.
The moon sees somebody that I don’t see.
God bless the moon and God bless me.
God bless the somebody that I don’t see.
If I get to heaven before you do,
I’ll make a hole and pull you through.
I’ll write your name on every star.
And that way the world won’t seem so far.
—Children’s rhyme
The astronaut will not be at work today. He has called in sick.
He has turned off his cell phone, his laptop, his pager, his alarm
clock. There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch, rain against the
windows, and not even the hint of coffee in the kitchen air.
Everyone is in a tizzy. The engineers on the fifteenth floor have
stopped working on their particle machine, the anti-gravity room is
leaking, and even the freckled kid with glasses (whose only job is to
clean out the trash) is nervous: fumbles the bag, spills a banana peel
and a paper cup. Nobody notices. They are too busy recalculating
what this will mean for lost time.
How many galaxies are we losing per minute;
how long before the next rocket can be launched?
Somewhere—An electron flies off its energy cloud.
A black hole has erupted.
A mother has finished setting the table for dinner.
A Law & Order marathon is starting.
The astronaut is asleep.
He has forgotten to turn off his watch,
which ticks against his wrist like a metal pulse.
He does not hear it. He dreams of coral reefs and plankton.
His fingers find the pillowcase’s sailing masts.
He turns on his side, opens his eyes once.
He thinks that scuba divers must have
the most wonderful job in the world.
So much water to glide through.
THE PARADOX
When I am inside writing,
all I can
think about is how I should be outside living.
When I am outside living,
all I can do is notice all there is to write about.
When I read about love, I think I should be out loving.
When I love, I think I need to read more.
I am stumbling in pursuit of grace,
I hunt patience with a vengeance.
On the mornings when my brother’s tired muscles
held to the pillow, my father used to tell him,
For every moment you aren’t playing basketball,
someone else is on the court practicing.
I spend most of my time wondering
if I should be somewhere else.
So I have learned to shape the words thank you
with my first breath each morning, my last breath every night.
When the last breath comes, at least I will know I was thankful
for all the places I was so sure I was not supposed to be.
All those places I made it to,
all the loves I held, all the words I wrote.
And even if it is just for one moment,
I will be exactly where I am supposed to be.
IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY
Return my teeth to the baseball bat.
Return my right leg to the car bumper.
Return my right hand to the first boy who held it,
Return my left hand to my father.
You can find the jewelry in the chimney,
buried under photographs of my grandfather.
Return his smile to him.
Wash my mouth out first. Thoroughly.
Return it to my mother. It has always been hers.
Return the poetry to my first-grade teacher.
Apologize for the time I went snooping through her desk.
Return the journals to the traveling salesman,
I bought everything he sold.
If there is any music left, you can untie it from my throat.
It was dying there anyway.
All the loose skin, return it to the sun.
Return the pads of my feet to the tree in the front yard.
Let the one who loves me make a pillow of my hair.
Give my left ear to my brother,
I was always waiting for him to take it.
Give my right ear to the thunder,
I should have given it long ago.
And in case there is an empty stomach, in case an empty womb—
give these to the women made of ambulances.
