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Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013

Page 11

by Sixfold


  Cow with Parasol

  Being ogled is nothing new

  when you’re a flower-loving cow

  with a furry blue face and tiny red wings,

  but hiding isn’t the reason

  for the parasol (in case you’re

  wondering, I just like it is all).

  When they passed on the path

  high above me, the sun, higher still,

  was mostly blocked, and for a moment

  I felt safe—which was puzzling

  since I was sure they were looking

  and probably making silent notes

  about my extravagances.

  Then, unavoidably, the sun moved,

  and I knew I’d soon see

  them, and not just their silhouettes

  but everything from their ill-fitting shoes

  right down to their tar-

  stained moustaches—

  and so, I’m left with no

  other choice: move on

  and dream of finding a cave so dark

  you’d never know if the colorless

  moss was smiling back or snarling.

  Stiletto

  Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

  Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

  Living nor dead, and I knew nothing . . .

  Walking up an empty downtown street,

  I’m holding a snow-white 20-ounce

  paper cup emblazoned with a fair-trade, organic

  hunter-green siren who sings herself

  into a short-skirted, six-foot-tall barista

  with sad, smoky eyes who overflows

  her corporate-issued button-up  

  and weeps as she gently chokes

  the stringy neck of a grease-stained landfill

  attendant. Loosening her grip, she smiles,

  and whispers, “Maybe everything is double-edged . . .”

  Descending from the cup (or maybe,

  it’s my mind, or the ocean; who can know?),

  she’s now the petite, raven-haired woman

  standing beside me wearing acutely illogical pumps

  which are silver tipped and rival the skyline.

  They stab the shadows of her legs

  as she struts confidently away from me

  before pausing on the corner as the last shaft

  of sunlight disappears behind fiscal temples.

  A tiny music seems to swell as she tilts

  her head heavenward to gather

  up all of the whispers of the City of Man,

  conjuring them into a thin film

  which winds itself around her

  until she’s iridescent—all fiery-black

  lipstick wrapped in feathers,

  balanced on a single limb—

  some sort of strange crane,

  a totem of pain and beauty

  perched on a lily pad

  of garbage-stained concrete.

  A Kiss on her Birthday

  She can make out

  what is probably a fence

  from the corner

  of her one opened eye.

  But with only one eye open,

  she cannot be sure;

  two might better grasp

  what floats almost invisible

  under the white window shade.

  It’s just like in Chagall’s painting:

  see, his happiness

  doesn’t need to be deduced.

  With his eyes closed

  and head twisting backward

  he’s left continuity behind;

  gravity’s hold holds him not.

  He’s of the sublime—a gentle kite

  longing to be stuck in her tree.

  In her hand the flowers

  he bought her,

  on the table a cake,

  knife and money-purse.

  She can feel them all,

  all straining for another dimension,

  but depth is illusive.

  And that one eye,

  open and empty,

  keeps staring out at who knows what—

  not him, that’s sure.

  Maybe this bothers him,

  but with his eyes closed,

  will he ever know?

  Perhaps; outside, that fence—

  it persists

  regardless

  of the cake and kisses

  and the floating husband.

  Mariah Blankenship

  Fiberglass Madonna

  Barbie was in her twenties I'd say

  when we used to sew her clothes

  on your Singer look-alike

  back room of your maternal trailer

  stitching time, saving none

  I'd insist on bringing her

  to the shower with us and she would

  bathe in the Amazon River Basin created

  from the drainage of your hair

  and I would braid her hair

  like your motorcycle hair sitting

  there at your ankle

  under the fall of your cleansed body

  And her perfect plastic features

  were a replica of you

  reflecting in the basin

  where a Narcissus flower once bloomed

  and Adonis once bled into

  the brushed nickel drain

  Even your breasts were as plastic as hers

  those same warrior breasts

  but you fell down the drain of wisdom,

  of vitality,

  a break in the river current

  And Barbie was fully clothed

  when you tried to stitch yourself

  together in an institute for the imperfect,

  communicating with your Singer look-alike,

  Sexton at her typewriter

  You were in your twenties, I’d say,

  when you drowned,

  Anticlea at the river

  And we are bathing eternally,

  showering Madonna statue of

  mother daughter Barbie

  with your blood forever pouring over us

  Barbie, that whore, lying naked in the drain

  Lexapro Shortage

  I am here to see a counselor today,

  rotten psychology stinks to high hell

  in my mind left on a shelf for 20 years

  Bring me science

  Bring me God

  Anything but psychology

  We came here together once,

  you and I on the ironic love seat

  I am staring at that brown seat now

  It growls at me

  I approach it like an enumerable caravan to my grave

  and startled, I turn to the black, more appropriate colored chair,

  holding the clipboard of my subconscious tight,

  like a tiger you would say

  And you are no longer here

  They ask for an emergency contact now

  and my God,

  I have had an epiphany

  I have no emergency contact now

  Perhaps that is the worst of it

  A permanent check mark next to divorced,

  A blank next to emergency contact

  They're all deceased, I say

  (euphemism for rotting in graves

  below Whitman’s democratic grass

  Shut up

  This is why you are here in the first place)

  And my mother is damn sure in the painting

  on the wall staring at me with an oil painted tear

  mocking me for being like her

  but there's no bullet in my head

  no trickle of blood on my temple

  just an empty loveseat

  A Barren Grave, Walden Pond

  I grow from the earth

  as though houses were

  formed on the eighth

  day, emerging from

  the dust like women

  buil
t from ribs.

  Emerson, I join you

  in the real houses

  of this world,

  the ones that

  envelop the bottom

  tier of gravity—

  a pyramid of pressure,

  our homes sprout

  from the dirt under

  our fingernails—

  from atoms,

  from bacteria,

  from nothing.

  The earth formed

  deliberately from

  the cabin and not

  the other way

  around, Thoreau.

  I am a house,

  empty,

  barren of furniture

  and my windows

  are closed,

  Venetian blinds

  shut, smiling back

  at me like Plath’s

  tulips perched

  on her windowsill,

  they mock me.

  Still I sit,

  emerged from

  the earth like

  a cracked

  politician.

  I lie to ecology.

  Emily Hyland

  The Hit

  When Daiquane is eighteen years old

  and two months into his eleventh-grade year

  he is hit by two chabóns who drive with intention.

  They drive a Toyota Celica, green like the trees, which

  do not line the block, the trees that smell like summers

  Daiquane watches on TV. Even if there were trees

  like along those downtown blocks with tulips at the roots, they would

  just seem invisible against the place he calls home.

  Trees seem everywhere in his dreams.

  In a recurring cycle of sleep, when he still

  lived with his mother and could still feel the heat

  of angry words on her breath

  when she pulled the sheets over him at night,

  so soon as he would close his eyes, he would climb the pines—

  besotted by limbs like ladder rungs—up

  toward some other dimension.

  It is a desert of death when they are through. They have

  hit him once to knock him to the ground—

  heavy teenage trunk uprooted—rims aglitter in the lamplight,

  and then turned around—

  right wheels upon the curb in the sharp swing

  back towards the fallen, to cruise over

  his skull and away,

  into the night,

  dicks hard

  with the ache of adrenaline.

  Gray Matter

  I finish reading Bessie’s murder out loud

  on the day I get assaulted at school.

  There is a sudden hand-to-weave hair-fight

  that descends upon the classroom

  over an inadvertent brush-by

  in the doorway over lip gloss

  and then I try to talk one girl

  off the ledge of this mania—

  we are in a putrid corner of the hallway now—

  my white arms out long

  to lock her away from all of this

  misdirected fury, and

  her hands lunge into my chest

  magnetize and stick

  while a dewy, halcyonic mist

  blurs action from cognition.

  And it’s not the falling back as much as

  the way the flesh of my breasts inverts

  under the heels of her Dorito-licked hands

  and the furnace-minded charge of

  that anger,

  which meets me

  through the muscle-jolt

  of a girl who lacks

  plain agency:

  that makes my feet lose the floor

  and topple.

  I hear some communal

  gasp; someone whispers

  “She pushed Ms. Emily”

  and their eyes say

  I am more sacrosanct

  than the girl who is

  bleeding from her skull-skin

  in the other room

  or the other in front of me

  who they can already barely see

  anymore. This truculent breast-push

  is the apogee of violence in my life—

  Bigger’s hands slide

  onto Mary’s rum-beat

  breasts, his hands

  touch Bessie’s breasts,

  resigned. Her hands slam

  mine, so that

  she is Bigger and

  I am Mary and Bessie

  and I am Bigger, too, and she

  is Mary and Bessie

  and she

  and I

  just tumble into a cycle

  of perpetual subjugation

  that stretches across

  a span of score in which

  we are all perpetrators

  because of what we are born into

  and trapped by the prophesy

  that contains each iota

  of our

  inevitable lives.

  I’d Had A Long Day

  1.

  In the basement, the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid

  finally had it out for their countries. As beef patties

  flew around the cafeteria like saucers,

  the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid

  fused and rolled into the hallway.

  The half-dressed throngs from the locker rooms

  and sweaty jerseys from the gym spilled forth

  by way of intuition and chatter; they

  salivated for the primacy of action. The whole building

  turned in and over itself; children sluiced down the stairwells

  towards inevitable circumstance.

  By the time the school safety agents

  rounded up and lollied down

  like a troop of Shakespearian boobies, enough time had passed

  for the wheels to have stopped. And when they

  neared the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid, motion

  was already invisible.

  In the epicenter was a mess of stress, and the agents

  stiffened up at the sight. One child dialed 9-1-1 on his cell, but

  reception was poor in the basement

  and his voice too still for the responder.

  When the EMT crew did descend upon the spot,

  the gym teacher stood up from holding in the blood

  somewhere along the curve where neck meets shoulder,

  where the scissors still stuck in. His clothes

  looked like sheets of symmetrical inkblots. He looked—

  in his sweatpants—as if he had just emerged

  from messily painting a house.

  After lockdown, after the coroner

  packed the Jamaican kid into a bag and stole

  out of the school in a whisper, and after the news cameras

  snuck glances through the windows into

  our emergency faculty meeting,

  I found myself glazed on the train platform at Utica.

  2.

  Two young brothers and their younger sister walk past me.

  Their sneakers blink red each time their feet hit the 
concrete, except

  the sister’s, which blink pink and silver glitter. We are all

  near the end of the platform and the air is dank. I’ve had a long day,

  and I think that to myself while rubbing my eyes

  with my fingers as the kids walk by.

  The boys stop on either side of their sister. They

  look like her bodyguards. They stand on the bumpy yellow strip,

  which is too close to the platform edge. They are not

  her bodyguards. She is little. I think

  she is good at math. They eye each other and then

  grab their sister, one brother at each of her arm
s. She is

  squirming, but they hold strong, inching

  closer to the rim. They start to hold her over.

  Her feet are trying for the edge, pointing down and

  straining back. I’ve had enough today. I

  muster up the teacher voice. “Excuse me, gentlemen,”

  I say. “Put her down. Right. Now.

  Don’t think I won’t ride home with you

  and tell your mother what just went on.”

  They are back on the platform now, all feet

  on concrete. I say, “Stand by the wall.” Their sister

  slides towards me. The older of the brothers

  pulls her back by the handle of her Dora knapsack.

  “Young man!” My voice is shrill like my mother

  when we climbed too high in the pine trees.

  “Do not touch her again.”

  “Whatchu gonna do bout it?”

  I am red as that puddle near the gym now.

  “Come here and stand with me,” I say to her. “My name is Emily.”

  The younger brother is looking down at his shoes now. 
The other one

  goes on, “Miss Emily, see—we Bloods. My boy Pumpkin gonna

  fuck you up. We gonna ride the train

  and follow you home.”

  He holds up a machine gun made of the air and

  chouk-chouk-chouk-chouk-chouks me

  with the fantastic spray of his imagination.

  After the gunfire subsides, I look him in the eyes.

  “I know what I’m gonna do with you,” I say.

  I gently put my tote bag on the ground. “Fuck

  off already lady,” he whines.

  We are only a foot apart. He is small, around seven. I

  lunge in, lift him hard under the armpits, and walk him

  to the platform edge.

  I can feel the grooves

  of the yellow strip beneath my feet like

  root-knolls on a trail. I can feel rushes of blood

  surge into my elbows as his weight tests my arms,

  outstretched.

  I can feel the humid breeze from the tunnel

  hit my wicked face as nearing headlights

  expose the rusty tracks below us.

  To Ms. Olds

  When I am writing in my room

  I leaf through a womb of yours

  crawl into the purplish bruise

  and hope my thoughts turn lucid,

  that this femininity waxes meaningful,

 

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