Today the fake spring bounded out to greet me
but soon it will be back beneath the earth
gnawing on bones and knowing better
while up here, god help us, it snows and snows.
It leapt through my open arms and its breath
was as clean as the snow:
no fume of dirt and grass, no spark of memory
to make my body twang like a bird on a wire,
and not a hint of that unnamable smell
that masqueraded as magnolias while I was foolish
but which has always been this other thing.
Like the face of someone once loved deeply
transformed in memory to a blur of scowl and hair.
Like a rare fern unfurling in the rock garden.
Like a rock garden behind a train station,
like finding your man in the pricker bushes
at the train station, like weeks at a time
alone outside the library with only books
as company, like living on borrowed
time, like giving something to a man
who only wanted to borrow it, like looking
for a friend and finding only wet magnolias,
like breathing in a green so bright you go blind.
Like a color without a name that hunts you
year after year, arresting you in front of paintings
that you would otherwise hate. Like getting arrested
beneath a painting of lawless abandon.
Like searching so hard for something you know
it will stay hidden out of spite.
Like being robbed by the woods.
Whatever it is, I wonder if it can find me here,
where all the grass stays dead. And I wonder
if I want it to – I should know better by now
than to welcome spring’s messy, animal form
into my arms and let it wake it’s mate in me,
that animal part that wants to play rough
and run through some new love
until its coat is streaked with foam.
Without spring I may never run through the woods
again or know how light tumbles rock walls
or remember the stupid joy of speeding
down Route 6 into trouble.
But behind it I might never find my way
from beneath the trees, and be forever chasing
a red tail that whips under wall after wall
leaving me panting and gasping for breath.
to grow cells in red media, not like blood or wine but some depressing
cranberry thing without any alcohol
and wait impatiently while they get gorged and angry;
only each other in a culture dish and no body
to defend as is their nature
it snowed, and blood defends my body,
and gorges itself on fresh air in my swollen fingers
the sky is a deep lake long covered with ice
that the wind has whipped clean of snow
blue and shallow-seeming, opaque and rippled
with the quavers that made it, and shot through
with smoke burned by the last boat trolling for trout
and the snow clouds have slumped deep behind
the first guard of the mountains, and for a moment each mountain to the north
is echoed by a radio dish on the ground, angled together in gossip
and the moon is a radio dish
and I alone am on the right frequency
This has been a good start to the year, and I’m looking forward to the rest of 2013!
My work appears in PANK this month: 5 poems
These are part of the Claudine series, and though they aren’t in any particular chronological order I hope you enjoy the story.
Also, a few months ago the forum where I learned how to write poetry and how to be an ok person on the internet essentially went defunct, disbanding an awesome community of writers. We’ve been working on a new forum and now it’s open to the public! Where the Wild Things Write is a forum geared at students – teenage, twentysomething, and thirtysomething writers who are up for learning their craft along with other cool people. One of the main focuses of the forum is on helpful and friendly critiques. If your goals are to learn, improve, and talk shop then please join us.
someone once told me, you make me think of tangerines.
you make me think of summer girlfriends. you are
a summer girlfriend.
those socks make you look like an old man. what time is it. no what time.
did you ever let a cowboy sit on your lap? where’s the beer?
when you’re done with the cookie, put your fortune in the cup.
that cup. cup your hands – gently now. I have something for you.
why don’t I just order for you
if you’re going to eat my food? open your mouth.
wear something nice, my mother’s coming. close your mouth.
you sound just like my mother. my mother
doesn’t like you very much, so can I pick you up
instead? baby, I’m no pick up artist, but those jeans, girl.
you don’t punch like a girl.
My final tally for August: 23 (out of a goal of 31) poems, a few of which I am really happy with and have sent out into the world. While this is not a poem a day, it does seem to be my limit for a mont: previous (mostly successful) poem a day months have resulted in 28, 19, 21 poems. This tells me something about my next goal: to write 20 poems each month.
Has anyone set a goal like this and had success with it? I need days to just veg out, to process what I’ve read, or to focus on school and work. How have you handled pushing yourself creatively, on a schedule, around other things?
And to start off the month:
WHEN WE ARE YOUNG WE ARE ACCIDENTS
I used to sit on a stone wall in the woods and watch the ferns move slowly back and forth like kelp in a rising tide, like green geese swaying as they feed with heads under the even greener surface of the water. Every time I walked from the cul-de-sac behind my house through the gate of the trees some magic entered me. The smell of life beneath a pile of leaves. Or like the smell of someone you used to love on a bus-bound stranger, just before you transfer. But then the schoolbus interior was all I knew, its patched green leather and persistent cruelties, the same unfortunate color of the couches in the school health center. I walked into the woods the way some people can walk through floral wallpaper and pass through the 19th century to their ultimate destination. I had no destination, neither from nor to. Ferns, thankfully, have no destination save to wave their spores into the wind which slowed to a stumble, a ramble beneath the trees, pausing where I paused and speeding up along the trail to avoid capture by a landlord with a rifle. Once, the man who owned the woods stopped me at the bottom of a snowy hill, his gun slung across the back of a quad. I’m hunting deer, he said, blank as the ice that the sled had carved, and I wouldn’t want to hit anyone by accident.
New work: Claudine’s famous sangria without ice
AND
Claudine comes home for the summer
Check out my poems in Fiddleblack #5: Claudine comes home for the summer and Claudine’s famous sangria without ice. And take a gander at the rest of the issue. If you’ve ever lived in in a suburb, look on these works ye mighty and despair.
22. Labyrinth
My neighbors smoke by the cypress
that divides our courtyard from the complex next door
as its ancestors must have divided fields in Tuscany,
and now my apartment smells almost like the alleys
in Florence, all graffiti and clove cigarettes, newspaper
and dried clay, but also like the busting edges of Lucca
which promised flaxen stubbly grass beyond the wall
which we trudged through while contemplating tiny bridges
olives, and the mysterious Etruscans, kicking up locusts
or some winged tomb insects with every step.
I remember your smell the best,
or rather, I remember almost being knocked on the grass
by your smell, it hanging on my elbow when I brushed yours
but didn’t dare get closer, it steaming off your white shirt
in the sun. Now I try to wind my way back
but the smell of your body in the heat at seventeen
has been overwritten by so many others:
the smoke, the nothing smell of mountains,
the previous owner of my death red roadbike,
olive oil and anchovy paste still clinging to a plate.
You, grown-up, curled in our bed. The list is infinite
and every side-street of smell leads me down another,
as if you were in the Piazza San Michele
in the rocky heart of Lucca and I had just passed
a bakery and a cathedral, hungry, without a map.
Support literary magazines!
Reconnaissance needs dollas to get printed.
I really loved the photography on the tumblr for Reconnaissance magazine, which all seemed to be taken in the kinds of places that I like to write about. So I took a chance and submitted some work. While I’m waiting to hear back, check out their Kickstarter campaign – the editors want to make the jump into a print publication but printing and distribution tends to run deeper than most writers’ and artists’ pockets.
And check out their tumblr: it has some great photography.
15.
Tigers walk over my grave,
their paws bigger than the sun loitering on the horizon.
At the funeral, the tables are set
with ball jars full of polyps
- coral, anemone, jellyfish
colonial creatures crowding each other
into a blue warren, or one lone gelatinous hand
bobbing in the embalming fluid as a plastic bag
just under a wave. I want my guests
to know I’m being turned inside-out;
that I have entered the museum
and they are welcome to join me
to lean in and fog the glass
to touch with breath but not noses.
I give you all I learned,
the priest reads above the black
lace tablecloths, the moths edging
across the lit vitrines and into drinks.
This is my last act of will:
that everyone must look inside the case,
everyone must know what I lived
and died to know.
