White Heat

02.08.01
11.23.03

“I’ve been thinking a lot about delight.” Last night I dreamt I wore a wedding ring. “Does anyone know the roots of the word delight?” I forgot to see if I was engaged. “I have vowed I will not write death poems anymore.” “When we’re writing, the energy anyways has a tendency to go down, to go dark.” I will sell white takeout boxes filled with human hair. When I was six I saw a chick hatch in a museum’s incubator. “These suggest a future time and not a present time, but the only way you can let yourself go is in the present.” “More thought than I can take.” “As you get older you get more filters about what you allow – don’t allow yourself.” “I don’t know why a lot of contemporary poems are being written.” “What are we risking personally?” “And maybe Creeley was right, maybe it is for love…but I think it should be nothing less than that.” I want to write a poem about a milkshake and throatfuls of chocolate ice sludge in a white paper cup with fingerprint spots in the condensation and a plastic yellow straw, flattened on top between my teeth—what is more satisfying than the last gurgly swallow. My boyfriend’s semen smells like broken glass. “First book I wrote at night, with cigarettes, second one in the morning without, and the third was all over the place.” “I write because it doesn’t have to be published.” When I run out of poems I will invent a new form. I will gravel-smash the world to clear a space for a new one—hot nights I throw lit matches from the roof.

Between Heaven and Ohio

02.08.01
11.23.03

Silver slippers and a cake iced in pearls and tiny bells. Necklace made of teardrop shaped garnets set in pewter briars. A yellow yartzheit candle for my father. A cake platter and silver server. I do not know the speaker of your poem. Can anyone write a poem about God? Kidskin gloves. Silk stockings edged in lace. Petticoats of rustling cloudy layers. Someone else to do all the laundry. Hats for every occasion. “Omit the anthropomorzing of God.” I am unforgivably lazy about reading poems. “I ended a poem recently with gratitude…it’s a hard thing to work with.”
A tiara made of swallow spit. A pashmina. A room filled with silk and velvet cushions. Long cigarettes. Sugared orange leaves.
“I wanted more with the moths…later seemed lazy.” “I’m not sure what guards, but I’m not sure who San Juan Nepomucono is either.”
“Why can’t the guards just throw him off…in the writing of the poem.”
One of my many chores was to clean the houseplants, I scrubbed the toilets also, and the sinks. Polished mirrors and set the table…I’m not sure, in retrospect, what exactly Sarah did.

Fig Leaves and the Tattooed Lady

03.29.01
11.24.03

The archetype of the tattooed lady… “what is the slow room in a cone?” Smell of dust on mahogany library shelves, grad students’ eyes across the room – 2 floors down in an elevator.
“I thought the peasants were important.”
Last summer I took a fistful of yellow pills every day, a thousand milligrams of blue powder in
gelatin capsules
Ativan-manacled ankles….
too tired
to
wash any clothes
or wear them
and tears fell down my face when I brewed tea.

Babies in Waiting

01.24.01
11.23.03

“The letter wasn’t responded to, the writer waits alone.”
There are five different water bottles here, one thermos and a CircleK big gulp. Imagine my face in wire spectacles. My lover’s left clavicle tastes like jalapeño strawberry jam. We shall live in a flat of crumpled newspaper, walls striped in the fine grey print of the New York Times. Newspaper vendors have to be hot-dog fat, hatted, a little greasy, smoking a chewy cigar. At Robinsons May I want to get Levis, cosmetics, sneakers, hot pink handbags and a bra.
Rooting in my bag the Xanax kicks in—I feel the need to switch to paler ink.
When I have known him a year, I think, then I will tell him about naming my daughter Esperanza, and the promise/agreement I made with Virgin Mary at San Javier the weekend he had to work.

Voracious Planet

01.23.01
11.23.03

The man has a knack for reducing even the cosmos to unutterably boring. His voice makes me feel like I can’t quite breathe.
Rabbit ears drop from my hair and furl down over my shoulder—furry against my shirtless back.
“Mixing the world up in a mixing bowl” I would punch stars out of thin sheets of sugar-cookie dough and devour them, tip by tip. I would lay thin slices of lemon, grapefruit, tangerines crystallized in sugar in bright clumps around the ice-berg oceans. Voracious planet. Magma simmering like tomato soup. Continents shaped from crunchy sheets of zweiback toast. The sun is a ball of fat—the moon is marzipan. All the rain is weak iced tea with tingy sprigs of mint. ‘The many contradictions of change.”

Casper and the Lonely Doll

01.24.01
11.23.03

The teacher drinks diet grapefruit soda from an aluminum supermarket can. The boy to my left has coffee (cream, no sugar?) in vending machine styrofoam. The general in the madhouse poem has an antfarm in his head. I used to have lizards crawling around in mine. I’m tired of hearing everyone say ‘crazies’ and I want to start gulping Xanax in sympathy. Prozac circus. The diet grapefruit is artificially flavored, and that disapoints me, somehow. “Allright, where are we?” I will have a dozen birds of paradise when wed. I will have Cavalieri bread bread and peacock stew. Everything we eat will be endangered. Somedays everything tastes like floating. I don’t like doorless stalls, the wet spot under the toilet or between my legs. Only the scent of lilacs on the linen pillowcase—I imagine myself in blue silk drifting noiselessly on wax floors through a lemon-dusted house. Not everyone aspires to being a ghost. Casper warped me. Casper and the Lonely Doll and Sara Crewe. The littlest elephant. Ping the duck. All the misbegotten orphans of the world—by the time you’re grown it’s too late for rescue.

Casper and the Lonely Doll

01.24.01
11.23.03

The teacher drinks diet grapefruit soda from an aluminum supermarket can. The boy to my left has coffee (cream, no sugar?) in vending machine styrofoam. The general in the madhouse poem has an antfarm in his head. I used to have lizards crawling around in mine. I’m tired of hearing everyone say ‘crazies’ and I want to start gulping Xanax in sympathy. Prozac circus. The diet grapefruit is artificially flavored, and that disapoints me, somehow. “Allright, where are we?” I will have a dozen birds of paradise when wed. I will have Cavalieri bread bread and peacock stew. Everything we eat will be endangered. Somedays everything tastes like floating. I don’t like doorless stalls, the wet spot under the toilet or between my legs. Only the scent of lilacs on the linen pillowcase—I imagine myself in blue silk drifting noiselessly on wax floors through a lemon-dusted house. Not everyone aspires to being a ghost. Casper warped me. Casper and the Lonely Doll and Sara Crewe. The littlest elephant. Ping the duck. All the misbegotten orphans of the world—by the time you’re grown it’s too late for rescue.

The Willingness to Believe in Easter Eggs

03.01.01
12.27.03

“The willingness to believe lies.” “Frivolous details
from popular culture.” This poem wants to monkey-arm
your neck, shimmy nipple nubs against your blouse, nip
your fingers between translucent teeth and ride you home.
This poem wants to rubble in your palm. This
poem smells like lanolin and milk. “I didn’t go
any further than that, I think most people who
write snow poems don’t.” “If the line’s already
been used, then why use it?” My lover carries
my name-lace with his keys, and when he takes it out
for sleeping and drapes it tangled on my lotion-cluttered
nightstand I like to see the silver tarnished
by his touch. –Your skin must taste like
cranberries, your hair like walnuts. Tommorow Robin
and Aliyah are wed. Jobless I have no gift.
“skin-time” This poem wears a necklace of
rhinestones and rosary beads. “But...we do that,
we say things one way, and then we go back
and say them in another way.” “It’s a map
of heights.” “Yeah, it all depends on the
rhythm.” “It’s just part of my personal thing, I
don’t like similes that much.” I think about
the stiff cotton and dye smell of unwashed Levis
and the flatness of bank-fresh ones. “I felt
a little rusted in the Easter egg stanza.”

We Hear Elephants Wear Burlap Underwear

04.02.01
11.24.03

We hear Russel Edson has a thing with roofs. The address is on the evening’s programs – none are evident.
Bare feet track splay-toed foot-prints in Kayro syrup across the green linoleate floor.
“Art makes us believe what we cannot understand.”
Ghosts dream in Librium hues.
Stereoisomers. Lace aprons. Librium. Elavil.
“One is always in danger of profundity.”
Garrulous.

Slurping Sentences

We will be long-dead and buried, and our bones will still be rumbling on the qualitative differences between men and women.
Spun sugar bird in a store display window with bark candy falling, cleaning the glass and Windex spoils the sugar and preserves but it doesn’t have anything to do with innocence “there’s that stain when you enter the world of experience…still a great experience though.” “Maybe passion is having an attitude that’s too great and it’s going to destroy…” – Writer’s are inexhaustibly greedy.
“Perhaps I have the soul of a reptile, after all.”—
‘Heaven has no place for the lukewarm.’
“She can’t find beauty unless it comes
through the door of truth.”
Xerox, paper for today’s business needs.—
Xanax, pills for today’s business people.
“I think there’s a lot to be said
for humility.”
Aerosolized liquid latex….”I don’t
see the self-righteousness here.”
What woman has not, at some point in
life, wanted to smash her lovers’
reflection in the mirror?
Pills skitter between bare toes…close your eyes again, we are always on the beach.

The Opium-Faced Girl

Orchids, the hairs rise my cold upper arms, bought a paperback copy of Story of O. Forgot my loose-leaf with all the poems in it at home in the hurry not to be late, not to be late, and ran to find a note on the door saying teacher ill, micro canceled.
I like the way the opium-faced girl
places away her sandals and hides her feet
up under her long black skirt, twitching
out her toes and retracting them again. They
are polished black, her mascara is black, and
I imagine her with the porcelain stem of a
hookah between her teeth. On her right wrist
is a bracelet of metal and black beads twisted
in several layers up her arm. On her left is
a watch.

The Class of Frozen Addicts

“It’s not all just molecules,” I want to tell her, the woman talking monotonously about the chemical properties of opiates and caffeine. It’s not all pka and routes of administration. It’s a ritual. There’s more to smoking pot than routing molecules of delta-9-tetrahydrocannibinal to the vascular depths of the lungs—it adds a social element. And she’s never used a psychoactive in her life.

Beer with Coca-cola

“It’s all about the pre-knowledge.” I want a
house with an enormous hearth, all white plaster
and warm brick and unpolished copper. I want
a stand above it in which to boil water or
soup in a cauldron or bake flat-bread on an
iron tray. I want it to have a wooden floor
so I won’t have to vacuum. I want my own
bedroom and a bathroom with a huge, separate
tub, like the one in Aviva’s’s apartment, but a shower
also big enough for two. I love taking showers
with Ryan. “Francis called from the emergency
room, but it’s not her, it’s her daughter.”
Zits pop up on my chin and forehead, stretching
the skin above them painfully. “The man never
says anything, but you know a lot about him.”
The nail-polish is crumbling from my hands. I
remember being stung by jelly-fish on a spring-break
beach in Virginia, years ago. I try to think
of good dream stories to tell my boyfriend before
we fall asleep. “I don’t know who the poem
was written for.” Last weekend I asked him
what his father did. “I’d like her to be
even more ruthless.” “600 years in middle
management.”