Pre-Poland

It was his apartment but she unlocked the door, leading them inside. While she began to undress he went to the oven, turning the knob to the highest heat and pulling the door open, hoping to warm the little room. He sat down and watched her pull off each layer, staying in his coat and scarf, too trashed to do anything but watch. She stripped off the absurd black wool pants they had bought her yesterday, now only in ripped black tights and a thin lace camisole. He knew she came from money and so her vagabond presence, the neediness of it all, every tear in her clothes, baffled him anew. The Europe winter had bleached her; he had the sense that her skin should be olive but it was an unenthusiastic yellow, a dried lemon, covering her small wrists and bloated stomach. She was a caricature of baroque neglect. Her nails were little black discs she painted every night, with jagged red strips of skin surrounding them like detail on pottery. She would sit with fingers in her mouth and write at the table, unconscious of the blood from the finger in her mouth blossoming through her lips. Avoiding his eyes, she went to the stove and put apple juice in a pot, a makeshift offering of cider she felt made up for her presence. The air was laden with the purposeful attempt to move casually, to dredge up the sensual, to crowd out the sentimental. She filled the two little 1970s tea cups, thin German bone, and brought them to the table where he sat, all heavy glass and dirty smoky breaths.

She spoke more quietly in the apartment, he noticed. Her words creaked with the weight of ornamentation. An impressive woman, he imagined, the sort with an endoskeleton of disappointment. Men do not love the impressive. They tinker with it until the Cartier of a woman resembles a shabby steampunk watch. She was otherwise regal, he was sure. There were glimpses of this quick bitter bite, ringing her spirit like a rind, but only when they weren’t in this little room. Lifting the teacup to his face, he stared at her, hunched over, examining the train ticket. She stared at the thick white slip and only saw red, the crimson walls of the East Berlin nightclub. A silly German man named Johann had pulled her aside in the smoking room, telling her about his trip to Los Angeles. He had seen the Hollywood sign, he had thrown up at magic mountain. Pulling away from Johann eventually, she went back to their group of friends. He was standing there, waiting for her.

He said, “Did you have a nice conversation?”

She smirked, “Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, darling.”

His face contorted into something like injury. They finished their smokes and he led her inside, twirling her in a playful spin. She pulled away and walked ahead, an unnatural construction of cruelty, adrenalizing venom. It didn’t last. Turning around, she grabbed his waist and pulled him against a crimson wall. The following moments were heat. Mouth in the deep grooves of her collarbones, tiny bone hands twisting his black curls, a grating jean zipper. Skinny austere German boys walked by and stared and she laughed at them. He was busy in her hair as she stuck her tongue out at an anorexic industrial girl wandering by. These moments were the shriek of a raped tea kettle. He pulled away and they went back on the dance floor. His pulls on the flask of bourbon came harder after that. At the end of the night, while they waited for the U-Bahn, he jumped onto the tracks and began to walk back and forth. He called at them, “There are enormous rats down here. The government shoves real Berlin between the tracks.”

Now they sat at the table, hit with the smell of burning apples. He rolled her a cigarette and lit it, wanting to see her little hand erect and pinching the long rolled paper between her middle and ring fingers.

He asked, “What would you like to listen to?”

Smoke dribbled from her mouth, her answer made cotton by the thick air.

“Mountain Man.”

Their frames withered with each minute, the deflation of tired roses. She carelessly placed the burning cigarette on the wooden table and climbed into his lap, one leg on each side of his body, facing him. Pulling off her camisole, with a gaze of heavy water, she did the same to his coat, the roughly cut fabric acting as a scarf, the buttons of his cardigan, all of it. All of it.

She said, “I want our chests to be touching.”

A black nail traced it all, the stubble, the rough Neanderthal bones propping the eyes of lazy almonds, pouting witty lips.

She said, “Come with me. Come with me.” Imploring.

“Where?”

“You know. Poland. You know.”

He shook his head no. Wet eyes of lazy almonds. Wet rivulets tracking through black stubble.

“It’s not right to make love right now. It can wait til morning.”

“Okay. Okay.”

He took her to the train station. It was some hours past noon and the city already moved toward darkening. She regretted asking if he was coming, because in that moment she realized there would never be any way to know if he would have of his own accord. This difference seemed to matter. He rolled her a cigarette while she ran around the tracks, asking different personnel in broken German about the train schedule. She strode back him eventually, rage trembling beneath her pale face, tightly wound and yellowing like an old corset. The wet air, hard in the cold, treaded through her hair; the black strands always seemed to crash around her head like cymbals. Tugging on her knots, she lit the cigarette and smoked hurriedly, leaning over the tracks and looking for the train. He waited until she calmed down and told her, knowing she couldn’t read German, that the sign read a 45 minute delay.

She said, “You can leave.” She began to roll the overstuffed backpack between her boots, staring at him insistently.

He looked at his watch, then stepped forward and placed his chin onto her right collarbone. He sang her lullabies and Tom Waits, told her about visiting Munich. And the train came and she got on, and he went down the escalators. And she watched until he disappeared, and turned to find her seat as the train began to move. And he had run up the escalators stairs, backwards, and jumped onto the moving train and kissed her and jumped off and she slumped down in the train hallway arms splayed and withered as angry German mothers strode by with their fat ankles and swinging floral bags hitting her face, a corset completely undone.

She said, "But ______ didn't break you. It didn't fuckin' break you. And you should be proud."

___

I told another she, "It broke me. It broke me. And no one can tell. That's breaking me."

She said, "Well, how can we tell? How could anyone fuckin' tell. You are an onion,

wrapped in concrete,

with a little satin bow on top to boot."

___

She said, "You're so tiny. When I held you, I thought, 'Where is she? Where is she?'"

___

She said, "None of us could approach you. You looked cruel. We thought, 'She will think we're morons if we even try.' And then, you weren't. Cruel. And I thought, okay. And you're just this little sensitive thing, come to find out."

___

So no one will pull me into the bushes, or their car, I walk in the middle of the boulevard in the glowering shimmer of 1:30 am afterdark. Maybe the car that swerves just past my toes thinks I am drunk. And I think of my cruelty and I am glad.

Anatomy of a Writer





























Rightfully blurred

Exorcism at Lethe

At last, my love gave me that scene from a movie;
it was all ugly gasping and absurd fists
pounding on his chest.
Streaming ochre and talc. Screams down a Madrid street:
come back. come back. don't just leave me
standing
here.
don't leave me. just, please.
be just.
Please.

I said, "We are meant to be. This is our lives' great love."

He said, "Meant to be is a continual deciding."

He was not wrong, he was not wrong. What a relief that he was not wrong.

Confrontation Series

Father, I am so sorry your body is failing you.

Father, I am living the way you do.

Your nerve: my heart's fortitude

Shoulder muscle: septic organ.

Etc, etc.

To what extent this is of your choosing is clear and
to what extent I let this moat be built
by drunken architects,
sloppy friends,
teachers forging against
us like Napoleon
is dusty crystal.

Will you still be able to hold a handful
of snapping balloons, for
me,
on birthdays?
The moon is a balloon, the moon
is
the balloon.

I am writing home to tell you to pay the water bill, I am writing home to tell you the power's out.
I am writing home to tell you I'm scared because you raised a communist who thinks her heart is common ground.
I am the dregs in a jar
of breakfast marmalade,
diluted, mild and
bitter and sour milk and uneatable lemons.

Papa, did you stop having friends for the same reasons
? (See the beautiful form of that question, marked.)

Once, you became jealous of Bear's bike and stole it and biked away so fast down oak MN St.s and pothole became eye bone on sidewalk, mangled Bear's bike, and he drove by with his mom and peeled you off concrete and now you have a scar and he was a friend of yours still).

Once, friends promised that upon my european return they'd puzzle me back together again and I taking this to mean many more things than what's been implemented as factory policy came back all a dreaming and ready to be mended and pothole became my books, their lusty needs, and I am waiting for some balloons no one gave me for my birthday and now I have a scar and love humanity so much still).

The Year of Deprivation

Henceforth how your era shall be known.

Immoveable man, I would rage at you
if you were malleable as seacliffs.
Hell is a pebble
thrown at
the moon, occasionally,
until all its white chalk
breaks off and
floats away.
Powder white, power of
cyclical reflection
joining the dodo bird, the polar bear soon.

This year reduces that rubble
to rubble.

Once, I drank milk.
Mixed with honey,
crouching in your kitchen
until you took the empty carton.
I woke up that night with the vomit of shame
and genealogical punishment in my mouth.
Women don't consume that way,
humans aren't even made to drink milk.

You ran out and in and saved me
scooping my nausea into your hands
the sandy chalk of missing enzymes.
But my deficiency is still
the centerpiece of this story, isn't it? ISN'T IT?

No, it is, and
strange that so much lack
builds such a carnival of artifices.
Fuck you, language, you really fucked me
on this one. I guess I needed you to,
since I wasn't getting fucked in the morning.

Men always told me that the perfect woman
makes love in the morning,
our eyes still sealed
breath hot lashes gums wooly.
I am white satin panties, garters,
boned corsets,
little hands,
disappearing demurity who baked her bones into pie crusts,
the most essential flour for your tongue,
navel flower,
clingy fingernails which burrow into sheets
which you tuck in the sides before we sleep.

I spent half, or more,
of my year of deprivation
in fetal position.

That pull of cello strings is
my vertebrae
snapping into place.

Tugs

If loyalty is all,
I face, roundly,
your effacement of
my standard.

Songfulness enters
it, and love's uselessness
functions like slicing
a mango,
rivulets of a pressed pit
scurrying into my sleeves,

and I am forced to angle
my elbow downward, if
loyalty is all. I can
oh, pardon us.

The redemption of wonder,
for one, that your childish
nostalgia can offer us,
"a school",
seminal saturation,
square quotes proper,
earrings of bike tires.


But more proper
to say the respect for
a possibility! I may not
yell anymore,
my sweet work screams.
I'd like to leave pretty
and soon, even while
you stick around. But oh,

loyalty is all and
possibility, you damn
leathered red floozy.

I think you'd like my small hands, godless man. I would fold unto you like a china doll, and I think you'd read to me at night. And I don't know when I'd sleep again, because I already don't. I'll keep believing in god and strain out the stains in my narrative, I'm a drug addict, I'm so and so's niece, I was to be married once, he left me for spoons and cotton balls. You are Didion and I am Didion. I don't believe it's anything essential, I don't believe that's anything essential. You are a replacement, any man is a replacement, for god in my gut. China doll china doll but only if you ask me. To dinner, to protect my honor, to the front door with a shake and nothing more. My radiator is broken do you know how to fix it, it scares me at night. China doll china doll.

Dare I? I do dare:
Come to me, come to me in spring. Come to me stateside, my side of the states. You bring those lazy almond eyes and I, I will feed you and nourish you with all the rest.
Climb the stairs of my building, across the street from where Ginsberg wrote Howl, up to my room. Come only with the intention of kissing me, kissing me on the mouth and nowhere else, like I was to kiss you and no one else in Berlin. And then thumb through my books, find the one that seals the deal, and undress us because of it, because I have the right book and what that means about me.

Follow me, follow me here in the flesh and to my flesh because you already follow me. I open my schoolbook and the prologue is a quote from Herzog, by Saul Bellows, "For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by..."

Teach me, teach me again to roll cigarettes, this time with the confetti raspy tomb tobacco stateside. Come to me, come to me in spring because I hardly remember you at all. I am sure I am writing to myself this time and not you. But I want, do I want.

What shall we do? What we shall do, darling. For instance, anything that has a devil may care tinge upon it, teeth marks on it, crushed pomegranate bruises on it, a whip of red horse hair across it, hot apple cider to soothe it.

I resolve, most resolutely, for this new year to never yell.

Your eyes are lazy almonds. I don't remember what your eyelashes are like but i remember the droop of those lazy, lazy almonds.

There are some things people say
that I shall forthwith deny,
like:

I am not a poetry person.
I am in love but generally a forgetful person.
It's too late to think about these things and
I need my sleep.
I do not say sorry, because I am not
a sorry person.
How many lovers have you had? How many people have you slept with?
(I shall appreciate if they differentiate but
I shall deny nonetheless)

There are some things people say
that cannot be denied
nor accepted, for the sheer fragility
of veracity, like:

It is not necessary to love like this.
I am in love but am not compatible with this person.
I am a mother who named my son Abraham, or Noel, or Paul;
They will be good men.

There are things I shall say
and say and say and say and
will not deny myself, like:

I cannot be in love with anyone, because I am
already in love with love.
I will die a woman who has made love to the world.

How to not have an affair.

First and foremost, do not pick someone with a physical feature you immediately dislike. Let's get real here, vamos al fuckin grano, don't lower your standards in any way. Because the last thing you want is to stand in the street, smoking a cigarette and thinking, "I couldn't even make a short man love me." But then again, don't pick a picturesque lover. Because that's what you'll be left with: pictures of their black curls mixing with the feathers of cheap down pillows, delicate tableaux of their wide unnameable blue eyes thinking of other people they wish you were. In fact, remember that a successful affair is the seduction of self. When you mount their body, consider the act an essential dance, your way of healing yourself from the lover before who made you feel less than. Note the thighs, firm and biblical, an ancient bequeathing of generations. The sharp collarbones, at once fashionable and tragic. No! Not theirs. Yours. And for gods sake, don't laugh during. Balzac said, "Happiness is the beauty of womanhood, as clothes are it's disguise." True enough, but let us not confuse this with the caustic notion that a woman without clothes is a joyful one. Put your clothes back on and smoke a cigarette, always in that order. You are tired enough after making love, so don't give this lover the opportunity to change what you smoke by rolling you a cigarette or lighting one of theirs. Even worse, to smoke their cigarette and fall asleep with a lover who deems it appropriate to hold one another in slumber. You may sleep together like sick expats in a freezing German city. Finally warm. And so easy do we mistake inertia for homecoming in these moments. Not asking you to leave does not signify the desire for your presence. 
Surely your lovemaking will reek of the primordial, for even the most gentle affair is a union o utility. Cover your nose diligently when encountering this lover's musk, all wet bark and rough salt. You will find yourself on a dank cobblestone street in Madrid, or among rotting fruits in a makeshift market, perhaps nose in a mug of steaming cider, and the irrepressible fact that you will never smell something quite like this lover again will snack on your innards like the worm in a tequila bottle. And you're in real trouble if you spray their blankets with your perfume when they aren't looking. If you're at that point, they've already won. They couldn't give half a fig about smelling you later on. 
More on this primordial state. We may be a global culture which now values convenience, but god damn does this affair remind you that we were hunter-gatherers, beings which crave steady hands and able minds. Therefore do not allow this lover to teach you a skill, particularly one which will make you feel capable or, worse yet, more poignant. They may, for instance, teach you to roll cigarettes. Congratulations, now your only respite and that yellow fragile halo on your finger pay constant tribute to a private craftsman. 
To ask a lover about past affairs is the juvenile move of a sadomasochist. You deserve whatever lashings their former lovers unassumingly whip upon your gut. The older we get, the more people there were before you who mattered more than you ever shall. The older we get, the more crowded your little DDR-issue sized bed becomes. Seal your wounded eyes, instead, with those long amorous lashes and use their pelvis for it's god-given purpose. I suppose it's best to keep any knowledge to a minimum. The first indication of a broken heart is basting trivialities with the grease of universal significance. They will have your favorite poet on their shelf and your favorite parent's favorite record. 
Never have a soundtrack. Your affair is not a grainy bildungsromanian classic that deprived fathers will watch, missing that sweet college girl they passed up for your lined and unkind mother. That song is not saying what your lover doesn't know how to. If it's true that their very fingernails ache for your tongue, those words will be said. They will be surely said. They will not follow you to Poland, they will not miss that plane, they will not look up the secret song you only listen to sobbing in the corner of the shower and then learn to play it on the guitar. Like it or not, like it or not. 

It is an inevitability that a writer, or any artist, shall love their subject. What part of this sentence is worth explaining? Perhaps the "shall." I may, any writer may, pick the most loathsome subject fathomable, and shall come to love it. I caress the hated thing, I place the negligible bump on the tip of my middle finger upon its widow´s peak or curls or shaved head and run it down, down its cheekbones, the rims of its ears, the collarbones, the ribcage, those beautiful and sharp bones defining the hips (or across its sweaty rotund paunch, as it may be), in between the webs of its toes. I fuck its daughters and sew with its mother. I search, with quiet insistence, for the watch it wears. And I am a woman, so anything I spend enough time with, I shall love. And then I shall love it until I perish or I shall love it until I suffocate it with ink and leave it in the trash like a baby from the 90s, from sheer boredom, from the shall of loving it too much. I will be a woman who has fucked the world. Being my lover has nothing to do with touching my body, but letting my pen touch yours.

were women to listen
to the murmurs of men
perhaps the swinging stalls
in our guts could
become shelves
lined with books
lined with lines
which do not cause lines
around our eyes but
rather the line across
the hand which says
her life lingered in love, not
she died of love and

were women to listen
to the murmurs of men
perhaps the marvelous
compartments of a woman's heart
filled with balloons
which inflate themselves
and never burst in fits
of ecstatic rushes
maybe the compartments
would melt from the
eery resemblance of a
bathroom stall and
more
much much more
like
chandelier prisms.

do you hear the
glass whispering?

Feedback Loop

“I’ve lost my faith,” she said.

Not even the curls on his head moved. He was completely still. She wondered if he was dead. Of course, he wasn’t, but her head always went there with loved ones. If her mother didn’t bless the day with some incessant nagging or advice her head went there. When her roommates in college wouldn’t come home for the night. And so forth. But with him, especially, she always wondered if he was dead.

He sighed. The smell of the air told her so. When her parents would wake up in the morning, she would sit with them at the breakfast table and held her breath. The smell of married couples. The same pajamas, week after week; not brushing your teeth before the other woke up, maybe going half the day that way until leaving the house. Stale, overripe. His breath was clean, full of pheromones. She had read that every mouth has its’ own chemistry. You could be completely enamored with someone’s appearance, but kiss them and the attraction would be gone. With the wrong chemistry, of course.

He had refused to kiss her for days. Before they first went to dinner, he would only walk her to the edge of campus after class. Her skin itself would hurt when he’d say, “Later, tiger!” and bike away. One evening, he walked her home and she asked him in for tea. He sat on her heavy red futon and she brought him her books. The mating dance of nerds, really. She sat on the lifted floorboards, looking up at him, telling him strange stories about this author, that poem. She knew these things worked with men like him for two reasons. One, because so many men like him had proposed marriage to her already. Two, because she was convinced he was to be hers. Only some weeks and he was already the line by which she drew the world.

When he decided that it was appropriate to kiss, he did just that. She held his breath in her mouth so long, it felt as if chili peppers were being rubbed into her lungs. Later, he told her that her breath sometimes smelled bad when they had first met.

“On the metro today, I heard a man call the woman he was with ‘my love’. I cried in our closet for an hour.”

He turned his head away from her. He had a cherub’s face, young and clean. He couldn’t grow a beard. Cheeks redder than apples. When she had taken him home for the first time, her mother asked him if he was from the Ozarks. He looked like a child from fresh mountain air, she reasoned. He wasn’t, though. He was from a small town with a funny name in a state she had never been to. She hated his parents.

Her mother said she could always foretell how a man would treat her. She only needed to learn about his relationship with his mother. Before they went to bed, at his house, he and his mother would sometimes talk on the phone. They spoke often and he responded to her inquiries gently. He would end the call by saying, “Love you, too.” That part, she didn’t like. The “I” part was what mattered.

But that’s how she now knew about the hopelessness of it all. She felt like the finches in her parents’ backyard. Her mother had hung up a bird feeder one spring and, beside it, placed a cement bird bath. A diligent woman: she woke up every morning, rolled her shiny black hair in those notorious red curlers, and smoked her secret cigarette of the day in the backyard. The bird bath and feeder, then, were her excuse to be back there in the first place. And they came, the finches. Shrieking feathered thimbles with puffed chests. Her mother placed duck tape over the light switch for the back patio, because one finch had built a nest on top of the light. Every day they came.

Her mother started hating the shells left behind, scattered on the concrete patio and pasted there with finch poop. She stopped feeding them entirely, except for some days when she felt guilt or a particular variety of matronly. It didn’t matter, either way. The finches came every day, from the moment her mother hung up that bird feeder until the last time she had been back to visit. Her mother told her, in a sad voice, that sometimes the finches became so angry they would fly toward the house, breaking their beaks on the clean windows. The birds’ feelings didn’t matter, though. They came back, every day. For the moment when the maybe became a full vessel of nourishment.

“I don’t want what we have.”

He shifted, straightening his back. She reached out her fingers, ready to rub his spine, stopping just short of his skin. When they found out he had scoliosis, she went outside and cried while smoking a cigarette. He denied it, but she knew that sort of display made him uneasy. They had gotten into the shower before bed and she looked at his shoulder blades. One higher than the other. She liked tall men, because of her father’s height, so she knew that tall men held themselves awkwardly. Shoulders rounded forward, chin a bit tucked in. He was holding himself more vertically than she had ever seen and, indeed, there was a curve. Slight, but enough that he felt uncomfortable every day she had known him. He was tilting his head back, wetting his hair, mouth open to catch the stream. She stood at the end of the tub, shivering. Every few minutes she would place her hands on his chest to catch some of the warmth.

His skin seemed a paper towel, covered with grains of salt and flakes of pepper. Rough bumps everywhere, some as white as his own skin, some a furious red. She had whispered once that it was her favorite part of him. He was surprised and asked why. She responded that it made him a more visceral experience. Any lover can guess the real reason why, though.

She pressed a hand to her stomach. Nausea always battered her intestines at this hour. Breathing shallowly, she reached over to the desk for the pink bottle of bismuth. A chalky swig. She spilled a drop or two on the carpet and rubbed them out with her toe quickly, furtively glancing at him over her shoulder. Some nights she spent on her knees, hugging the stem of the toilet. It was always a shame when that happened, and perhaps not coincidentally when she was the one who made dinner. When they had gotten together, she was hungry all the time. Their dinner dates were often the first time she would eat that day. She did love her body, it wasn’t that; it was just as if her physical needs were a broken leather sole. As long as her shoes got her around.

He started feeding her every time they were together. People didn’t stop her on the street as often, telling her to eat more. She rarely stated a preference, because she had no idea what could be made at home. Anyway he was a bit of a food snob. She was fine with mayonnaise and he made his own aioli, that sort of thing. Only once did he mess up. He bought a cut of goat meat. He later told her that an old woman in the butcher shop asked what he was buying. When he answered “Goat,” she widened her eyes and started cackling. She wished him good luck and walked out, swinging her bags and shaking her head. Stubborn as always, more motivated by this (she could guess), he bought it nonetheless and prepared it that night. They had eaten the first few bites slowly, glancing up at one another shyly. She regally, gently, pronounced it shit. He gallantly threw the gamey morsels away and scooped her some ice cream for dinner.

“You’re ice. Really, you are. If a girl ever stays with you, it’s either because she doesn’t care about you or really doesn’t give a shit about herself.”

It seemed that tonight he couldn’t be bothered. She absently stared past his head, running her bony finger over her face, sometimes her cracked lips, stopping to poke at her chipped front teeth. Shivering, pulling the blanket over her legs, she continued to stare out the window. A crowd of young Spaniards walked by, her age, probably just leaving dinner. She used to stay up late, too, but he had work in the morning. The condition was that they could only sleep in the same bed if they turned in early. He exhaled, snoring a little. She turned off the light and lay down, face in pillow.