Read an Excerpt
SUMMER BARBECUE WITH TWO MEN
Tonight, the moon looks like Billie Holiday, trembling because there are problems other people have
& now I have them, too.
I’m wearing a cherry-colored cardigan over a navy print dress, on purpose.
People think I’m sweet.
I try the Ancho chile pork ribs, in case the man I once wanted might still rub off on me.
I wonder if I’ll ever know about flavors, what tastes right. In the overheated kitchen,
I chat briefly with a series of
30-something-year old men—all slender, all bearded, lustful to the point of sullen.
I hug & compliment
their pretty, female partners as a way of saying,
I am beautiful in my harmlessness!
Outside, people.
A circle of party chairs. I don’t care much for a stranger’s guacamole. The man
I once wanted is grilling
these beautiful peaches. He offers some—
I’m embarrassed. I try not to touch his hand.
I try to touch his hand. On the porch,
another man I know is kissing the shoulder of a woman
whose fiancée is here somewhere. Guess what,
he says. You’re the only one who cares.
I wouldn’t have guessed:
Judgment is a golden habañero margarita with wings, wet & cold on his chest. So
many people are tender from the right angle.
I’m hungry & confused. I love a good barbecue. Save me.
* * *
Summer Seminar
In this minor emergency of the self,
we drink to become confused,
to swim in the dark like idiot fish.
This is a lake at night in a forest.
This is where we look up at the stains in the sky and someone says, It’s purpling out here,
and someone else says, Someone write that down.
We’re all performing our bruises.
Chloe smiles like a specialty knife,
Bea tells stories like a bubbly divorcée,
Clara smokes like a sage in her coiffed towel,
expertly naked, third eye shining.
I hang back on the shore with Kyle.
We talk about his man in New York while our skinny-dipping sirens sing show tunes in the violet dark.
Later, we’re all in a clinic at 3 am handling Kyle’s broken ankle.
It’s so embarrassing, he keeps saying.
And it is: earlier, doing the sprinkler in a dorm room to Please Don’t Stop the Music,
he kept yelling, Stop the Music! Stop the Music!
until we understood: he wasn’t actually joking.
And sometimes the poems were like that.
When we wrote knife, bubbly, naked,
we were really getting down,
dancing hard on the injury.
* * *
I’m Trying to Write a Poem about a Virgin and It’s Awful
She was very unhappy and vaguely religious so I put her at the edge of the lake where the ducks were waddling along like Victorian children, living out their lives in blithe, downy softness. She hated her idleness. I loved her resilience. Her ability to turn her gaze on small versions of herself seemed important.
The lake wasn’t really a lake. It was a state of mind where words like ochre, darken and false
were supposed to describe her at her best and worst, but they were only shadows and everyone knows the best shadows always look like the worst kinds of men. She wanted them badly, so I took her for a swim. In the lake that was not a lake, her twenty-five year old body felt the joy of being bare and naïve among the seaweed and tiny neon fish, but I didn’t believe her. And I couldn’t think of anything to say in her defense. Some people said I
should take her out of the poem. Other people said No, take her out of the lake and put her in a bedroom where one man is saying, I can’t
help you, and another is saying, You waited too
long. The men sounded like cynical seabirds.
When they said, Virgin, they meant, Version
we’ve left behind. I didn’t trust them. So I took her to the rush of the sea. She waded in and waved at me. I turned away. It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t the shell I was after.
* * *
Trauma with a Second Chance at Humiliation
You remind me of a man I knew at sixteen.
Every afternoon,
I climbed the stairs to see him,
my copy of The Sound and the Fury clutched to my chest,
my hands fluttering with nerves.
When he said, She was his whole world,
about Caddy’s kindness to Benji,
I thought How Beautiful,
the clocks stilling and the field widening—
his oblong figure behind the tree.
I drew eyes in my notebooks that year,
wet lashes, dense pupils.
Also his figure—slender, awkward, geometric.
~
He liked teasing me and also a few others. But only I
read his copy of The Dialogues.
As I read, I felt him look.
At night, I traced his scribbled notes with my finger.
~
Eight years later,
I find a man who resembles him.
It’s your encyclopedic mind.
It’s the strangeness of your features.
It’s the way you hold the burnt sugar to my mouth to taste, then pull it away, eager for
my caramelized reaction.
~
Isn’t it delicious?
There’s always going to be someone willing to give a spoonful
of their attention. The trick is to recognize the conversation
will run out, right into
I’m sure we’ll run into each other sometime.
~ That was in the bookstore,
the last time I saw him.
Now you are a page I read while holding my breath. I’ll turn you
into something else, a footnote of a person. Like I was
sitting next to you on our friend’s couch,
your hand on my thigh for several seconds.
You said it—Do you want me to cook for you?
as if you could promise that and more.
~
To admit I love you would be to admit
I love ideas more than men,
myself even less than ideas.
The thin line of your mouth,
I could have held it down, erased the
I didn’t mean to make you think so.
~
What you don’t say is an iris locked in a container.
What I don’t say is an iris burning wildly over a pool of water.
I want you take yours out.
Show it to me, please.
See how an object can change when a new person wants it.
~
To divulge is dangerous, but it’s also chimerical.
One side of me says, Destroy.
The other, Be Gentle.
Now this pool of water is a platonic eye
that avoids attachment by rippling away.
These ashen petals: the expectation that you’ll understand intuitively
what has taken me years to describe.
~
I’m open to ridicule.
I can let this go.
But just so you know,
after school, it was like this:
I sat on the desk,
we talked and talked.
You could say it was nothing,
the windows fogged with winter,
the trees outside like the shadows of a bad idea
going brittle.
It does matter.
I don’t have to tell you why.
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