poetryinthewild

[poetryinthewild]

poem for catcalls

when men on the street shout at me to smile

let me bare my teeth.

what?

i thought you liked your girls wild

if i’m going to end up your bitch, at least let me be feral.

girl who smiles a crescent moon smile will

hear the wolves whistling

and wonder how much skin she’d have to show

to make them howl.

hey baby makes you wonder what they see

an infant crawling down the street on all fours,

encountering the sights and smells of the world outside the womb

baby’s skin is soft

baby’s eyes are wide

baby doesn’t boil from angershame

baby knows to hide when the wolves sniff her out.

[poetryinthewild]

For the Shanghai Circus and the Man who Collapsed at 96th Street

When I was younger, my mother would drag my sister and me down to Times Square. We'd turn the corner towards 8th avenue and stumble upon the New Victory Theater, a small place that was the hotspot for student field trips. My mother took us to see the Shanghai Circus because of the exhilaration- men swinging from poles, ladies quivering on tightropes, a roller derby onstage, and my mother's favorite act, the chairs. The point of the Chair Act was simple- a 25 year old Chinese man would stack chairs and climb them, building the tower higher and higher as he added more and more. He would place the final chair crooked, so that it was wobbling unsteady on one leg. Usually he would perform a handstand on this chair. It was a fear of strength, agility, and bravery. To my eight year old eyes, the Chair Act was one of the scariest things that had ever existed. I couldn't bear to keep my eyes open, and yet I couldn't bear to close them. Transfixed, I held my breath until he was safely on the ground again. This was my mother's favorite act. She believed beauty existed within fragility- a chair, precarious, the moment of truth. I'm fifteen and getting off an uptown 3 train from Times Square. It's slightly past rush hour- at 8 pm, I am able to get a slightly less than comfortable seat sandwiched between a girl with a weave and a denim jacket and an older man holding an expensive camera. It feels liberating getting off at 96th street- I walk briskly through the station, reveling in the space that surrounds my limbs. I'm still walking when I spot the man- lying on the ground with his shirt off, the firemen are performing chest compressions and rescue breaths, applying pads to his bare skin. A small audience has gathered- this is their show. The audience peers at the man with concern. No one makes an effort to move. I know from Wednesday CPR class that the man's heartbeat right now is that of a bird, fluttering its wings erratically against his rib cage. The bird flies from his chest and into my throat, lodging itself. I cannot speak, I wouldn't want to. I can't bear to keep my eyes open but I can't bear to close them. Transfixed, I am holding my breath. My mother believes beauty exists within fragility, and I am watching a human life on a strand of spider silk; he is a mistake away from breaking. The man is precarious, balancing on the brink of death. Transfixed, I am holding my breath in the moment of truth. The medics call out that his heartbeat is regular again, and the bird struggles out of my throat and back into his chest, its steady wings beating a thum-da-dum. The circus performer has gotten off the chair and climbed down again, I breathe and he breathes, we are taking a bow.

[poetryinthewild]

Fishing for the Letter E

Isadora knows how to catch catfish but chooses to catch nothing, casting a fishing rod out into tranquility and pulling lily pads and twigs and twists of ivy that skip along a glasstop pond into waiting, loving arms.

[poetryinthewild]

Gina

i take in Gina through absorption, back pressed up against the matted blue seats of the m96 crosstown, i soak up every molecule: lips parted as if to blow a bubble, hair falling in messy bangs stuck to her forehead, crescent curve of her neck, looking off to the front of the bus, her rich brown eyes with thick lashes that she bats at the fathers picking up their daughters from elementary school. gina's hands are delicately folded across her lap, a thin scar running alongside her right index finger becomes visible as she raises her hands to adjust her necklace. she moves a cocktail ring down towards her knuckle and the scar is gone, tucked beneath the ornate jade.

[poetryinthewild]

I Kiss a Girl

& she's blushing all over, cheeks splotched with ruddy pink, it

stains her face like a kool-aid spill.

i didn't know lips could blush too or

maybe it's syrup from the watermelon candy,

she stared straight at me as she crunched it into shards,

i’m thinking maybe this redness is chemical.

she glances at me and her eyes

slice the room apart,

dividing our distance into a series of rivers:

i wind through a crowd of bodies like a brook trout squeezing into the space between stones.

she is an island, and i am beached on the shore of her gaze.

i am forgetting how to breathe on dry land, words bubble up in my throat and suck themselves back down my windpipe,

this is a rhythm of rise and fall, push and shove,

courage and falter.

a dribble of watermelon escapes the corner of her lip, she is a goddess and i understand this to be ambrosia.

the candy gives me a secondhand sugar high,

i am electrified into existence and

she doesn't kiss with her mouth open.

the taste of fruit like summer breath,

her kisses are fluttering moth wings,

i am trying to prove we share a pulse beyond

the heart left twitching on the operating table.

i am trying to prove that she doesn't believe

love can be sterilized into experimenting

the word floods my mouth like iodine,

stinging with sanitization as if

fucking was only okay in a labcoat.

i want my love to make a mess,

i want her to open her mouth.

i kiss a girl

& she's blushing all over,

pulling herself away, prying her lips off mine

i am trying to prove that we share a pulse and

she is trying to pretend she's never met me,

the candy splinters like glass, she chews fast and nervous,

experimenting.

i stare at her lips and know that lips can't blush,

we both know this redness is chemical.

[poetryinthewild]

love poem for phineas

you play your bones a marimba

body as instrument, my ears ring with the glissando of your ligaments

legs running in a sun drenched daydream

daisies on the riverbank, your gaze leaks into mine

light refracting from the film of your eyes like mirror prism rainbows

you trap afternoon shadows in the cradle of your shoulder blade

an arm wrapped around the tree trunk like your best girl's waist

you prowl forward, catlike, limbs groaning, you stand upright,

gloriously freckled in the august sun.

you never hurt like the other boys did,

never flinched when they called you queer,

you just smiled and inched farther down the bough,

their words like the

tail end of arrows, brushing the nape of your neck

as each one misses its target.

i look at you until you become unfamiliar to me,

your eyes scrawl out a suicide note.

each time you jump a new and beautiful death,

each time you arise from the water, a resurrection.

[poetryinthewild]

maisie (work in progress)

Maisie runs her hands over her body ruggedly

a children's bicycle hesitant without training wheels,

She flinches when she hits the bumps,

each new curvature jarring, each scab fresh.

her stretch marks cause the tires of her palms to skid, bitten chapped lip,

Maisie gets familiar inside a foreign skin.

she speaks with sand in her mouth,

soft and mudsweet mumbling, she floats down the hall humming birdsongs,

Maisie peels herself from her body in corkscrew spirals, learns how to levitate

she barters with God over coffee,

sitting cross legged on her old rug, his voice is windchimes, her laugh the tinkling of spoons, she begs him

if I were born again let me be a meadowlark

[poetryinthewild]

the doomsday clock is two minutes closer to midnight

the doomsday clock is two minutes closer to midnight,

or so said the headline that caught me off guard, sitting in my kitchen,

one hand buried in a bag of potato chips, another poised over the keyboard.

i found it strange, that the symbol of our impending doom comes at midnight, violet midnight which represents so many beginnings,

the night is young when you place your arms around me, the hour like a baby bird, your lips on my neck, midnight, we sway to jazz in the club up near the bridge on 135th street, midnight, lying in bed with the door shut, staring up at the ceiling and asking god if he could ever love me back- this is midnight.

according to our scientific friends, the clock now stands at 11:57

i recall past eleven-fifty-sevens, the new year's eve before 2010, lying in bed with my sister and pulling the covers up over our faces. dick clark was still alive in 2010, so his voice poured out from the screen, aged but not defeated, we thought if only we could grow old like that.

if the world's supposed to end in 3 minutes, we have time to listen to a song, two if they're very short. most of your favorite songs were the long climactic ones, the triumph at the build up and beauty as you reveled in it. 

we'd have time for one short song. maybe we'd dance real slow, my head tucked into your shoulder. 

we'd hold hands and wait for the world to catch on fire, laugh as the sun swallowed us whole, we would kiss in our last minute, not passionate like a last act, but gently like goodbye.

god would watch us with his hand poised over the heavenly keyboard.

god would press delete and maybe wish he hadn't.

[poetryinthewild]

Alma, New York

my mother dreams of tin bowls, blueberries, fresh grown thyme poking its head out of cold packed soil. she paws at the snow covered stalks with her gardening gloves, brow knit in a stern expression as if her glare could melt the december frost. the snow came over alma the way a child pulls a blanket over her head on a too-cold Sunday morning, we woke up to find the world had grown still, wandering into the woods like bewildered pilgrims, the trees were holy men adorned in white, raising their branches in exotic prayer. winter dropped itself on our doormat, an abandoned daughter we took in out of pity even if it meant wearing wool socks and boots, pulling on heavy jackets and watching our breath curl up into the air like tendrils of dragon smoke. i found my fingers trembling, snatching at hours of daylight, and when the sun sank into the fields, i fell deep into the corner of our old armchair, inhaling the musk tucked into the upholstery, hearing the smack of my mother’s knife on the wooden cutting board, seeing her eyes glaze over and her hands freeze up, held in nostalgic limbo, dreaming of raspberries, basil, lush, sweet summertime.

[poetryinthewild]

Poem for the Swamp

i saw eyes everywhere that summer, irises swimming with rich amber, pressed open, yellow wide eyes blinking from the brush, my sister niamh said they were owls and i offered up visions of bushbabies, lemurs, longtailed weasels, swallows, rustling leaves made hallucinations run rampant through our muddied minds. i remember that summer as a hazy heat, a filmstrip passing by in watery apparitions of healer hands, palms outstretched, the moonlit revels of mischievous sprites. beyond the realm of our small pond, gypsy caravans made our fathers scowl. paper lanterns strung up above our heads illuminated dragonflies swooping down to tickle our eyebrows. we spoke nature’s language like a mother tongue, we learned that brambles could scratch, that you should never tickle an alligator, that you don’t tell mom where you got the purple bruise under your knee. cattails murmured secrets to us that were lost in translation once niamh opened her mouth, we forgot that english couldn’t mimic the hush of the long grass, and we started hearing voices: subdued in the daytime, we listened to the faint chatter of the cypress trees, sat perched like buzzards on a rotting log, legs half submerged in the green waters where minnows wriggled by the hundreds, river grasses crept up onto our toes, swamp weeds choked our ankles, niamh pulled up vines and twigs to make herself a crown, i twisted daisy stems until they snapped and the poultice dribbled onto my soil-covered fingers. at night, we snuck out to watch the barefoot gypsies dance, mesmerized by skirts swishing in unison, legs bewitched by the tambourines. evening would give way to the swaying of bodies in drunken fullness, but when everyone went home, we could hear the marsh cry out. the scream of the insects rang in my ears until early morning, the katydids crept into my nightmares as the ecosystem began to invade my subconscious. i was a body overrun by termites, i looked down at my arms and saw crumbling wood, ants crawled over my flesh and plucked out my eyeballs for the queens of their colonies, i ran my hands over my neck to find gills had grown in, i was made of fish scales and slime, gasping for air in a bed overgrown with weeds. i would grip my bedsheets and feel algae, struggling to stay afloat until i was swept under deep black rapids, listening to the pounding of the water and the mountain sound. niamh is scared of death, so i don’t tell her that i’ve seen it firsthand, i drowned every night in my dreams and everything about that summer unfolded before me like a scroll, a memory plastered across my mindscape, oils and snakes, charms and spells, toad blossoms and eye of newt, herbal remedies, palm-readers, all of it stood and watched, and as i choked, i began to unravel my muscles came unstitched, organs disappeared, joints popped apart. in the moments just before waking, i was always a pile of bones settling to the bottom of the water, waiting for some river god to pick me up, hold me gently in his hands, i would whisper to him create me before i disintegrate please.

[poetryinthewild]

poem for the swamp, side B

i saw eyes everywhere that summer,

rich amber, pressed open, yellow wide eyes blinking from the brush,

niamh said they were owls and i offered

visions of bushbabies, lemurs, longtailed weasels, swallows,

the rustling of the leaves caused hallucinations to run rampant before gritty eyelids.

  nature taught us all she knew that summer,

that brambles could scratch, that looncalls were avian lovesongs,

that you don’t tell mom where you got the purple bruise under your knee.

cattails murmured secrets to us that were lost in translation once niamh opened her mouth,

we started hearing voices:

subdued in the daytime, we listened to the faint chatter of the cypress trees,

sat perched like buzzards on a rotting log, legs half submerged

in the green waters where minnows swam by the hundreds,

river grasses crept up onto our toes, swamp weeds choked our ankles,

niamh pulled up vines and twigs to make herself a crown, i twisted daisy stems until they

snapped and the poultice dribbled out and wetted my soil-covered fingers.

  at night, the marsh began to cry out.

  the scream of the insects grew deafening, we were taught to ignore the wail of the mosquitoes,

but the crickets chirped without cease, katydids screeched, beetles clicked

until the swamp let out one massive groan and began again,

the ecosystem began to invade my subconscious,

every night i was a body invaded by termites,

i looked down at my arm and saw crumbling wood, ants crawled over my flesh and plucked out

my eyeballs for the queens of their colonies, i ran my hands over my neck to find gills had grown in,

i was made of fish scales and slime, gasping for air in a bed full of algae.

[poetryinthewild]

poem for the swamp, side A

healer hands, palms outstretched, we reveled in

shadows and summer creatures hiding in the long grass,

each one told us not to go where the fairy lights twinkled,

beyond the realms of the cattails, gypsy caravans made our fathers scowl

paper lanterns strung up above our heads illuminated the dragonflies

swooping down to tickle our eyebrows.

  the gypsy skirts swished in unison to the pounding drumbeat,

legs bewitched by the wail of the fiddle and the jump of the tambourine

nights would give way to cricket song and drunken fullness, the sway of bodies,

couples leaning against trees so close that their foreheads pressed together,

their gaze lost deep in each other.

niamh watched it all with wonder, half asleep and leaning back on her hands,

her eyes were gleaming from the twinkle lights and suddenly i wanted to stir it all up,

the deep black rapids, the air thinning, stomping, blackbirds and the mountain sound,

i wanted to bottle it like an antidote, an ointment, cap it and hold it so tightly to my heart that my fingers would lose circulation and whiten,

everything about that summer unfolded before me like a scroll,

a memory plastered across my mindscape, oils and snakes,

charms and spells, toad blossoms and eye of newt, herbal remedies, palm-readers,

all of it stood and watched as i unraveled myself,

unstitched my muscles, organs, joints, until i was a pile of bones sitting next to you,

a dog came along and bit my femur but it didn’t hurt hahahahahahahaha

i am not myself, nor you, nor the version of myself that you used to see, or want me to be,

you are an idle god, i know you have quick hands,

create me before i disintegrate please.

[poetryinthewild]

elegy for a christmas tree, december 26

we propped you up on thursday’s garbage,

your wooden arms leaning against the pavement with aging grace.

the truck hadn’t come yet,

hadn’t purred along the icy asphalt,

hadn’t fogged up our windowpanes with carbon sighs.

the snow had fallen like a sheet,

clinging to our eyelashes and the woolen fuzz of our mittens,

we carried you like a casket.

  you were dressed up in spectral finery,

a burial shroud of phantom tinsel,

avery said she could hear the clink of ghost baubles,

i saw christmas lights pop before my eyes like sunspots.

  we propped you up on thursday’s garbage,

you fell mercifully into the snow, your pine needles sunk blissfully.

the snow covered everything, a sheet, a blanket, a child pulling the bedcovers over her head on a too-cold morning.

you sat docile on the curb, existed quietly amongst

abandoned television sets, broken record players, plastic bags filled with milk cartons, sheets of flattened cardboard, rotting furntiture, dirty mattresses,

baby shoes dusted with feathery snowflakes, baby shoes worn down with the whimsy of first steps, soles beaten with toddling magic.

we carried you like a casket,

pallbearers of the yuletide.

  avery held her breath the whole time, said that

every curbside is a graveyard on boxing day,

we walked away from you guiltily, hands in our pockets,

socks coming up over our boots, sleet perching on the arms of avery’s jacket.

avery took a breath when we got inside, but she said the air was too hot, 

too stuffy,

too laden with pumpkin and ham.

  avery went back downstairs and 

came back inside five minutes with red cheeks and a red nose

and pockets full of pine needles which

spilled out of her pockets across the floor

and into the corners of the room where wrapping paper lay like an idle snake.

[poetryinthewild]

come with me

  come with me to the ends of the earth

siren song from brine wet rocks, splashed, whipped with salt air

nymph song from wet trees, your dew soaked shirt in the wet leaves.

  i have loved you before,

have known you in the call to prayer, turkish coffee and baklava,

we ate figs and dates and dried fruit,

falafel, kebabs, fistfuls of orange shoved in hungry mouths

i loved you in istanbul on chalky mornings that lumbered sleepily to the horizon,

at twilight, velveteen sundowns swaddled in spices,

i ran my fingers up the underside of your arm, painting your veins with fire.

on sultry nights when your sighs could breathe the dust

off of ancient persian carpets,

we murmured back into the city,

a pair of lungs inflating in the overwhelm.

  plum blossoms, orange blossoms, lilies, lilacs

shimmied off the vine as if magnetized

and waltzed into our ears and eyes and noses, wrapped us up in thick springtime

we came home every night picking petals out of our sweaters,

too shy to whisper “he loves me”

  they say there is a halfway point

at which you can look back at all the dreams you’ve ever hd

and pick up dust patterns, pocket change, matchboxes,

start to remember names and faces and the color of pennies.

  you came home like odysseus with slight alterations

like a new haircut,

or a different pair of shoes,

or the realization that you have fallen out of love,

i am penelope, and i pretend to spend nights contentedly near you

while you dream of her; calypso rolls prettily off a lover’s tongue

  your sleeve catches a slant of light in the subway station,

we smoke cigarettes and pour the ashes onto our fingers

try to conjure up plum blossoms, baclava, the mosques, mount fuji, the old penn station

i loved you even towards the end

your cheek pressed up against the window 

of the greyhound bus back from washington,

i listened to your heart beat, wondered if you were awake,

we existed in eyelashes and elbows, knuckles, baby hairs

nothing to say to each other

we folded and unfolded our hands;

we began in a supernova and ended in creation.

[poetryinthewild]

requiem for a girl lost at sea

i have only met god once, saw Him

blowing me fishmouthed kisses from behind the

shed where i used to practice being a grown-up,

sitting straight and keeping my eyes down.

  He said baby sugar darling girl,

can we cut the sweet talk? and if you have ever been to

the ocean in the mid-winter, you can remember

that particular smell of brine and melancholy that

carves a cavity in your lungs.

  the winter i moved to the seaside,

i went swimming every morning,

let myself straddle the current and collapse onto the shore.

the sea must have been 40 degrees,

i stretched myself above the water, let the icy waves lick at my neck.

i dreamt of drowning the first few nights, i would wake up

with chills dribbling down my spine, cold pathways of fear constricting my throat,

a scream without sound, paralysis.

i stayed awake, sleep was dangerous water where i always drifted out too far.

my eyelids became blue at the bottom from where i had to

tug them closed.

  if you have ever been to the ocean in mid-winter,

you can remember the way the snow piles on the dunes,

the way the grass sags with the weight,

a hunchback standing sentinel over the water.

  you can remember the way your body halts, suspended in the january frost.

your heartbeat will begin to slow down,

your eyes will freeze over and cease to see straight,

your hands will go numb if they have nothing to hold onto,

and if god comes along when you’re too young to know better,

you’ll tilt His face toward yours and say into the breeze,

unthaw me.

[poetryinthewild]

lola lola

  in the half-light gloom of harlem november,

lola kicks at the crimson leaves that have begun

to flutter slowly off the london planetrees that line 137th street.

on sunday mornings, lola sings the whole way back from church, and on sunday nights

lola wears her boys like bangles,

four on each arm,

all expensive and shiny and new.

  we prowl the block every night, lola and me,

done up in high heels and lipgloss,

and the blackest kohl we could find

sitting sullenly with the rest of the expiring eyeshadow and concealer,

next to a box of advil and a couple of

bottles of chewable vitamins;

this is the poetry in which i can paint you my mother’s medicine cabinet.

lola has spidery smears of eyeliner smudged under her lashes,

i call her raccoon, she tells me

raccoons can see in the dark!

i call her duck,

but this time, it’s harder for her to see the way she waddles after her mamitá

as if she’s just clawed her way out of the egg.

  lola says we should take the 1 train down to columbia tonight

she says she likes her men smart,

but i know it’s because lola likes the way the christmas lights make the cobblestoned paths gleam,

how she likes the idea of living in a city where trains run only underground, how

a university is a candy store where you can

pop facts into your mouth and let them sit on your tongue, she wants to learn to speak with

“e-lo-quence.”

lola pronounces each syllable like a promise.

  lola clutches at my arm like it’s a lifeline as we head down 116th,

past the window of the morton williams university supermarket and down towards the park.

we are two rose-colored showgirls working the night shift.

  lola tells me that one of the corner deli places on 125th sells alcohol to minors,

lola knows where to get vodka cheaper than a gallon of milk,

lola drinks herself to death every night

and wakes up with the blue fabric of her best dress bunched up around her waist,

trying to sip righteousness through a closed mouth smile, thinking

so this is what it means to be young.

[poetryinthewild]

zoo

the word zoo becomes funny if you say it enough times, like Riley and I do. the whole bus ride, we are looking at each other with lollygag eyes, my mouth parted slightly, ZOOZOOZOOZOOZOOZOOZOO (haha). the bus stops just outside the gate, Riley idles with the engine, dawdling and fixing a shoelace. I tell Riley that I like the big animals, especially gorillas because they look a lot like us and I used to think about those gorillas encased in glass coffins before zoo meant "jail!" and life was a big whopping metaphor. I think that getting older means laughing more, thinking less, letting the word ZOO roll off your tongue about six thousand times until your whole mouth tastes like cherries. Riley heads straight for the polar bears, gawking at the great white beasts paddling like puppies to stay afloat, it just kills him, how an animal that ferocious has not dreamt up a more graceful way to swim. Riley doesn't notice me leave, his nose pressed against the glass like a prayer. I take my time walking to the primate house, dig the toe of my converse sneaker into the wood chips, inhale the excitement of ice cream and balloons. the primate house is quiet, families moving in and out with a lull. I look at the gorilla through the glass, admire his great silver hair and beautiful back and when I whisper "zoo zoo zoo zoo zoo," I could have sworn I saw his mouth moving.