7.06 / June 2012
from The Book of Scab
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Dear Mom and Dad,
I wanted to make something clean. Don’t you know? I wanted to make something that was not porous, no matter how closely you looked-and not you, but your machine, lens exponential in its uncompromising pronouncement. Something without fleck or pore, without texture. I wanted [...]
Call & Response
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When did you know you were gay?
my boyfriend asks in bed one night.
And I tell him it was at church camp,
age thirteen, when David, the boy
in the top bunk, shook our beds
in what he claimed was a nightmare
sent straight from Lucifer, the fallen
angel himself. I know now [...]
Between Them
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There is an old black and white photograph of
my grandfather and his brothers on the farm.
They are all strong men with thick forearms,
forceful, tall with rounded bellies,
bursting beneath dirt-crusted overalls.
I am not like my rough and muddy ancestors,
who churned boots through cracked fields
and pulled barbs from dry [...]
An Apartment of Women
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She just happened to be. Her anatomy was coincidental. Each breath could have been another’s breath. Her hair lost its way growing. Laila knew no way to go forward that did not involve sideways.
She found Nan or Nan found her in just such a confusion. Walls not [...]
Five Poems
Note: These poems are made from New York Times articles published one hundred years prior to my compositions.
Human Eclipse
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A candidate made a bet with several
contesters today that he had the biggest
mouth in the crowd and to prove his
assertion, thrust a bronzed heart between his jaws.
But it fitted [...]
Little Beast
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Margot kept things from the dig. She had a rusted fork that, when she touched its prongs to her tongue, tasted of done air. A tooth, a rib. Whose, she didn’t know. She didn’t trouble herself with ghosts. A rip of shirt, dusty soft. Blue leather, but [...]
A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us
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(0)
The space between me and my brother
has always varied in size and volume (1):
its dimensions
are ever-changing (2),
have bent and expanded,
transcended literal confines (6),
opened new spaces (3),
abstract spaces (4),
have functioned
as a membrane (5)
that wraps itself around our bodies
like the well-tailored clothing
worn in the 1950′s (7)
without ever actually [...]
Two Poems
Dear Jeny
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I know this is your name because I read it on your embossed name tag.
I’m writing this down because I can’t shout loud enough to tell you over the noisy rattle and bang of the paint mixer and the customer assistance in aisle 12b announcements.
I want to [...]
Three Poems
These poems are presented in a PDF in order to preserve the author’s artistic intent.
Two Poems
AVEC (Ah-vek):
I.
My favorite foreign word and the word
of my sexual dreams. Avec lover.
Avec or sans clothing.
II.
Pronounced yes
with the face plain as a plowed field.
Pronounced no
in your neon lipstick.
III.
The lavender soap smell of everything French and possible
in the warm morning.
IV.
Also, with with a spear going through it.
V.
The front teeth biting
the bottom [...]
Advice for the Female Fetus
1. We’ll Get to Now Later
Sometimes, when two people love each other very much, they want to get closer. So they put their bodies as close as possible to each other, like the pages of a brochure, or two legs inside a mermaid costume. This is called making love. Having [...]
Three Poems
Size
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My mother kept old love letters,
pulled them out to show me
how they smelled of men’s cologne.
She told me of size and circumcision.
She told me my own father was small.
She timbered around our house,
her body now the size of a hollowed-out log,
a sprig when they married.
Sex was something [...]
Four Poems
Geography Lessons
“hic svnt draconesâ€
-The Lenox Globe (ca. 1503 – 1507)
In the country of your childhood, country of the crossroad, of the
winged creature at the hour of its extinction, you put a secret in the ground
to kill the secret & the ground goes black. Now the ground is buried
by [...]
How to ____ a ____ Lobster ____
At some point in your life, you’ll want to believe the writers and the artists, the travel sites and the brochures, and visit the State of Maine. You’ll particularly surrender to the coast, we predict, and therefore must try some lobsters. Prepare first for your vacation by watching all possible [...]
Two Poems
Hinterland
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I collected everything:
aglets for my shoelaces, jabots for my breasts.
So this is it? I wondered. I stitched myself to windows,
attempted great somethings: a leap, for instance,
between my bedroom and the smooth shuttered garage.
Later, I caught millions of you, pillowed them with cotton balls
in clear glass jars. [...]
Altogether
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I was born a mother of three children on an island in the north. Every day I put one on my back and two in their stroller and went out to the coffee shop. I felt our bodies move forward; we lifted our faces and breathed cold [...]
Four Poems
Victoria’s Secret Says: Be A Summer Bombshell
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Take your paper dolls swimming and drown
every last one. Spend a week bleeding
and two sucking on metal keys.
Spread your painted toes
across the dashboard of his car.
Scale metal gates that pinch your armpits
like alligator teeth. Turn
your skin into a slip and slide.
Someone [...]
Three Short Essays for Aubrey Hirsch
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“These muscles,†Says He
Notice what you eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh…
-Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibalsâ€
I am new to eating animals, newer still to poultry, and preparing to cook my first whole chicken. I rinse the bird; my small kitchen [...]
Scheherazade
Make this one about a girl who wastes away. You can tell us
about her growing up, flipping stones out into the driveway
with her piano fingers,
but make sure you tell about the wasting; the self-loathing
with the quiet vigilance of a mailman.
Make her arms as thin as string, her waist turning [...]
Two Poems
How to Fight Back
Hayward, California
I’m gonna scratch up his car, pour
sugar in his gas tank and watch
the whole thing blow.
A girl inside a car of women, almost
women, speed down Mission Blvd to downtown Hayward.
Jalapeno poppers on their laps,
dinner. Miles away, their cousin cools her bruises
with weed choke, [...]