September - Poem 9

Questions and Advice My First Weeks Living in Mississippi: July 2009 / Laura Bandy

You’re from Illinois—rich. Don’t expect it, here.
You will never stop sweating. Get used to being damp.
Everyone eats sushi, even after the oil spill. Oishi is best.
Everyone goes down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Ignore
the X-marked houses. Katrina is over, we’re on the off ramp.
It’s tempting, but don’t join in saying “Bless your heart.”
You don’t understand.
You don’t understand where to shop—stop going
to the Wal-Mart on (redacted). That’s the Black Wal-Mart.
There is a white Wal-Mart and a Black Wal-Mart. There is
a Farmer’s Market. The egg lady will give you a bag
if you forget. If you forget where you are.
Don’t forget—Friday nights are Ladies Nights at Mag Bar
(girls drink free). Wear your cowboy boots.
Buy cowboy boots.
Nick’s Ice House has toilets for seats, part of the charm.
Brett Favre gets drunk and pisses on the floor there. Great tipper.
Miss Lula is your neighbor. She will bring you tomatoes
from her garden, also pickled cucumbers and honey biscuits.
Miss Lula likes to tell her stories. Some will curl your hair.
The bugs don’t die here and the spiders are poisonous. Just
be aware. Yeah, that’s a brown recluse. She’ll kill a gal.
“You’re a Yankee, ain’t you. Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.”
We don’t have snow. We don’t have fireflies. What is
snow like? How cold, now? Did you ever make a snowman?
Can you catch fireflies in your hand? Does it hurt when they
turn on their light? Ma’am, do you miss the North?
Don’t you know about Robert Johnson and the Crossroads?
He sold his soul to the devil there and we got the Delta blues.
They sent “Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground” into space
in ’77, that’s how good our music is. Y’all got, what… pop?
All of life’s a tradeoff, Yankee, ain’t it. Phew. I think you hate it.
Down here, we understand. Don’t look at the levee’s rim
at the water rising. The water is always rising, the pot water
always getting hotter. We’re all lobsters. You all got lobsters
up there in Illinois? Crawfish? Just corn? I’m sorry for you. 

A Warm October  / Alicia Boemi

It’s all a cycle,
but there are no ebbs or flows. 
The universe is too too physically jagged and;
it continues to go and go.
Full circle— they do it to themselves—
men tear the heads off one another,
letting their rotting roots be exposed.  
Serrated edges of their headless bodies,
meander the landscape of a scorching earth.  
We’re in the throes of it.
Women wailing, “please no” 
to 
a God who cannot actually hear them.
Whether it’s their blood soaked desperate-for-more whispers through sweat stained lips,
or 
prayers;
their whimpers will always fall on deaf ears.
See, he’s allowing them to
tear off her limbs so you
can still hear her cry out for something better.
While everyone hides behind a modern day antenna. 
You see, it’s actually chaos out here—
we’re just too into our devices to see
what is actually happening
and that;
the mothers and the fathers are not in control.
In fact no one is, 
despite us wanting—
someone to blame.

Marginal Notes on The Fire-eater at Forty-Three by Grace Fontaine /  Jesse DeLong

A spelunker will hold a torch near the ground at a cave’s entrance, sweeping the flame back and forth, waiting to see if unsurvivable levels of carbon monoxide will turn the torch to smoke.

Critics point out that Fontaine was wise to have Emilia’s breakdown occur at forty-three, and not forty, as it seems like less of a trope.

“An experienced fire-eater will snuff the flame. Lock your lips around the handle, and the triangle will cut off the flame’s oxygen. It’s easy. You don’t have to injure yourself.”

How does this apply, I wonder, to a relationship. There must be some symbolism there.

“With the case of the record, that wasn’t possible. The pain blocked out sound. I couldn’t hear the inspector counting. I couldn’t listen to the crowd. The heat of the fire raised so much the temperature of my teeth that the heated bone burned my gums.”

The dentist told me that I grind my teeth in my sleep and that the dead white skin on the sides of my tongue is from me biting its flesh. I never remember, maybe mercifully, my dreams.

In some versions, you are the one holding the torch. In others, you are the unsurvivable levels of a certain type of atmosphere.

You can see how staring into the yellow Post-it notes and inspirational banners of cubical walls will do this to a person. The fake plant that doesn’t need watered. The secret brownie hidden in the back of a desk drawer for when you need a mid-morning pleasure.

Dickens may have had a better way of writing language that obfuscated the meaning, mainly, like here, that someone died: “Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living.”  

There she is, Linda from accounting, talking about her kids again.

“I didn’t go about this the way I methodically moved through the rest of my life. There wasn’t a planner, no pros-and-cons list, no research. One Labor Day off from work, I picked up the Guiness Book of World Records, stuffed between the H encyclopedia and a box set of Friends Season 3, and I flipped to a random page, blindly pointed my finger, and wa-la, there it was. Fire-eating.”

Pablo Manríquez, using his connections as a political reporter, took a similar mid-life veer. He declared that, with no formal training, and never having painted anything, he would sell portraits of famous politicians. He watched YouTube Videos. He bought horse-hair brushes and acrylic colors like umber. There are several replications of Mitch McConnel, glum, looking out of the right side of his eyes. In one, there is red behind him. Another, the background is puke colored.

“I later learned that it can take up to 25 minutes to achieve full arousal, which made a lot of sense when I thought back on my partners. Apparently, it involved increased blood flow, and tissue engorgement, words I couldn’t really use with Charles when talking about sex. All I could say was, ‘It takes time. It takes time. Slow down a bit. That’s why it hurts.’ He never did, though, take his time. None of them did.”

In Prince George’s County Landfill, there are, possibly, still several versions of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, some smiling, some not.

The contents of this desk drawer: transparent sticky notes, three highlighters, a stapler (out of staples) and a pack of 5 Peppermint Cobalt.

Isn’t it our habits, though, as Emelia knew, that keep us from actually living? 

Something I used to love is playing on the radio /  Shelly Krehbiel

The dishwasher is full. The sky behind
the city lights is a handful of stars.
I made something for dinner. I started
the washing machine. I finally found
the place on the streaming service website
to cancel the subscription. I cancelled
the subscription. And when it dutifully
asked why I was leaving, I selected
Other. Typed: Yesterday I met someone.
Tonight I turned off the lights early, left
the window open for cricket music
that might slip through traffic noise. I don’t know
if anything will come of this, but I
remember enough words to sing along.

For Claudia Lapp, /  rob mclennan

Oregon, trails. Sometimes the oldest, history. Abstraction. Arm to shoulder, leapt into the world. In the Atwater Station. To be attracted, to revelation. Doctors, and durability. Concurs. A Greek phrasebook, begins. Mediterranean, honey. Pixieish ecstasies, what the stars might reveal. Description, description. L, as in Lapp. The old woman in anyone. Full of Jungian dreams, a white stallion. John Abbott. A web full of wanting. Of home, kin. What afternoon light. Beneath your smile, this blue ceiling. A way through the winter. To use the right words. A long silence, indeed.

blithe  / Piper Rasmussen

why does NYC have so many
    sandwich-board &
neon-storefront psychics?      then again, where but

the home of Wall Street?      the city of 
        "See Something, Say Something" (& then     by the way
          Pay Something)

if every TAROT you walk by & every shop
that sells a lotto ticket with your sandwich 
leaves you cold,      & at the corner bookstore,  

you pass over    Beyond Black, the brilliant id
behind the curtain --

say you skip     every time
      the tickle & button click
and miss this moment
     mid-séance with Judi back at home     
   ("I can feel it in my base chakra" /  "probably trapped wind")

those who close their eyes     to all of that
miss also             the spirit
      the creaking-open
of the Golden Door

a crack           & the gifts that come raining
                                               down
on those who can see, those who can

    take     a falling anvil to the face
a little folly & disgrace         once in a while

bop at the end of a terminal summer  / Connor Simons

in august your body careens into wilting
think sunflowers with bloomless faces
think your mother crashing her van
into an already dented garage door   think
the creep of rot eating away at the cedar
wood frame of your bedroom window
 
as breathing flows – my mind secedes
 

the sky’s become a failing liver   sagging
unable to filter life’s daily poison
you’ve seen the world’s distended gut
before and know there’s only one
ending   the unfocused gaze   remnants
of a lake   copper-scented phlegm rattling
in a throat   all of life a warning sign
deferred until your day conflates with dying

as breathing flows – my mind secedes

you want a solution but you’re naked
and splayed on the linoleum floor   sweat
on the small of your back adhering you
to your own discomfort   there’s your
mother’s voice again   you get used to it
and a starving sparrow is dying in your yard

as breathing flows – my mind secedes

Nightmare / Veronica Vo

Locked in a room with a stranger it’s raining so hard
we can’t open any of the doors. I go fishing the stranger
offers to show me how. I know it’s just a dream
because of all the rain. The stranger is trying to keep me safe.

In an elevator that goes up thousands of floors, I go down
hundreds. I test a pit of rocks with my body for fun smile.
Someone spilled blueberries in the car the guts are impossible
to get out. It’s not working. Single digits I’m not having fun.
Guess that’s why the only options are triple or quadruple.
Up or down. Not out.

You Were a Girl Once  /  Melinda Wilson

In the womb    I was your default 
There’s still time to decide
All we want that to mean
In the days when doctors were
dictators   nightmares were 
still nightmares We will
never be gods  but we will feel
like gods when risks pay out
Like I’m waiting for a beer
to get cold in the freezer
next to the cauliflower pizza
crust. Cauliflower as stand-in
for flour. Flower as it stands
on its stem   Risk as replacement
for god The beer could be 
colder  but the air is warm
and I’d like to keep you forever
however you’d like to be
Let me see you with the flower