POEM IN WHICH MY SPEAKER IS BORED WITH MY REAL LIFE
My speaker wants to make some big pronouncements, fly
with extended metaphors. She’s disgusted when I toss
the coffee grounds in the trash without even trying
to make an image. Don’t they look like loam,
the crushed beans once whole—yes, crushed and used,
the way I sometimes feel? My speaker wants to know
where the trash ultimately goes. Reminds me
about Thoreau—I can stand as remote from myself
as from another. I have long loved the way the poet
Ai’s name was pronounced “I,” but my speaker is bored—
I have written about this before. My speaker
wants me to be someone else in this poem—Dumbo
or Marilyn Monroe, or catapult back to my younger self,
a little girl wrapped in victimhood or a Superman’s cape
depending on the day. I tell my speaker the old joke
about the naive bride—First the aisle, then the altar.
Then her hymn—I’ll alter him. Hear the “I” in aisle? I ask.
But my speaker is unimpressed. Aye aye aye aye,
I am the Frito Bandito, I used to sing with my sister.
The first “aye” sounded like “I” and then
the next three sounded like they began with a “y.”
A Frito bandito robbed people of their chips
at gunpoint. He was a mascot of our youth. Back then,
we weren’t afraid of banditos or guns. They were just
cartoons. We weren’t outraged by any Mexican stereotypes
as we would be now. I could have never predicted
the gun violence so prevalent in my adulthood,
a recent mass shooting right on the beach
where I walk every day. A 15-year-old boy
who the medics thought was hit in the heart,
his left side torn open by bullets, lived. He had
a congenital condition that placed his heart
on the right side. Can there really be a feel good story
about a mass shooting? I think not. And yet
how giddy I was to hear this. I imagined
the shocked medic wondering at the magic
of this young man still breathing. Brig, a fiction student,
said I could use his image—the fluorescent light of lies.
He meant the ceilings of hospitals and the false promises
of enthusiastic doctors and nurses. He recently lost
his young wife. I, my mother. This boy will live, I told Brig.
This boy will live. The coffee bean unground, become whole
in reverse. This boy’s heart intact. I had walked
the same beach only hours early. I walk it almost every day,
my speaker wanting me to make big pronouncements—
today about violence, but most days about the dying sea.
POEM IN WHICH I’M AN URBAN PLANNER LIKE MY HIGH SCHOOL APTITUDE TEST PREDICTED
Disappointed I wasn’t deemed a future rockstar
or supermodel, I looked at my results, having no idea
what the job description would entail. I walked
home from school on Elder Ballou Road
wishing there were sidewalks, cars winding
and whizzing as I jumped on lawns
to get out of the way. I hated the smell
of the incinerator which burned trash everyday
at 4 pm, my eyes watering. Cold Spring Park
needed more benches for the oldies and swings
for the kids. The spinner was so rusty
those who slashed their fingers wound up
getting tetanus shots. Polluted Social Pond
gave me an ear infection. Too many bars.
Too many donut shops. We needed a book store!
An art movie house! What were we going to do
with all those empty textile mills, their cold
smokestacks and brick facades?
Now I’m meeting
with other industry experts to work it all out.
POEM IN WHICH I CONSIDER MOSQUITO BITES AFTER MAUREEN’S MEMORIAL IN THE ARBORETUM
I thought I was prepared. Neil even had DEET, but I must have sprayed unevenly. Soon I sported red splotches like an ankle monitor telling me stay home and grieve. I scratched through the night, annoyed by death. I used cortisone cream on the outside, my own cortisol pumping inside as I thought of everything I needed to do besides feel sad. I broke my home confinement—groceries, new tires (I had a flat on the way home!), a doctor’s appointment, work, and meetings at work. It was easier to itch than cry.
What did that dead tire mean? No air to save it, even my spare donut flat. My legs prickled, and there was a big bite on my shoulder blade I needed a backscratcher to reach. I was stoic as we gathered and read the poems of my dear, dead friend. I was stoic and perhaps a little numb. I was unflappable with the AAA guy, holding my phone flashlight in the dark as he jacked up my car. He said I was unusually calm for a woman who’d broken down. The tire meant stop moving. The stinging began.
POEM IN WHICH I ACKNOWLEDGE I AM VINTAGE
Every New Year’s Day,
my sister and I were mesmerized
by the black and white cat clock
with a tail that swished back and forth
in rhythm with its eyes that followed.
When the tail went left, so did the cat’s pupils.
When the tail went right—well, you get the idea.
The metronomic tail didn’t seem to sync
with any second or minute or anything else
happening on the face of the clock
which actually sat in the cat’s belly. The cat
wore a bowtie and his whiskers
were more of a moustache. My father
and the uncles got drunk as they played pitch
as my sister and I drank glasses
of milk listening to all the French.
My mother forbade my father
to teach us, as French speakers
back then, in the mill town where I grew up,
were called “Canucks” and were assigned
traits always given to immigrants. My mother
and the aunts gossiped, pulling pork pies
from the oven, followed by ceramic pots
full of baked beans made with molasses
and chunks of salt pork. The cat, neither
English or French, kept time in silence, not even
a meow. My sister and I kept each other
company, trying to guess a French word here
or there. A blue, swirly carnival glass hen
decorated Aunt Aura’s end table. Under
the iridescent lid was a mound of red and white
pinwheel mints. Our parents, aunts and uncles—
everyone with whom my sister and I rung
in our childhood New Years—are gone.
You can still find beanpots, but now
they say “Boston Baked Beans” on the side
or come in festive colors, not like
the brown and tan one I was used to.
There’s a replica of the cat clock—
Kit Kat Klock—on Amazon, though I was hoping
to find the real thing. I did track down
a “Hen on a Nest” on a website
called Aunt Gladys’s Attic but there was
just a picture and a notice “out of stock.”
DREAM IN WHICH I CONTEMPLATE FROTHED MILK
I meet the mother
who says she gave me
up for adoption
but I wasn’t adopted
I say and she says
well your mother
is dead now
and my daughter
is gone so let’s
have two lattes
and figure this out
POEM IN WHICH I WONDER HOW THE SAUSAGE WAS MADE
Who hunts the animal (experience)
and who kills it? Who butchers filets (prose)
and tosses this poet emotional scraps?
How does she use the liver and heart?
How does she decide on the casing
(mini-sonnet or free verse)? Does she crush
the bones and gristle into something
delicious? Does she ply the meat grinder
hoping to make music—or wait,
am I that monkey in a red felt hat?—
turning the crank, trying to make art?
POEM IN WHICH I DROWNED AS A SIX-YEAR-OLD
The teenage lifeguard called in sick. My parents
were busy eating their clam cakes on a bench.
When I sank to the pool’s bottom, no one
noticed. My little sister splashed on the concrete step
and thereafter became an only child. I overshadowed
her, giving her nightmares. My parents
never forgave themselves, even though
they had both warned a bratty me to stay
in the shallow end. I became their angel,
visited their dreams with my tiny wings.
I never went through puberty, never grew up
to write my first sonnet commemorating
my near-death, never made it to my sixties
so I could write this poem. My poor living sister,
the rule follower, now alone, would have
given anything to see me dragged out,
given mouth-to-mouth, then grounded—
no bike, no TV—for the rest of the month.
POEM IN WHICH I ADMIT MY IGNORANCE
I always get the House and Senate mixed up. I still can’t
convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. I read Fahrenheit 451
so long ago I barely remember the plot even when
I reference it. I didn’t spell Celsius
correctly when I started this poem in my notebook.
Sometimes I try to figure out who you are
talking about by context—a famous writer,
musician, politician? Then, when I have enough
info to get by, I nod, before changing the subject
to something I’m familiar with, America
and the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
