Cow with Parasol
Being ogled is nothing new
when you’re a flower-loving cow
with a furry blue face and tiny red wings,
but hiding isn’t the reason
for the parasol (in case you’re
wondering, I just like it is all).
When they passed on the path
high above me, the sun, higher still,
was mostly blocked, and for a moment
I felt safe—which was puzzling
since I was sure they were looking
and probably making silent notes
about my extravagances.
Then, unavoidably, the sun moved,
and I knew I’d soon see
them, and not just their silhouettes
but everything from their ill-fitting shoes
right down to their tar-
stained moustaches—
and so, I’m left with no
other choice: move on
and dream of finding a cave so dark
you’d never know if the colorless
moss was smiling back or snarling.
Stiletto
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing . . .
Walking up an empty downtown street,
I’m holding a snow-white 20-ounce
paper cup emblazoned with a fair-trade, organic
hunter-green siren who sings herself
into a short-skirted, six-foot-tall barista
with sad, smoky eyes who overflows
her corporate-issued button-up
and weeps as she gently chokes
the stringy neck of a grease-stained landfill
attendant. Loosening her grip, she smiles,
and whispers, “Maybe everything is double-edged . . .”
Descending from the cup (or maybe,
it’s my mind, or the ocean; who can know?),
she’s now the petite, raven-haired woman
standing beside me wearing acutely illogical pumps
which are silver tipped and rival the skyline.
They stab the shadows of her legs
as she struts confidently away from me
before pausing on the corner as the last shaft
of sunlight disappears behind fiscal temples.
A tiny music seems to swell as she tilts
her head heavenward to gather
up all of the whispers of the City of Man,
conjuring them into a thin film
which winds itself around her
until she’s iridescent—all fiery-black
lipstick wrapped in feathers,
balanced on a single limb—
some sort of strange crane,
a totem of pain and beauty
perched on a lily pad
of garbage-stained concrete.
A Kiss on her Birthday
She can make out
what is probably a fence
from the corner
of her one opened eye.
But with only one eye open,
she cannot be sure;
two might better grasp
what floats almost invisible
under the white window shade.
It’s just like in Chagall’s painting:
see, his happiness
doesn’t need to be deduced.
With his eyes closed
and head twisting backward
he’s left continuity behind;
gravity’s hold holds him not.
He’s of the sublime—a gentle kite
longing to be stuck in her tree.
In her hand the flowers
he bought her,
on the table a cake,
knife and money-purse.
She can feel them all,
all straining for another dimension,
but depth is illusive.
And that one eye,
open and empty,
keeps staring out at who knows what—
not him, that’s sure.
Maybe this bothers him,
but with his eyes closed,
will he ever know?
Perhaps; outside, that fence—
it persists
regardless
of the cake and kisses
and the floating husband.
Mariah Blankenship
Fiberglass Madonna
Barbie was in her twenties I'd say
when we used to sew her clothes
on your Singer look-alike
back room of your maternal trailer
stitching time, saving none
I'd insist on bringing her
to the shower with us and she would
bathe in the Amazon River Basin created
from the drainage of your hair
and I would braid her hair
like your motorcycle hair sitting
there at your ankle
under the fall of your cleansed body
And her perfect plastic features
were a replica of you
reflecting in the basin
where a Narcissus flower once bloomed
and Adonis once bled into
the brushed nickel drain
Even your breasts were as plastic as hers
those same warrior breasts
but you fell down the drain of wisdom,
of vitality,
a break in the river current
And Barbie was fully clothed
when you tried to stitch yourself
together in an institute for the imperfect,
communicating with your Singer look-alike,
Sexton at her typewriter
You were in your twenties, I’d say,
when you drowned,
Anticlea at the river
And we are bathing eternally,
showering Madonna statue of
mother daughter Barbie
with your blood forever pouring over us
Barbie, that whore, lying naked in the drain
Lexapro Shortage
I am here to see a counselor today,
rotten psychology stinks to high hell
in my mind left on a shelf for 20 years
Bring me science
Bring me God
Anything but psychology
We came here together once,
you and I on the ironic love seat
I am staring at that brown seat now
It growls at me
I approach it like an enumerable caravan to my grave
and startled, I turn to the black, more appropriate colored chair,
holding the clipboard of my subconscious tight,
like a tiger you would say
And you are no longer here
They ask for an emergency contact now
and my God,
I have had an epiphany
I have no emergency contact now
Perhaps that is the worst of it
A permanent check mark next to divorced,
A blank next to emergency contact
They're all deceased, I say
(euphemism for rotting in graves
below Whitman’s democratic grass
Shut up
This is why you are here in the first place)
And my mother is damn sure in the painting
on the wall staring at me with an oil painted tear
mocking me for being like her
but there's no bullet in my head
no trickle of blood on my temple
just an empty loveseat
A Barren Grave, Walden Pond
I grow from the earth
as though houses were
formed on the eighth
day, emerging from
the dust like women
buil
t from ribs.
Emerson, I join you
in the real houses
of this world,
the ones that
envelop the bottom
tier of gravity—
a pyramid of pressure,
our homes sprout
from the dirt under
our fingernails—
from atoms,
from bacteria,
from nothing.
The earth formed
deliberately from
the cabin and not
the other way
around, Thoreau.
I am a house,
empty,
barren of furniture
and my windows
are closed,
Venetian blinds
shut, smiling back
at me like Plath’s
tulips perched
on her windowsill,
they mock me.
Still I sit,
emerged from
the earth like
a cracked
politician.
I lie to ecology.
Emily Hyland
The Hit
When Daiquane is eighteen years old
and two months into his eleventh-grade year
he is hit by two chabóns who drive with intention.
They drive a Toyota Celica, green like the trees, which
do not line the block, the trees that smell like summers
Daiquane watches on TV. Even if there were trees
like along those downtown blocks with tulips at the roots, they would
just seem invisible against the place he calls home.
Trees seem everywhere in his dreams.
In a recurring cycle of sleep, when he still
lived with his mother and could still feel the heat
of angry words on her breath
when she pulled the sheets over him at night,
so soon as he would close his eyes, he would climb the pines—
besotted by limbs like ladder rungs—up
toward some other dimension.
It is a desert of death when they are through. They have
hit him once to knock him to the ground—
heavy teenage trunk uprooted—rims aglitter in the lamplight,
and then turned around—
right wheels upon the curb in the sharp swing
back towards the fallen, to cruise over
his skull and away,
into the night,
dicks hard
with the ache of adrenaline.
Gray Matter
I finish reading Bessie’s murder out loud
on the day I get assaulted at school.
There is a sudden hand-to-weave hair-fight
that descends upon the classroom
over an inadvertent brush-by
in the doorway over lip gloss
and then I try to talk one girl
off the ledge of this mania—
we are in a putrid corner of the hallway now—
my white arms out long
to lock her away from all of this
misdirected fury, and
her hands lunge into my chest
magnetize and stick
while a dewy, halcyonic mist
blurs action from cognition.
And it’s not the falling back as much as
the way the flesh of my breasts inverts
under the heels of her Dorito-licked hands
and the furnace-minded charge of
that anger,
which meets me
through the muscle-jolt
of a girl who lacks
plain agency:
that makes my feet lose the floor
and topple.
I hear some communal
gasp; someone whispers
“She pushed Ms. Emily”
and their eyes say
I am more sacrosanct
than the girl who is
bleeding from her skull-skin
in the other room
or the other in front of me
who they can already barely see
anymore. This truculent breast-push
is the apogee of violence in my life—
Bigger’s hands slide
onto Mary’s rum-beat
breasts, his hands
touch Bessie’s breasts,
resigned. Her hands slam
mine, so that
she is Bigger and
I am Mary and Bessie
and I am Bigger, too, and she
is Mary and Bessie
and she
and I
just tumble into a cycle
of perpetual subjugation
that stretches across
a span of score in which
we are all perpetrators
because of what we are born into
and trapped by the prophesy
that contains each iota
of our
inevitable lives.
I’d Had A Long Day
1.
In the basement, the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid
finally had it out for their countries. As beef patties
flew around the cafeteria like saucers,
the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid
fused and rolled into the hallway.
The half-dressed throngs from the locker rooms
and sweaty jerseys from the gym spilled forth
by way of intuition and chatter; they
salivated for the primacy of action. The whole building
turned in and over itself; children sluiced down the stairwells
towards inevitable circumstance.
By the time the school safety agents
rounded up and lollied down
like a troop of Shakespearian boobies, enough time had passed
for the wheels to have stopped. And when they
neared the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid, motion
was already invisible.
In the epicenter was a mess of stress, and the agents
stiffened up at the sight. One child dialed 9-1-1 on his cell, but
reception was poor in the basement
and his voice too still for the responder.
When the EMT crew did descend upon the spot,
the gym teacher stood up from holding in the blood
somewhere along the curve where neck meets shoulder,
where the scissors still stuck in. His clothes
looked like sheets of symmetrical inkblots. He looked—
in his sweatpants—as if he had just emerged
from messily painting a house.
After lockdown, after the coroner
packed the Jamaican kid into a bag and stole
out of the school in a whisper, and after the news cameras
snuck glances through the windows into
our emergency faculty meeting,
I found myself glazed on the train platform at Utica.
2.
Two young brothers and their younger sister walk past me.
Their sneakers blink red each time their feet hit the
concrete, except
the sister’s, which blink pink and silver glitter. We are all
near the end of the platform and the air is dank. I’ve had a long day,
and I think that to myself while rubbing my eyes
with my fingers as the kids walk by.
The boys stop on either side of their sister. They
look like her bodyguards. They stand on the bumpy yellow strip,
which is too close to the platform edge. They are not
her bodyguards. She is little. I think
she is good at math. They eye each other and then
grab their sister, one brother at each of her arm
s. She is
squirming, but they hold strong, inching
closer to the rim. They start to hold her over.
Her feet are trying for the edge, pointing down and
straining back. I’ve had enough today. I
muster up the teacher voice. “Excuse me, gentlemen,”
I say. “Put her down. Right. Now.
Don’t think I won’t ride home with you
and tell your mother what just went on.”
They are back on the platform now, all feet
on concrete. I say, “Stand by the wall.” Their sister
slides towards me. The older of the brothers
pulls her back by the handle of her Dora knapsack.
“Young man!” My voice is shrill like my mother
when we climbed too high in the pine trees.
“Do not touch her again.”
“Whatchu gonna do bout it?”
I am red as that puddle near the gym now.
“Come here and stand with me,” I say to her. “My name is Emily.”
The younger brother is looking down at his shoes now.
The other one
goes on, “Miss Emily, see—we Bloods. My boy Pumpkin gonna
fuck you up. We gonna ride the train
and follow you home.”
He holds up a machine gun made of the air and
chouk-chouk-chouk-chouk-chouks me
with the fantastic spray of his imagination.
After the gunfire subsides, I look him in the eyes.
“I know what I’m gonna do with you,” I say.
I gently put my tote bag on the ground. “Fuck
off already lady,” he whines.
We are only a foot apart. He is small, around seven. I
lunge in, lift him hard under the armpits, and walk him
to the platform edge.
I can feel the grooves
of the yellow strip beneath my feet like
root-knolls on a trail. I can feel rushes of blood
surge into my elbows as his weight tests my arms,
outstretched.
I can feel the humid breeze from the tunnel
hit my wicked face as nearing headlights
expose the rusty tracks below us.
To Ms. Olds
When I am writing in my room
I leaf through a womb of yours
crawl into the purplish bruise
and hope my thoughts turn lucid,
that this femininity waxes meaningful,