Trouble & Attitude 1/Trouble and Attitude - Issue 01.iso/pc/pctext/poems.txt

Text File | 1995-06-02 | 8.1 KB | 331 lines

DISTRACTED , PART 2

It's the way your too-tight shirt
rises over the small of your back
When you lean forward
to pull a photograph of yourself
out of your bag

It's the way you swallow my hand in yours
caressing me with your long fingers

It's the way you say "What" ?
When I fix my gaze on you
lurching clumsily forward
hugging me with your head averted

You look at me like a little girl
who's embarrassed at being adored
but when you rise up to button your coat
and sling your bag over your shoulder,
your hair in your face,
your legs sky-high,
you look down on me
and I'm humbled


- Michael Wiener





CAPTURE THE ECHOES OF THIS ERA IN A FUZZY POLAROID

Better yet, cover them with a tupperware top.
Preserve their peculiar smells :
mildew, nonoxynol, dirty socks.
Thread the needle of summer.
Brush the bruises off knuckles.
now it's time for band-aids and boxes
and locks of hair pressed between pages.
sneak out on Indian summer.
Crawl into the cradle of public transportation,
dead - on arrivals.
Get the art of nostalgia right :
it's just like pulling a hair
from the center of a mole.
Mark your time by biting
your tongue. Sixty days
have come undone. And now
you've passed the test,
mutilated into an adult.
So this is a cyst. This is an addict.
Learn from ancient mistakes:
don't turn to wave.


- Maggie Nelson


SISTERS

The sister, with lips like two blooded slabs of moon.
The white skid mark on the floor where we once
breasted
together. She taught the torture of the
pituitary.
She taught how to bleat into forms
subterranean and
proud.


She had seen the crevice and come back, with secrets
of pornography and the open road. She was everyone's
desire to know the eclipse, personally.

The house was like the aquarium but colder. Like the
circus but gorier. Mother lived with the premonition
of
menopause. It made her feel like Less of a Woman.
Stepfather collected power tools and used Binaca.
Father
sank into slivers of bone and ash on the
mantle. Together
we lived in that adolescent slit.

The sister was the blonde epitome of the black eye.
Those white barley locks. She did not flinch from 24-7
footage of the fist in her face, the elaborate
breakings of
her back.

Her mouth was a land fill of lies, a rude cabaret of
stories.
But to share the air with her! To feed on
her amphetamine
dreams! Tales of wasted embryos, and the dislocated
jaws
of their fathers. The demise of the Sex Pistols.
Our language wore stiletto heels and fumbled into
First
Lady positions.

Imagine, then, my own moment of lost-innocence. The
sister was there, that impossible heroine : liquid,
hot, toxic.
Yes, when the floral print peeled off. Yes, when I
shed a
tear for wildness. She had taught me to look for
evidence
that we were more than holes. So the
pleasure, in the end,
was my own.


-Maggie Nelson


NOVEMBER

I don't want anyone to look
at me today. The way I look,
it's personal. I cry all the way
to Canada. I don't know why.

The blank faces of silos,
white birch standing in swamps,
field of cement tubing, the bus
lurching through the afternoon.

I don't want to compel you
nor do I find you compelling
I want it to be Tuesday.
I want it to be raining.

None of this is seduction. I am
no longer the girl who went
from rooftops to rooms smearing
her blood on the walls. I no

longer jump on a thumb. I can
feed off of a hot hip-bone,
the tawny and cold November weeds.

I know one day we will return
to watch the carnival from the hill.
We will share our whiskey,
dream of privacy.


-Maggie Nelson


THE YEAR YOU LOST

doing battle with a blue bic pen
breaking into a sweat is easy
black skirt blowing in the wind
it's summer and you don't want the crudite.

you want sesame bagels
peaches with bites out of them
scars in progress
pot smoked on freshly cut lawns

the year you lost the weight

the phone started ringing
and you started singing hymns
drinking tea in a suede jacket
the color of night

winchester rifle belt buckle
two notches tighter
where are those voices coming from
so much, so much, so much


-Cynthia Nelson




BYE BYE BOURBON TREE

candles light my tears afire
your fallen leaves aflame
have been this split a long time
living in a trailer with the half-me
the sometimes-you inside yourself
that far and sitting there not watching me
not relating to my nothing

o brother you are a bourbon tree
when pushed you watch horizons
as anxiously as me
enough in your home not heartright
silk coverings on the secrets stored away
jeweled prizes and surprises
can speak fruits in new dimensions
yours too

damn this attraction anyway
some sideshow circus lust
wearing on from tavern to town
you show up in dreams so straight
hanging your soiled loins in branches
drying out the abuse you carry for the
happy-go-lucky to resurface
dive down in any water
feel a comforting past surround you


- Cynthia Nelson





WHAT I WOULDN'T DO (a waitress poem)

for one tough girl
in a pale blue sweatshirt
to eat from a plate
touched by my hands
i'd walk the restaurant floors
of a thousand jilted lovers
on their own at last surviving
on carefully-counted change
from the tip cup

i'd give my best hours
to the bus stop
and the shop window
and the coin slot
not a machine in vegas yet
just plain fare bus
and transfers i never used
would end up floating
amongst the laundry
lost from pockets expecting
bigger surprises

-Cynthia Nelson




PIERSANDRO'S SESTINA

Morning seeps through the windows, then pours over her
in white
billows of day. Her body transforms the cotton sheet
to silk draped over line
and curve. She breathes with open mouth. Under the
silent noise
of daylight, I hear her heart beat like raindrops.
I move towards her in my mind only, save for my
fingers,
which trace the shape of breast ad hip in
slow circles. To wake

her is to shatter this moment of before-knowing, this
line
to infinity that is the movement of the hum
inside her. The noise
in the air is not in the air, but in my fingers,
washing across her blue skin. They are a tide in whose
wake
I see the glimmer of possession, foaming drops
that reflect her sighing breath in blinding white

waves--Before the industry of his fingers
began, I willed it. He does not know when her wakes
me that I have lain still to feel my body pierced
within by the lines
of his gaze. I imagine myself smooth and lilywhite
under his brown hair hands; I am quiet in the
deafening noise
of his man's breathing. Inside, my heart drops,

spinning down endlessly in the eddies of his vision. I
wake
for him finally, smiling feigned surprise at his
fingers'
feathered tips. They pause midflight, then
drop
to my hips. The secret inside me is raucous
noise,
the din beating blue beats like a heart in the space
between us, in the white
air, the fresh morning--Monstrita, give me one line,

I beg you...I stare at her mouth, craving the soft
noise
of her words yet unspoken, sweet as lemondrops.
Her words are buried under snow, secret bulbs of tiny
lilywhites.
The lace along the edge of the sheet is a
line
which she clutches, going down in the
wild-tossed wake
of my stare. Would you silence me with a finger

to your lips, your giant brown eyes fighting
teardrops?
My love, it is not the onslaught of
possession, not cold white
desire. There is something in you that wakes
me from the dream of myself, and image whose vicious
fingers
close on me in black choking. My whole
history focuses into the timeline
moment that is you, blessed safe silence in this dark
noise.

The silence drops like water from a granite ledge.
White wheels spinning in your eyes
flash lines of light across my face, my body. Through
my fingers
I awaken the pulse in you that is the noise that is my
heart beating.

        -ERW