Found in Willow Springs 80
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THE SPELL WE CAST
She wore white flats and her feet always
looked cold. I invited her to my house
and we spread our homework all over the couch
and ate all the graham crackers
and drank all the milk my mother
had watered down with powdered
and made something between us just from the hours.
Her mother took us to the thrift store
and bought us cardigans and rhinestone rings
someone dead had worn.
Some nights we drove to Cheney
and stayed with her dad who let us drink
and smoke and wear his army jackets and camo
pants when we went outside
in the middle of the night to see what dangers
we could find. Her face and neck
got blotchy when she cried.
She made me buy black boots with slits
on the sides and listen to the Violent Femmes
and Annie Lennox. We had nothing in common
except Annie singing Oh we were so young
as we drove down her street under
the yellow maples. I liked the way the leaves
flew around the car, and I liked listening
to the sounds of the diner where Annie
was singing, the spoons hitting the coffee cups
and the people talking.
I thought maybe this is what it was like
to have a sister, someone not like you at all
but who had sat in the same car and heard
the same songs, someone whose threadbare
sweater you'd worn. Someone who had kissed
the boy you loved so you couldn't talk to him
anymore. Someone whose body slept
next to yours in your bed and hers,
and all night you could feel the sighing
space between you, where you almost touched.
Wayward sister, weird sister, weird as in
not pretty like the other girls with the soft
hair and nice clothes. Pretty is a word
that hurts, its ts like staples. Pretty
like a camouflaged girl, like the sound
of fifty silver bracelets clanging together
on an arm, saying I need to make this sound
so you will know I have something inside of me,
how else can you explain the way I can make
this cigarette bloom with fire? Weird as in
we could see the future. For example, the boy.
We put him in the cauldron.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS FRESCO
Fresco means fresh, means the plaster is wet and you paint on it
and what you paint becomes part of the wall, means a crack in the wall
becomes a crack in a face, a beautiful face. Let there be a girl on the ground
in a plaid uniform jumper, the skirt lifted up. Let there be a knife
hanging over her from a thread. We need a tree, apricot for the one
in her backyard. Her mother sliced them in half. Their skin tasted
like her own. One year the tree dropped all its apricots at once.
Paint something in the corner for death, a full moon perfectly still
and then its reflection on the water, moving. Paint the long dress
she wore that day. Long like a girl from long ago. Like maybe
she wasn't even there. I bought her a suitcase to keep her letters
but it's only big enough for her old dresses and coats. They are mute
so she can't give them away. Let's paint the suitcase. A yellow dog
a patchwork sheet a skein of hair the wind's fingerprints on the lake.
The other day I saw a child cry. The tears just came over her, there was no
stopping them and I remembered being young and how you can't help
anything how someone can touch you and make you feel good and bad
in the same moment, how your body is always flooding and cracking open.
GIRLIE GIRL
It's what we call a girl who likes lipstick
and dresses and what my son has to call
a girl in the play when he is coming on to her,
playing Charlie Cowell, a salesman
who sells anvils. He doesn't have the time
but he sure has the inclination.
My son who is only fourteen
and who has never come on to a girl
or a woman, who knows
that girlie girl is a way to put girls down
for being too much like girls
and tomboy is a way to put girls
down for not being girl enough,
my son whose first kiss is on stage
when this girl tries to distract him
to make him late for his train
not because she likes him
not because he's the hero
but because he's in the hero's way.
My son who says he's a character actor
not a hero, that his drama teacher said
It's good to know who you are.
But this is The Music Man, the play
with a swindler for a hero,
with the message that it doesn't matter
if you lie as long as you lift the spirits
of the drab people of Iowa.
It's good to believe in something
even if it isn't true.
I was a girlie girl. Still am.
Look at my shoes. I always buy
Mary Janes as if it would be disloyal
to choose something else, something
with a pointed toe and a heel,
something that somehow suggested
a dark room with a piano, ice cubes
in short glasses, smoke swirling
like the possibility of sex,
only briefly visible.
By girlie I mean like a girl
and not like a woman. Which is what
my son means when he propositions
Marion--he means she is still innocent,
which he likes and wants to ruin.
I mean this is what Charlie means,
not my son whose body used
to live inside mine. But my son is the one
saying the line.
NEITHER BRIDE NOR DAUGHTER
Once I went to a kegger at my childhood home.
I didn't know I was going but Jen was sitting
on her dresser listening to the Eagles
and curling her hair and then we were walking
through the dark neighborhood and then
we were on my porch and someone
was handing me a plastic cup.
I said This is my porch and he laughed
and said Mine too, but it wasn't.
He didn't know there was supposed to be
a brown-flowered couch in the living room
and over the mantle, a print of a Rembrandt
called The Jewish Bride, 16 67.
For all of childhood, it hung there
and I never knew what it was called or why,
how an art dealer said it was a father giving
a necklace to his daughter for her wedding,
but how most art historians now think
it is actually Isaac and Rebecca.
There was another keg in my room
in the basement. Strangers were moving
between my invisible bed and my stereo,
stepping over my clothes on the floor,
staring at themselves in my mirror,
wondering if they would ever be good enough.
The water rushed through the pipes
and the furnace made that sound
like it used to. I had to stand in the corner,
drinking and singing both parts
of "Total Eclipse of the Heart,"
holding the note at the end of Turn around
bright eyes long enough to imply it was still
going when I started Every now and then
I fall apart. This was the song I listened to
late at night while I waited for my boyfriend
to come pick me up so we could drive through
the empty streets in the dark.
Years later, that same boy will go back
to that house to show me he remembered
where it was. You know how they say
the wind gets knocked out of you,
like there's wind blowing through your ribs
all the time and then suddenly it's quiet?
In the painting, the man and the woman
are not looking at each other.
I like it when one thing covers another
but not completely, like fog.
Rembrandt was famous for his ability
to concentrate light. In the painting,
the light shines on the man's hand
touching the woman's chest.
Everything else is dark.
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SEAWEED AND MICA
I am sitting on the porch on our house on 19th
staring at the tree I am too frightened to climb.
I am amazed by my legs. They are short and round
with little blonde hairs that shine in the sun.
I like them. I have a scar on my right hand,
close to my thumb, where a mother Dalmatian
bit me when I tried to pet her puppy.
The scar looks like a crescent moon in the daytime.
I am sitting in my desk at school, looking down
at my stomach, thinking it wouldn't be that hard
to just slice it off. But how will I hide what I've done?
I am swimming in Mica Bay with my boyfriend.
He can't float so I put my hand under his back.
You have to let yourself fall into the water, I tell him.
He can't. Mica is shining slivers in a rock.
The stars pull their needles through the water.
In the water, my body is secretly beautiful.
I am a seal who has to wear the body of a woman.
No one has touched it and said don't tell anyone.
No boy has kept his picture of Tina on his dresser,
putting it facedown when I come over.
I have never met Tina but I picture her driving
down a California freeway in a red convertible
that matches her red nails and lips.
She is tan and thin, but in the water,
our bodies are the same, our limbs light and swaying
like a willow tree's branches.
I loved willow trees when I was a child.
You could go inside them and no one
knew you were there.
I have a C-section scar.
Sometimes it still hurts when I roll over in bed.
When I open my eyes underwater,
for a moment I can't tell the difference
between the seaweed and my hair.
PROOF FOR MY SIDE
What you need to know is that a Lincoln-Douglas debate requires
three judges in the final rounds. And that we waited in the room
for a long time for the third judge who then sauntered in
and said he would keep time and the other judges should share
their paradigms first because he liked to go last. You also need
to know that my son is one of the debaters and the other one
is a girl with beautiful hair. The resolution this fall
is The US. ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers.
I remember when it was the right to be forgotten and all
we were talking about was erasing ourselves from the internet.
Not black men being pulled over and shot one after another.
My son drew the affirmative and argued that the tyranny
of the majority over the minority results in the Trail of Tears
and he said the girl with the beautiful hair was abusive
when she said he had to change the whole legal system
to end racism, which I agreed with because how could Ben
do that, standing there in his first suit, reading his case
from his laptop with the stickers on the back that said
Hey Moon and Transcend the Bullshit At the end of the round,
the judges filled out their ballots while we sat in silence
and the third judge again declared he would go last.
The first two judges sided with my son and the Cherokee
walking from Georgia to Oklahoma in 1838 who needed
no one to have any more power over them than they already
did and the girl with the beautiful hair who looked like
just a few years before she was lying on her basement floor
playing with plastic horses and dreaming they were real
and she could climb on one and it would take off running
and her hair would fly behind her seemed to understand
that she had debated well but had come up against
what was right. And then the third judge said he was voting
for her and even though his vote didn't matter because it was 2-1,
he made us listen and we were trapped in that high school
Spanish classroom, staring at Day of the Dead
posters and thinking of the 234 black men who the cops killed
this year while he said her argument was the Eiffel Tower
and Ben's was that upside-down building in Seattle
and I thought what upside-down building and doesn't
an upside-down building still have an architectural design
and speaking of Paris, had he seen the Centre Pompidou
with all its pipes on the outside so it looks like the inside
of a clock or a pocket or a fantastic mind and then he said
the Trail of Tears didn't seem to fit and I thought seem?
and why am I hating this man who is telling all of us
that we have just witnessed Lincoln-Douglas at its finest
as if that is what matters? Of course, he is not the first man
who has ever told me what he said was the most important
and his argument is so phallic and shining and pointing
straight up to the sky where we keep the clouds and reason
and God and why can't I see it and all I have
are the blue veins in my wrists as proof for my side.
