13.
The Moment
There is the moment,
cornered and heady.
I learn that a room can grow
small without magic.
A throb of walls,
windows push,
breath.
Amazing, the paint did not peel
from the heat
of my screams.
The mind tries to soften
the moment
with repression and vodka.
I doubt freedom
from the flashes
like lightning.
A terrible movie
where the audience
looks away.
His sour desire and awakened
strength—two pillars
trying to separate.
He builds the moment
solid and silent,
this box of violence,
a rotting wood
I polish
like a lie.
*
12.
XX
The girl as mini tragedy,
her smooth slit floats in the fluid,
ready for the cruel world,
ready to grow, bear her own children.
The girl is taken early from her mother—
two hearts beat through the procedure,
only one travels back home.
She will try again, he comes to her
every
night.
The girl reappears like a trick.
Her hands are ready for work—
the cooking of rice and what meat
her family can afford.
The girl is taken again, no time
to be a spirit, no time to run the fields
in a thin dress, a hand me down
from another sister who never
existed.
*
11.
The Killing Club
The fibers from the ropes are needles
pricking my neck. You tighten
your finely crafted knot. I
try to swallow my fear, but the noose
has
made rub burns all around
my neck.
It hurts to think
to me, You asked for this.
*
10.
STILETTO KILLER… A Surmise
“She told me if anybody screwed with her they’d get a stiletto heel in the eye,”
- her former apartment manager told the TV news.
Alf and Ana drank tequila at the club until closing.
Ana wore a tight, green dress. Alf said she looked
like a whore.
Back at the apartment, the neighbors heard screams.
“The defense will prove she was a battered woman,” her lawyer told the press.
She was too short when the stilettos came off but her
feet ached.
She had to stand on tiptoe to reach him, for Christ’s
sake.
Women are always losers in Texas.
Ana alleged: “He cursed in Swedish
when he beat me.”
She’d read Swedes beat their women in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
In the early morning hours, Ana stabbed her lover
thirty one times.
The stiletto heel fused to her fist.
When the police arrived Ana was covered in blood.
In that green dress she looked like Christmas.
(CNN) -- It may have been a vicious murder or the unintentional result of a
lover's quarrel. Either way, the death of a Texas
college professor stands
out for the weapon the killer allegedly used: one of
her own stilettos.
*
9.
LAST MEAL
She puts bowls on the table,
fixates on the scarred oak union,
digs her resentment into the grooves.
This is how he knows her:
She
yawls.
Drowns him
out.
He eats her temporal lobe. Skim milk splashes in
the bowl. 5% body fat;
a new low.
Riddle: When is a promise like a bayonet?
I’ve been meaning to tell you.
A woman betrayed in a breakfast nook does
not constitute a poem.
Her dead mother reaches through the wall,
throws the marriage in her face.
Her husband grabs his bowl and a spoon.
“Sit
down, darling,” he says.
“Open wide.”
*
8.
SPREADING MY LEGS FOR
SOMEONE (POSING FOR PIRELLI)
The grey-suited Pirelli rep. sat behind the desk,
puffing on a cigarette. White smoke hung in the air
like surrender.
I slipped off my dress.
Kept my stilettos.
There was nothing on the agency man’s glass-topped
brain but my nakedness.
He wouldn’t meet my eye.
“Jesus!”
he exclaimed when I bent over
to tighten an ankle
strap.
The photographer looked like Antonio Banderas.
“Sit down on the seamless,” he said, pointing to
the
black backdrop that spilled onto the floor.
He rolled the tire over to me, snapped on the lights.
I sat, cross-legged, clutching the tire close.
My naked breasts peeked through the center,
the nipples erect. I laid my hot face along the tread.
The photographer pushed up his cashmere sleeves,
picked up his Nikon.
The lights bore down like August; the cement
below the seamless bruised my ass. The two men
stared at me the way my stepfather did.
I pushed the damp strands of hair from my forehead.
Arched my back. Opened my
thighs.
The suit lit another cigarette.
Antonio
Banderas moved in for a close-up.
“Is this what you want?” I asked.
My feet poked out from the tire’s rubber frame
like destiny.
*
7.
Trashy Bitch Change-Up
So forgotten, or maybe forced
out of the mind—Chica doesn’t know how
they see her. She’s always blind
sighted, in some ways, by men’s behavior.
Her first memory of this was made
when she was a small child melting broken
crayons on the aluminum garbage can lid
beside of her family’s flat. That day
home became more broken than any other word
she had ever known. Each fragment
of crayon changed from solid to a liquid grace
harmonizing each color swirling
in a pretty frenzy of broken things
on that receptacle for unwanted things. Later,
the word
garbage was thrown around as if was her
name. Little white girl running with
street rats
in every shade of human flesh.
She’s predestined to read markings left on trash
cans. She has no means of self-
identification. Where does this road stop?
Her dad said,
Later. It’s your mother’s fault. The family dog, Lady,
followed him into the metallic green Chevy Nova
he promised to her when she was old
enough to drive. Slamming the door,
he didn’t look back. She never saw the car
or the dog
again. His eyes offered no tears for his
little girl
dressed like a boy in an unconscious attempt
to give Daddy the son he wanted. That day
he
swore to show her how to throw a curve
ball. Chica never learned to pitch any
sort of ball. Indifference is a cruel
rule of order. Thirty years later, she
still has no
car of her own. She’s out grown her
baseball cleats
which sit quietly in a box marked “old
shit” her cat likes to sleep on.
*
6.
He’s the Man, All-righty
Otherwise known as a supervisor, what he is,
is a talker of shit who smears anyone’s name
to make his own look good. It doesn’t
matter
that he ain’t even bright enough to pass the
personality
test which opens the door to the Corporate
managerial hierarchy, keeping him in his place
as the stupid “yes” man. He’s a duped
dummy: a Corporate puppet. Solely a
lifeless thing
controlled by strings.
*
5.
Saltines
It’s 3:14 in the morning,
and I’m eating Value Time Chili.
Don’t feel like doing much
of anything and have been watching more and more porn.
There are all these
numbers in my head but no words. I have no idea if they’ll take me anywhere or
what I’ll do once I’m there.
These are not delusions of
grandeur. This is my life. I’ve made it what it is and what it is not.
I’m typing this poem with
my left eye taped shut. I woke up today with Bell’s palsy. It’s challenging to
eat or drink, and I don’t know when or if this facial paralysis will go away.
Earlier tonight, I was on the phone with a friend, and she was having a
difficult time understanding what I was saying.
These are not delusions of
grandeur. I have always been a tough pill to swallow, and at forty-five, I am
finding that to be even truer.
It’s 1:49 in the morning,
and my mother just told me I shouldn’t stay up too late. When she refused
earlier this evening to drive me to the emergency room, she lost the right to
ever again tell me what to do.
We make our own beds, and
then we lie in them or we don’t.
The saltines are perfect,
all broken up in the chili. With every spoonful I eat, I feel that much better
about all the messed up shit in my head.
*
4.
Snowfall in the Morning
The
attack was over before Colin could so much as flail. His body rested on the
chilled concrete for a long time, and when he awoke at dawn, the creature was gone.
Blood
saturating his crisp white dress shirt, Colin staggered home.
“Drunk
again?” his lover asked as he collapsed at her bedside.
Then she
saw the puncture wounds.
“You
won’t die,” she said in the bathroom, patting the lesions with a warm washcloth.
“It’ll be worse than that.”
He
wretched into the sink. “Why didn’t it finish me?”
“Because
you’ll be more useful to them this way.”
The
words took awhile to sink in, and when they did, all Colin could manage was to
wobble back to the bed.
“You can’t
sleep.” His lover leaned over him. “Sleep will hasten the process.”
“But
that’s the only thing I can think about.”
She
grasped his arm. “Get up. Let’s take a walk. Like we used to.”
Outside,
the weather was colder than he remembered, but Colin didn’t shiver.
His
lover tucked her hands into her pockets. “Is there anywhere you want to go?”
“Do you
want to see where it happened?”
“I’d
rather not.”
“But
you’d know what street to avoid,” he said.
“They
could be anywhere. Seeing a spot where they’ve attacked once won’t make me any
safer.”
A thick
layer of snow encrusted the ground, but it had rained overnight, rained while
Colin reclined on the back alley pavement. He might have died of exposure if
not for his wound insulating him. Though it spread deliberately, one cell at a
time, the infection knew how to preserve life until life was no longer
needed.
Now
hours later, that night rain had frozen atop the snow, and the ground cracked
beneath their feet as they started across the nearby game land.
“Aren’t
you going to ask why I was out so late?”
“I doubt
it matters now,” she said.
The
trees enveloped them, and they plodded along the trail they both knew by heart.
He gazed
at her as the smoke of her breath snaked through the air. “What would you do?”
“It’s
your choice, not mine.”
Though
the worst weather was over, the storm wasn’t quite finished. Bits of ice
toppled onto the treetops. Overhead, the branches chimed, and Colin listened to
each mournful note.
“It’s
like an elegy on Sunday morning,” he said.
Eyes
downcast, his lover shook her head. “People always think things will be the
same, but they’re wrong.”
Through
the canopy, sunlight reflected off the snowfall, and Colin squinted into the
searing white. His lover’s wide eyes weren’t so sensitive as his.
“I’ve
never known anyone it’s happened to,” he said.
“I knew
someone once,” she said. “And I saw him afterwards. What was left anyhow.”
They
reached a clearing in the woods, the one where she had always skipped ahead,
giggling.
“Witches
and pixies live here,” she would whisper to Colin.
But
neither of them said anything this time. Instead, they gawked at something up
ahead in the center of the pasture.
He
inched closer. “What is that?”
Awaiting
them like a sacrificial altar was a mountain of gore.
His
lover shrugged. “A field dressing. Must be deer season.”
Streams
of scarlet seeped into the snow, and every curve of the intestines glistened
back at Colin.
He
struggled to swallow. “Why does it shimmer like that?”
“It’s
cold. Things freeze in the cold.”
“We
should leave,” he said. “A hunter might not see us, might fire his gun this
way.”
“Or her gun,” she said.
The
couple backtracked through the forest with the symphony overhead, eager to play
its dirges for only Colin and his lover to hear.
“How would you stop it?” he asked.
“There
are different ways. Easier ones. Messier ones.”
“Have
you seen it done?”
She
nodded. “Never in person though. Only in videos they showed in health class.”
“We
never watched any videos like that,” Colin said.
“That’s
because you’re older. When I reached high school, they knew more about it.”
He
removed his coat. “What are the easier ways?”
“This
time tomorrow, we take a walk,” she said. “A walk just like this one.”
“And the
messier ways?”
“Well,
there are a hundred of those. I probably couldn’t even think of every way to do
it.”
“What if
I don’t want the easy way? Would you help, even if it’s untidy?”
“If
that’s what you want,” she said.
They
crossed the field where their walk had begun a half hour earlier, and Colin
stepped on each of his previous footprints in the snow.
“Do you
love me?”
She
sighed. “Of course, I do. If I didn’t, we wouldn’t be talking about this. I’d
just go away and wait for it to be over.”
“Why
don’t you? It makes more sense.”
“Because
I love you. That’s what I’m saying.”
They
reached the front door.
“Maybe
you could join me.”
“No,”
she said. “And if you try to force me, it won’t be so hard for me to decide.
I’m not like you. I know what I want. I’d rather die with open eyes than stay
alive with closed ones.”
Inside,
Colin followed his own blood splatter back to the bedroom where he turned off
the light and collapsed on the bed.
“Will it
happen while I sleep?”
His
lover sat next to him. “It might.”
“Then
maybe I shouldn’t wake up at all.”
“Is that
what you want?”
“I’ll
let you decide,” he said.
Colin
rolled over and closed his eyes. Resting against the headboard, his lover
peered at him through the darkness. For the next twelve hours, she waited
patiently for nightfall.
*
3.
TRASH COLLECTOR
Everything is so
wasteful.
Especially the use
of flesh and bone and
blood
in the cause
of all this walking
around
and breathing.
You might see people
but to me it's all
trash bags overloaded
with talk and attitude
unwilling to set
themselves
out on the sidewalks for
pickup.
So that's why I am
the great trash
compactor,
with no particular route
but a grumbling engine
load
of duty.
Welcome, I say,
to the most conspicuous
of the refuse.
Then a cry and a crunch
and a furious revving of
my motors.
~John Grey~
*
2.
JENNA'S LAST NIGHT
It was a full moon
that sat on her,
a whiteness that
waited by her side,
pale and erect,
the spine of a
young girl,
while the solemn,
ancient, dead rock of
the sky
was all weight,
all misery.
Ah once
such a brimful jug of
light,
and now, angels have
to do it for her,
spread wings,
the beautiful thing,
she speaks of
but only sees as eyes
fade.
The moon
is a tombstone.
The whiteness is a wine
glass.
Drink, death says.
~John Grey~
*
1.
Levitation
We went to
sleep-away camp together. That’s where I met her. It wasn’t a coed camp, but
she was pretending to be a boy.
An East
Indian camp counselor levitated by the campfire, but no one was old enough to
know what was happening, even the other counselors, suburban Jewish kids
heading for the Ivy League at the end of a long, hot summer.
The next
morning they talked together about the clever trickery they’d seen, then headed
to the lake to pull a giant cage from the mud, a trap for snapping turtles.
She
whispered to me that she hoped the snapping turtles escaped and snapped the
bones of all the counselors, snapped off their noses and eyelashes. I was the
only one who knew she was a girl.
As an adult,
her overmedicated, glassy blue eyes are a perfect match for the faded denim
shirt that hangs on her bony shoulders. There’s too much in her face for me to
wake up to. Those eyes are the windows to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She
had to raise her own parents. She had to suckle them at her breast. It was too
much for her.
She was too
much for me. I had to put on a life jacket and jump from the second floor
window into the flood. I floated by a rowboat and pointed with my thumb to
where she awaited rescue.
~Mitchell
Krockmalnick Grabois~
