Tag Archives: my poems

Poem a day #14 Getting Dressed for Work

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here’s a little lesson in what first drafts can look like. This not-yet-a-poem wanders all around, taking forever to tell a story which will probably be reduced to a few descriptive details when I’m done blithering and ready to really write. Inside every narrative is a lyric waiting to happen, but sometimes digging it out is not so easy. If I can’t remember the name of the woman I went out with, why is she even here in a poem about something else? And be forewarned that this piece doesn’t end but only gives up, out of time and out of words.

Getting Dressed for Work
1.2

Buttoning my Arrow shirt,
centering my thick leather belt
over the fly of my chinos,
sliding on my Doc Martens,
my mind bounced back
to Orange County, California
in 1986, on my first date
with a woman,
whose name I can’t recall,
in my first lesbian bar
whose name I don’t remember,

where I can still clearly see
the butch women—
the old school butches,
the men’s pants butches,
the starched collar butches,
the gentle hands that could
take you out butches,
the hold the door hold your chair
hold your hand but never let you
win at pool butches—
the butches, who all wore
tiny gold earrings.
Girly earrings, not Harlem studs
studs.

I stared at the butches,
discretely, for I’d read all about them
in my coming-out frenzy,
and also at their earrings,
mentioned in none
of my reading. My date,
as flighty as those earrings were
incongruous,
seemed not to notice.

Monday in coming out group
I asked my mentor Laurie,
who smiled at my description
with only half her face.

The dress code, she said. Don’t you know
about the dress code? When the bars
were raided, any woman wearing
less than three items
of women’s clothing
could be arrested
as a pervert.

Standing in Philadelphia
in 2010, I examine myself.
Men’s shirt.
Men’s style-pants.
Men’s shoes.
Men’s undershirt.
Men’s belt.
No jewelry.
Bra.
Today, women’s underwear.
Black socks – do cotton socks have gender?
Wallet.
Carefully chosen gender-neutral
burnt orange urban messenger bag.

I’d be in the paddy wagon,
my picture spread on the paper,
my job lost probably
my apartment lost
maybe and even if I ran
out the back I could still
have been beaten openly
on any street.

How do you get dressed—
oh that most ordinary
of daily experiences—
trapped between the radical need
to be only who you are
and constant fear
of arrest? How did you find
masculine-looking shirts
that still button on the left?
Shoes just female enough
to keep you out of jail?

How did you invent a world
in a world not ready for you,
oh Butches with gold earrings?
I know you fondled the silky panties
of the femmes with teased up hair,
but did you, secretly, fondle
your own, those bits of nylon tricot,
swathes of practical cotton?

Or was it the women police officers
fondling your panties
when you were stripped in search
of women’s clothes?

Poem a day #13 Prelude to a Poem

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Prelude to a Poem

I’m stuck I said.

Write about dustbunnies she said.

I jot dustbunnies are domesticated tumbleweeds
and then read it to her.

Good start, great image,
already some music building.
She claims she could not be
a poet, but who else
says such a thing?

Now I’ll have to go research tumbleweeds.

Oh, I know about tumbleweeds. Roll
everywhere. Stick to everything.

Wikipedia says there are many
different species. They live in steppes
and deserts. They are diaspores,
existing only to disperse
propagules.

Use diaspore in the poem.
It has an interesting sound.

It can be an entire plant
broken off of the root
or just a flower cluster.
And this—tumbleweeds
aren’t native to North America.
They came from Russia
in shipments of flax seeds.

Flax seeds—that sounds good, too

They’re described as noxious weeds

Don’t you think that rhyme here
would be too easy?

I pause while my brain once again
puts two and two together and finds
they equal oppression.

Do you know what that means? It means
the whole iconic Western movie scene
is a complete lie. White cowboys
aren’t indigenous to North America.
Their horses aren’t native. Those range-
destroying cows aren’t native. Even
the damn tumbleweeds always blowing
across the shot aren’t native. The whole
fucking thing is a lie!

You’ve lost the music she sighs. And why
do you have to make everything
about politics?

Poem a day #12 Middle

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Middle

Is the no-regrets choice:
not too big for something
you might not like
not too small if what is new
is very good.

Is stable:
not the risk-taking
of the secure first child, not
the attention-seeking
of the clinging youngest.

Is reliable:
won’t be the first,
won’t be the last,
will just keep on keepin’ on

Is predictable:
always –er,
never –est

Grew up invisible in a culture
where fries and cokes
came only in small or large.

But now Middle
has Starbucks.

Now Middle
can strut her stuff.

Grandé is a favorite size
Grandé is a heart’s delight

Grandé goes to clubs
that don’t open till 11
dressed so fine that
-er is on no one’s mind.

Grandé always thought
that tall was small.

And Grandé knows
that no one knows
what Venti means,
anyway

Poem a day #11 Counting with Sue

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Counting with Sue

At 49, but otherwise feeling fine,
get her carbs to eat, fast.

By 30, she’ll refuse food, so pour
the Juicy Juice into her mouth
and rub her throat
to help her swallow. Start with
two boxes, squeeze her blood
onto the strip 5, 4, 3, 2, 1—
declare crisis over or rip another
plastic straw off the back of a box.

150 and all is well.

180 and all is well but no dessert.

77—yeah, time for a milkshake!

At 60 or lower, with a migraine pounding in,
call 911. With the migraine comes
the vomiting, with the vomiting drops
the glucose, with the glucose
drops the consciousness. Pray the EMTs
respect this disease, pray the IV
sinks in first try.

37 units = daily base level

1 to 10 = unit of insulin to gram of carb ratio

1/2 syringe—enough insulin for a night
of rowdy sex without carrying a cooler
for the little blue bag

5 days between pump site changes

50 test strips in a tube. Check the quantity
before going anywhere.

250— fuck, I left the pump on suspend.

385—fuck, I forgot to count the bagel
I ate before breakfast.

At 500—blood becomes lead weights dragging
dense through the veins. Take as many units
as a body can bear, go to bed and
try to sleep until the feeling of muscles
being shredded fades.

Always carry the glucose meter

Never eat, not anything, not ever
without counting and calculating,
planning and pumping.

Always. Never.
Always. Never.

Poem a day #10 Philadelphia Geese

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Philadelphia Geese

In Fairmount Park the Canada geese
are wild in the way that
rats are wild, in that no one
invited them and like the city’s
homeless, they fend for themselves.

Our Canadian-American geese
migrate from the west side
of the river to the east. Unless
they don’t feel like that much commotion
breaking open azalea-crazed spring days.

These geese roam only the Schuykill River.
These geese will take your offered treats
but will bite the hand that feeds them.
These geese will get all up in your business.
These geese leave landmines
of bacterially-loaded fecal matter clusters
in clumps of hundreds everywhere they go.
These geese do what they want, don’t care
what you think, and will give
as good as they get any day of the week.

These are Philadelphia geese.

Watching a flock of Philadelphia geese
you can’t help but notice white geese
scattered here and there—farm animals
gone feral, washed down the river, needing
a home, taken in by the flocks
of brotherly love. Every spring
some of the goslings are white-headed
but speckled or dark-faced but white-backed—
the first generations
of a native Philadelphia goose.

These Philadelphia geese—most days
we barely notice them, or we complain
about their shit
or their attitudes.
But each May we watch, needing to see
the yellow-green gosling announcement
that spring has fully ripened, needing
the traffic-stopped for goose-crossing excuse
for staring at the river rather than hurrying
to work, needing the honking sunset flight
as witness to a day’s passing, needing the shock
to our heart beats as our geese
fly so close overhead we feel the beat
of their wings through our shared air and breathe
to their native goose rhythm:
PhillyPhillyPhillyPhillyPhillyPhillyPhilly
PhillyPhillyPhillyPhillyPhillyPhillyPhilly

Poem a day #9 Lesson of the Cicada

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Lesson of the Cicada

Growing
is hard work.
Not just expanding
but changing.

Completely.

Anything that cannot grow
enough, anything
that restricts,
must be peeled off.

Even your own skin must split,
crack open, give way,
if you must force
a way out. Even if it slices,
even if this leaves you raw
and wet and vulnerable.

And after this struggle
look back. How little it is,
what had confined you.
How fragile. How empty.
How nothing, now,
without you.

Poem a day #8 A Few Additional Footnotes on 9/11

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(not a 9/11 footnote – where is poem 7? Written, but not ready for public notice)

A Few Additional Footnotes on 9/11

______________

636,073 superb, with tall and wonderful spires,
Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships—an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets—high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies;
Whitman “Manahatta”

______________

636,074 Instead, much of the evidence of the lives of World Trade Center victims is spread into thousands of tiny pieces, piled up in a landfill or buried under the streets of lower Manhattan.
Dana Chivvis AOLNews.com 4/5/2010

______________

636,075 The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!
The city nested in bays! my city!
The city of such women, I am mad to be with them! I will return after death to be with them!
The city of such young men, I swear I cannot live happy, without I often go talk, walk, eat, drink, sleep, with them!
Whitman “Manahatta”

______________

636,076 All people are chosen. All land is holy.
Alan Senauke

Poem a day #6 – Headwaters

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Headwaters

Sex with you is a full body
contact sport, never finished
without some evidence

a bite a scrape
a deep muscle bruise
knee-sized, on a thigh,
five-clustered bruises up an arm
a feint but lingering bruise
across the top
of a cunt
a red hand print

Seeing them I smile and then
every love-sick victim-woman
that pop-songs, the blues, the movies,
the years of work in women’s shelters
have trotted through my head chorus
I don’t mind, it proves he loves me.

But they should have.
And it didn’t.

Some of those women were being battered—
I know this like I know the mole
on my own right wrist.
But maybe maybe
some walk out of dreary days
to beds that sizzle with possession
of a want not afraid to fling full force
screaming like a cat in heat and clashing
armor on armor
like giant tortoises fucking.

Between counting only the female bodies
dumped daily onto the ground
in every country, and the insane privilege
of asserting that all sex always
is only good, there must be some land
where I can stand.
and find sure footing.

Porn and pop culture may mine it,
raw product for misogynist mythography
but that is theft, not definition.

When she fucks me
into the place
between pleasure and pain
maybe that place
is a headwater, stingingly cold,
sharply crisp.

And downstream the women,
barely 18, bruised,
slurring stoned at the camera
More daddy, harder daddy, give it to me
live in the toxic stew
at the river’s mouth
where the poor and the dark
and the broken swelter
waist-deep in dehumanization,
drown in the run-off
of obscene profiteering.

Years ago I too was washed
downstream.
I’ve been fighting
against the current
for so long, back to where
desire is spawned, where
our bodies belong to
our bodies, where teeming,
screaming want is not wrong.

Counting the bodies
as I’ve migrated home
I’ve wept, and known
it was not in my want
that they drowned.

Poem a Day #5 – Mocking West Side Story

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Mocking West Side Story

The robins have been fighting for weeks.
Today the mockingbirds begin

screaming in harsh gutturals as they battle
from branch to branch to

rock to grass to lawn chair. Their cries
are so avian, so ordinary—they

disappoint me so. I expected finger
snapping, clarinet riffed Jets are gonna rumble,

or a shrilly whistled Keep coolly cool boy
while somewhere, three yards over,

a female is throttling her wish
that there be no morning star.

And why not? These are urban mockingbirds.
On a wire above my train station, I hear

one cycling daily through his repertoire—sparrow,
wren, crow, cardinal, chickadee, cat, squirrel,

tmobile jingle, tripartite car alarm from hell—
aweir aweir aweir aweir aweir aweir

weirrrr-YUP, weirrrr-YUP, ANKH ANKH ANKH—
a performance always closed with the sound of commuters

saying goodbye to their cars: beep BEEP beep.
One heartbreak morning he reminded me this is only

another tequila sunrise, then, after the new tattoo,
mocked me with the chorus of Margaritaville.

So I expect a Broadway soundtrack. It is his job
to be familiar to me, so I won’t consume him

the way humans have always consumed all that is
unknown, silencing difference before it might sing to us.

Poem a Day #4 – Southern Illinois Summer 1970

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Lest you think I exaggerate, I grew up never eating rice. I don’t remember when I first learned what it was, but I didn’t grow up knowing. I think my Grandma Dorothy would sometimes eat minute rice with a lot of sugar and cream as desert, but I never tried it. Potatoes, almost daily. Egg noodles, macaroni, spaghetti, and lasagna, constantly. But never rice. And I didn’t see a bagel until high school when my bike-racing friends introduced me to them as a source of carbs you could stick in the back pocket of your jersey.

Southern Illinois, Summer 1970

Maxwell House coffee tins
rusted, scraped along the road side
until filled with small stones
and bits of black top tar
carried carefully by the hands
of seven year old girl
and her six year old cousin
only a few steps
to the ditch’s trickling stream
of water washed from a pasture
and field.

Each load of stone dumped on the last
pushed into a rough dam
cemented with one small handful of mud
after another, handful of stone, handful of mud
rising up and then across as the water
pushed past our determined construction.

At the top of the ditch we built one pebble dam,
below another and then another
and then another, then back to the top
again after each rain that rainy summer.
We built day after day, cans carried
across the street to Grandma Dorothy’s back porch
when called in for supper.

After, we watched our parents
watching the news on the tv. Somewhere
far away there was something bad
and the tv and the parents talked and talked
in voices we knew would not answer the questions
we knew from the voices not to ask.

Each next day we returned to our ditch
to build dams. We did not vary, we did not
play other games. The water had to be stopped,
the problem had to be fixed, the world
depended on the success of this project,
as it so often depends
on what children know they should not know.

We talked as we built, as children will,
dead serious and then laughing.

We called our dams rice paddies.

We didn’t know that rice was food.
We had heard that a paddy was something wet,
but were kept from knowing
what death lay in those waters.

We did know this—
every night the grownups said
something has to be done
so every day we built dams,
our fingers sometimes torn by asphalt pellets,
sometimes cut by broken glass buried in the mud,
all that summer, when rice paddies
demanded blood sacrifice
and children in two countries
had so little childhood.