mother mary anne

mother mary anne died a long time ago in wichita,
which is in kansas or oklahoma,
or some other place that looks like a wide, dusty chessboard
someone forgot in the garden last spring.

the tree she planted from the rosary beads
she bought in a paper packet at the seed store
creased and wrinkled and blew away but

her tan tweed suitcase outlived her,
plodding along the side of the road,
its hitchhiker’s thumb trailing behind,
waiting for a ride.

i am creased and wrinkled like an old highway map
and the wind is tugging at my corners.

in the safe behind my passport portrait

an island
of blank-papered, brown, cardboard boxes
balancing on a handful of broken-glass and knitted waves,
boxes of cream lace dresses with torn hems and stolen street signs [roses and cheshire cats stenciled over “kirchstraβe” and “mockobcka”]
and wrinkled copies of “the lady of shalott” once forgotten in the rain.

or maybe of one lone box,
a box of empty lockets,
tossed back and forth between two mirrors,
a sea of its ghosts stretching out to the horizon.

floating on the island:
a tall, blue, iron postbox,
his whiskered, mustached mouth yawning below a grizzled nose,
stoic and patient,
his throat a tunnel to the earth’s second half, the dreaming half.

she
[amber and rosemary and cotton]
slips a sealed envelope,
postmarked straβburg
[and skoΠje and holzen and prishtinë and chang chun and and and],
empty but for a whisper,
down his iron throat,
down the tunnel painted moon-grey.

chin on her knees,
legs crossed like an indian,
leaning back on her elbows,
dipping her toes into the filigreed sea,
waiting for a parcel
postmarked nowhere.

lektion zwei

messager:

if i hung a doll on the wall with a body part and wrote under it, overandoverandover, the same words, i wonder what it would be?

hers, the one that is say, “protectionprotectionprotectionprotection” until the words and her voice dry up like a well in a drought, has someone’s hand on her chest. the only time someone’s hand has looked like that on my chest was when we were walking late at night or early in the morning, wading past and through a sea of armchairs lined up for miles along the vardar river, meandering towards the old stone bridge that my mother used to pretend was made of rubies and yellow diamonds.

it was only a cat in the bushes by the dirt path to the bus stop, but the red bus with the white stripe scared it and she scared him because he would kill anyone that hurt me, and his hand shot out across me, as if the few bones of his wrist could keep away knives or fists or even just eyes.

but the world is in a palm and his was flat against the night instead of against me.

someone’s palm is flat against messager’s doll’s chest.


i would hang her by the back of her neck where the sides of her throat grow into her shoulders and on her chest would limpidly hang a photograph of someone’s collarbone, white and protruding and like the moon if the moon weren’t so jovial and plump, a photograph frame in brown sugar, like the glasses at fancy dinners, their rims crusted in crystals.

and i’m not telling you what the dark green crayon underneath her legs would say.


mary jo bang and gjertrud schnackenberg are brilliant. especially when they say things like:
“or vision, thrown on an empty mirror, and there you were?” or “in the dining room they would crumple over the table like paper angels if anyone raised an eyebrow.” or “a child’s prison for butterflies” or “a change of clothes? the dream master asked” or “and once, the household clocks passing the news of ‘Five’ from room to room, when she stood up to put away the cards and cold tea, he, wishing he could keep her there with him, thought to detain her with interrogations, and, sinking back…began by asking her, Where is the snow from?”

today the snow outside my window is climbing up the thin glass, poking its fingers inside maybe to wave or maybe to laugh or maybe to say, “leave your cold mint tea and

kitsch, camp, and excess

jeff koons thought he was taking a photograph of a slice of cake—maybe a birthday cake, probably a cake bought from the store to give to someone you don’t like (because it’s from the store, which is easy, sort of, unless it’s saturday afternoon) or maybe to give to someone you do like but you don’t have the time to make a cake or maybe you just don’t have the money, which really doesn’t make sense because making a cake by yourself mostly costs less money than buying one at the store, unless it’s not really cake but something that just looks like it. a lot of poor people buy cake at the store, i notice.

like marie antoinette, now that i think about it, except she wasn’t talking about herself and neither are the poor people… i don’t buy cake at the store, but i don’t really even eat cake.

but jeff koons- he wasn’t taking a picture of cake. he accidentally took a photograph of the day my little sister was born: tacky and sterile, with frosted roses pasted to the edges, and me crying in the corner because she had no teeth.


jeff koons, jeff koons, and a baby stuffed into a bear with arms longer than its legs, not eaten, mind, but stuffed.

she looks like she(he,it?) bought some cement shoes, but for her chest

sort of like a chocolate raisin, the ceramic kind, like

I am heavy with a shipment of baubles from the underground warehouse
that sells cement shoes—
for your chest.
or, rather, for your enemy’s chest,
only i bought this pair for myself. there was a sale.
I always wanted to be a chocolate raisin,
the iron version,
a ship’s hull crusted in metal urchins.
if I hit you in the eyes, hard
you would see out of sea-star-shaped slits.
if i could lift my hand, or breathe.
we exchange information,
trade facts in the brown paper bags some puts in their backpack
to carry cocaine or a salami sandwich.

you can’t fight mist with a sword and someone cracked my telescope when they used it as a cane. i don’t blame them, we all need something to lean on, but i just hope that if I keep moving my feet, i’ll reach something that’s not nothing or a cliff.

falling, trapped in a bear and amore and my arms still only gape.

he loves me, he loves me not: five-petaled flowers

my ladder shoots up from under the violets
and climbs to meet the top of a yellow playground slide
my hair is braided into the sky as i stand tall on he loves me, he loves me not
and rungs built of

a scarlet coat with shining black
buttons marching in two single-file lines down the front—
a grizzled man with a face salted and peppered,
bristles crooning about bluebirds and rainbows in the subway—
bright white clouds pretending to be dragons with twisting, ridged, raging
backs or gardens of blooming skyscrapers—

i climb high on mountains of clinking trinkets
and teetering stacks of round clouds
the man who buried you in the ground forgot to light
the exit sign
and the iron ladder you sent for is out of stock—

you are atlas and i am trying to balance a green marble on my nose.

eliza

when i was nine, trapped in a red, sagging cardigan and round yellow glasses, i had crooked fingers, all straight but for the longest two, bent near the top. sitting on my window sill overlooking the blue vans and the basketball hoop with the torn netting, i would hold my fingers as far from my eyes as my arms would allow and squint until they blurred into a family of four, the tall father stooping to hold his wife’s head on his shoulder. i still have crooked fingers and they are still in love. when i was nine, you were seven and you had a brown mole on your right cheek and maybe you named her, but you would not have told me.

and then eight years passed and i was thinking about waking jeweled in dew and made the mistake of printing too many poems upstairs, leaving them like forlorn children wandering the desks in the attic of the library, calling to each other and drifting to the floor. that is where your brother found them and that is why he asked me for another in the hallway with the grey linoleum by the lockers with the broken hinges. i never meant to do it, but somehow i trapped him with me in my red, sagging cardigan and his roaming feet carried us past broken street lamps, through the blossoming apple orchards, across ravines on fallen trees, down the path through the abandoned brick factory to a hidden green lake, behind the fence at the dump for forgotten art, in a secret tunnel coated in moss, up to the peak of your roof trying to sing our way into the sun, nowhere that was school, and everywhere that was afternoon detention.

your voice reminded me of thyme tea, grey sand, and cattails in august, and when you glared at me and my cardigan on the green bench leaning up against your rough-edged house, i went to all the way to switzerland to escape it and ate no dinner that night.

before summer and the atlantic came and stole us away from each other, you picked purple flowers with your teeth and i had rainbow paint on my cheeks and you talked more than you like but neither one of us could help but know and know and know and crinkle in the right places.

and then it changed, because he left to somewhere to make sandwiches and you brought the painting of the white dress and the lanterns into your orange room and every thursday was for us and no one else, to share grapes and throw away the salami your mother hid in your sandwiches. it was always different than ordinary, without jumping on the stairs but with talking about muffins and things that come from riedlingen and even though my hair turned to wool in the rain and pieces of me sometimes were trapped just above my eyes, it was that pale yellow that will someday be my kitchen where i will make rice. your sister painted a portrait and i wore the white dress with a scarlet ribbon around the waist, while he held my head on his shoulder. and my hands were blank.

when the germans put up the garlands and lights in their gingerbread streets, i kept too still, not because he bid me be quiet, but because he bid me nothing. standing on the fountain, singing without my eyes, wearing only the umbrella your mother borrowed to do her gardening, i see nothing but night and thyme tea and medallions from when you were seven. the longest letter in the world went through a hole in the wall this morning; drink it with milk and honey, my love.

my name, it never meant wren in anyone’s language

water me twice a day
as the old women in red and
tan headscarves let their
green garden hoses run on the
shattered afternoon streets to slick the
sweet dust down,
wondering if today the dust will take
root,
blossom, and keep
out of the air.

god made the wrens out of deep mud.
the dust of the air: in the shattered-lace wind,
its pale wings crack and flake,
it never does settle for long, root, or flower,
goodbye.
the wrens, they sleep under leaves
in forests of jade.

death's exercises

which is more frightening—an invisible death or a foreseen death? what i mean is, should we be afraid of vasari’s carnival 1511 where the black oxen drag the dead men through the streets singing “dead we are as you can see and dead we’ll see you one day be”? or should be frightened by plath’s blue-satin flemish lovers, foolish, deaf and blind to the carrion army surrounding them?

breugel’s dead are just; baudelaire’s glamorous. the difference between the two is that breugel’s bring the living into their ranks (for desertion is punishable by life) and baudelaire’s bride yearns for the admiration of the living. and therefore breugel’s dead enrapture and enchant while baudelaire’s merely mirror life. breugel’s dead…the living are guilty, the immortal unforgivable, for life is gluttony, lust, and greed, all to be surrendered in death. death is the truest democracy, the truest equality, as petrarch notes: where are their riches now, their honours? wretched is he who hopes in worldly things (but who does not do so?), and if, in the end, they are deceived, then this is just.

we all belong to death and to escape him is a sin, for in death we are equal, simple, true, still. he is a jealous master. yet shelley sees the dead not as tranquil but as feeble and roving, faded yet roaming. perhaps because death it is because death is extreme that we are drawn to it, as schiller notes, because though the transition is one from animation to immobility, it is a great transition nonetheless. any shocking change is a source of awe, because from vast dichotomies, differences, contrasts, we derive awe. perhaps it is because death is so much greater than ourselves, so full of power beyond our control, that we flock to it as we do to disaster or pain. or perhaps we are not meant to be tranquil beings, and, therefore, in bringing us into peace, death does us great violence. perhaps we are merely fascinated because of all these perhapses, because we cannot know or even theorize. death is not a thing, but the absence of a thing, of life, and we cannot imagine what fills that void.

when one life dies, it seems as if all life dies with it. middleton’s kaspar is gone, and with him goes the fairies, and the compasses, the pushcart wheels, the devil-shooer, lucid monograms in the stars: the imagination, direction and logic, energy, protection and good, wisdom. and yet the last line is one pitying not the world which has lost, but the man who has lost the world. for the divorce is painful for both, whomever left first.

in death, who has lost and who has gained? or does river flow on in circles, winding around and refilling its empty bed?