Absence

Jeffrey McDaniel

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more
than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks

to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I drop a postcard in the mailbox and watch it

throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must be

part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.

Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.

I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,

as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,

back and forth, between our lips, under an oak tree
I had absolutely nothing to do with.

Fifty-Fifty

Patricia Clark

You can have the grackle whistling blackly
from the feeder as it tosses seed,

if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched
imperious as an eagle on the high branch.

You can have the brown shed, the field mice
hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door,

if I can have the house of the dead oak,
its hollowed center and feather-lined cave.

You can have the deck at midnight, the possum
vacuuming the yard in its white prowl,

if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky
raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear.

You can have the whole house, window to window,
roof to soffits to hardwood floors,

if I can have the screened porch at dawn,
the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.

The Problem of Hands

Louise Mathias

And how to fill them
is the problem of cigarettes and paint.

First time I felt my undoing
was in front of

a painting--Sam Francis, I believe.

Oh, his bloomed out, Xanax-ed California.

I liked the word guard, but you know

we made each other
nervous, standing too close

for everyone concerned. All art being

a form of violence
as a peony
is violence.

Here you come

with your open hands.

here is a secret

I have a small boat--oar-less, unmanned, and marooned nowhere--tattooed on my arm because (and no matter what I tell you about it as a way to circumvent the real story, as a shortcut to evade the real story, remember this) one day, when I was struggling with a story whose words I found twisted in a bramble of unkind syntax and a thorny silence, I found I wanted to thrash myself into submission.

I can't listen to Pure Heroine (Lorde, 2013) without the assault of memory: my brother's second-hand car, the driver seat a pool of sweat, the smell of leather.

I knew myself to be a woman because my instincts towards violence trained  themselves against myself. My body is a wonderland of craters, trenches, patched and quilted over to look like a war zone.

Her mouth, really, a ring of muscles.

To tell my parents I want a year off of work to work on my graduate thesis, the year off after that to look for grants for my PhD

Man on the jeep with caterpillar scars as fat and thick, glossy like collagen lips.

I am attuned to the way bodies resonate with pain and some, even, will sing out in chorus: here, here, I am. 

Here is another secret: I do not trust you.

not in a good way

Soon, I tell myself, soon there will be time to write properly. Sit down empty, turning things over to find where the fine, near absolutely quiet words have gone. I've found that, most often, I have to squeeze them out. But it never happens. So here I am, saddled with two classes and more than eighty papers yet to check. But here I am. This morning Gabby remarked, in that offhand fashion I've decided to interpret as [purely objective], you look like you've been squeezed and not in the good way.

Violence we understand as being done upon some body. The first rebellion I ever fought was one against my own: twelve, refusing to bloom, an inchoate dissatisfaction thrust into my hands because I was at once too little for my age and too large.

I thought it made sense to agree with the naysayers: mother, my loud aunts, various and diverse passersby and nameless titas, and the feckless cousin (or two). All of them with scripts and dialogue simple and repetitive (like a mantra, like a prayer) and harmful because they seemed to answer in chorus, in unison, that someone's body (my body) could be wrong, completely and totally.

I was thirteen. This is why I'm not an essayist. I don't remember my own life. That, or there is little to remember. Let's not go there. 

What I remember next was a decision: instead of disagreeing, I thought, I would send a stronger message. I bowed my head, allowed the words to fall like bricks, and played dead. I would make of myself, I thought, a cautionary tale. So I starved myself, refused to eat, and then purged in the bathroom with the lights on and the shower churning to hide my gagging noises.

Let's stop there. I mention all of that because I feel like my body has begun to collapse. Bits and pieces have begun to chip away, piecemeal. Like someone has loosened all my screws and filled me with smoke and hay (or grass). There is a stabbing pain in my chest, perennial and insistent. There are holes in my teeth. There are too many teeth in my mouth. I have a wound clotting on my head. I feel my spine folding. I've been up since dawn and the words in my mouth are alien. I've never had to talk so much before. Where is it all coming from? I need the words on the page, not in the air. I need the sound to stop bleeding out of me and into some airy, empty fifth-floor classroom where the clock gave up at ten-to-five months and months ago.