Today Means Amen
. . . it is that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches
of what humans can find out about each other.
—Jason Shinder, “Coda”
This book is dedicated to my dear friend Sam.
contents
BOWL OF DIAMONDS
In the In-Between
My Lover Found Me Weeping on the Couch
The Origin of the Heart as an Indicator of Love
Without
Small Poem
I Have Mistaken Myself
Seven Layers of Hell
Uninhabitable
A BEEHIVE PITCHED IN THE RIVER
The Living Room Needs a New Coat of Paint
The Origin of the Funeral Hat
For My Niece Livia, Age 8
A Thousand Pieces
Progress Report
In the Train Station in Munich
Thanksgiving, 2011
God Bless Your Fingers
Your Love Finds Its Way Back
Missouri
Remember
PAY THE BOATMAN
Happy New Year
A Stranger Died in an Avalanche
The Origin of Breast Milk
Beautiful
Teeth
Exodus 33:20
Ode to My Bottom Lip
I Was Asked to Speak at Your Wedding
Gardener’s Daughter
Telephone
Floating
After Googling Affirmations for Abuse Survivors
SOME INVISIBLE MACHINE
It Rained for Two Days Straight
Won’t You Let Me?
Thirteen Stanzas for Sarah Winchester
Whom I Think I Understand
This, Too, Is Not for You
Made for Blood
One More Theory about Money
Existential Crisis Brought Forth by
Complaining about My Boyfriend over
a Basket of Cheese Curds
The Origin of the Bathrobe
At the End of the Day, I Am an Animal
Facts Written from an Airplane
Mantra to Overcome Depression
SING TO ME THEN
Prayer: Hope, Screaming
The Two Poet-Daughters
These Hours I Have Not Lost
but Do Not Remember
Today Means Amen
Release It
Tonight in Yoga
The Lucky Grow Old
The Day of the Last Fire
Chai & Whiskey
About the Author
Acknowledgments
BOWL OF DIAMONDS
In the In-Between
We finally decided to leave each other.
To throw in the towel as they say, which
makes me think of our love as some
red-faced boxer—lips ballooning, eyes
disappearing inside themselves—or,
as a laboring woman—belly round, heeing
and hawing. Our love trying to push out
new life, and us, two scared nurses, dabbing
away the sweat on her brow or cleaning
the blood from his busted lip. Our love:
not pregnant, nor a good left hook, but
it did put up one hell of a fight. We chose
to forfeit, to finish it. Our love: some
shitty novel or a board game that just
goes on and on forever—just end it!
Maybe it’s an animal struck down
by a car. I’ve heard deer make the most
human of noises as they die—just
end it. The night we did, we slept
the kind of touchless sleep that follows
a funeral. I woke midday to the sound
of stillness, nothing, and knew where
our love lives now. Our bodies
refusing to rouse to a world bled of it.
Some part of us wanted to stay there,
in the in-between, where the baby
isn’t stillborn, where the deer runs off
into the meadow, where the boxer
just gets up, punch after punch,
and the rounds go on forever.
My Lover Found Me Weeping
on the Couch
reading the obituary of a local father,
not much older than you or I, whose body
betrayed him too soon—or should I say at all,
ever, because what kind of body is so disloyal
as to feed a tumor until it is fat as a blister
inside the skull, a snail too big for its shell—
I couldn’t help but think of the boy, his son,
still in that intangible stage between baby
and person, between magic is real and magic
is not real because if it was, it would have
saved my father. I wept for him and sneered
at the audacity of death, how it is the boldest
of all things, how it comes and goes as it pleases.
And once I was done, once everything was dry
and dull again, my lover looked at me and said,
“Sometimes, it’s obvious you have never lost
someone.” He, whose mother was taken from him
by her own body. He, who became one of those
parentless boys whose entire class showed up
for the funeral. This, which is not at all beautiful
nor poetic. Me, who still writes about it, who
gasps at death’s sleight of hand, not knowing
how the trick actually works: no trap door,
no encore, no white dove buried up a sleeve.
Is empathy just a pretty mask for privilege?
One day, my father will die and I will be lucky
that it wasn’t today. Perhaps then I will stop
writing these poems, no longer a weeping tourist,
a trite spectator caught between the glory of god
is real and god is not real because if he was, if he was.
The Origin of the Heart as
an Indicator of Love
Sylvia Plath sat down at her kitchen table
and began to cut the beets into neat,
equal pieces. Their juice, a bottomless
pink, spilled out eagerly—each vegetable
a blood-heavy sponge. When she finished,
she wiped her hands on the front of her blouse,
smearing a cave painting across her chest.
Ted came home just as she was turning on
the oven. He saw the stain first, then her face,
pressed his fingers against the redness
and said I want to be here. He smelled
of unfamiliar perfume but she didn’t care.
That man had looked right at her and said
he wanted to be right there: in the fluttering,
in the birdcage, against the ringing bell.
That night, they made love like two cadavers
reorganizing their organs. Later, while he
snored, the other woman’s teeth still rattling
in his throat, Sylvia wrote in her journal:
I have found it—the source of all my trouble,
the maker of all the racket. This bloody maraca.
This wild polygraph. It must know my truth.
I just need to listen. Listen. And yet? All I hear
&
nbsp; is the endless procession, the pounding voice:
stay go / stay go / stay go
Without
There is a stage in early childhood development
when a baby realizes for the first time that
he is not, in fact, part of his mother’s body.
That their heartbeats don’t float together
down the river of her arm or pass each other
like corresponding voices along telephone wires.
One day, when she leaves the room, the baby
will comprehend that he is actually alone.
Such a heavy thought for something so small.
And, yes, perhaps it is strange to describe
myself as your child. It is problematic
to compare you—once my lover—to
my mother. You, who have painted my body
with your body. You, who startled the crows
of my heart. You are not my mother but
we did live inside each other for months.
It is the only adequate way I found to describe it.
One day, long after you left, I finally realized
you were actually gone. The suddenness.
The spark. Learning a new word for without.
Small Poem
My sister is sick. Her belly is a flat lake.
Her mind is wrapped in a blanket of thistles.
I try to tell her it isn’t the engine’s fault
when the car doesn’t start. She doesn’t listen.
Her mind is wrapping a blanket of thistles
over her body, the small bird of her neck.
When the car doesn’t start correctly, we listen
to it cough and heave itself into the toilet.
Her body is the smallest bird. Her neck
peels itself open (when she is too much)
to cough and heave herself into the toilet.
I do not want to write her as a sieve,
who peels herself open, who is never enough.
But she is disappearing before my eyes.
I do not want to write this. To sieve
my sister into a poem so small
but she is disappearing before my eyes.
My sister is sick. Her belly is a flat lake.
My sister is turning into the smallest poem.
She tells me it’s the engine’s fault.
I Have Mistaken Myself
On the flight home, I cry
over a man who does not
love me. There is no stopping
the tears that flock to my ache
like needy children. The first,
the boldest, comes with
no warning just as the engine
begins its yearning howl.
Just as the plane’s nose
abandons the earth to point
itself upward to face God,
or nothingness, which is
to say love. I pretend I am
just afraid of heights when
the attendant’s eyebrows
pout with false concern:
Is this your first time flying?
I have carried too many
men around. Would you
like a glass of water? I have
mistaken myself for a bowl
of diamonds. Don’t worry
dear. It will be over soon.
Really, who could love
an ox? Spent and blistered,
always dragging this bloody
plow. Listen to it scrape across
the pavement. Look at all
the land I’ve tilled. Look at all
the shit I could bury him in.
Seven Layers of Hell
In this room, a thousand
newborn mosquitoes.
In this room, Frida Kahlo
serves dinner to a crowd
of laughing white men
on her hands and knees.
In this room, every person
I ever regret fucking and
the sound of their orgasm.
In this room, the best
minds of my generation,
endless amounts of whiskey
and rope, one shotgun,
hundreds of bullets.
In this room, no matter
how hard I try, I cannot
remember your name.
In this room, every picture
is hung crookedly
and out of reach.
In this room, the baby
we never had is crying.
Uninhabitable
My father still lives in the house he built
for my mother. He calls himself a bachelor,
not a hoarder, but you can measure how long
she’s been gone by the piles of expired
mail, the dishes, the sun-stained photos
framed in dust—tree rings of his solitude.
When he speaks of his recovery, he lowers
his voice, even though we are on the phone.
He tells me he isn’t ashamed of what he did
or where he has been or what he put my mother
through, but I think he means that he does
not allow himself the luxury of forgetting.
:::
I am writing about you again today and
I wonder, why dig up our sad corpse?
Why put the spleen back, a spoiled balloon,
already burst, but here I am huffing life back
into it. Nursing our fruitless love. Sometimes,
I still can’t believe it. That you happened
and I happened and this was the best we could
do. Our nest of rubbish, our flowerless
garden—we slept here. Made love among
the bottle caps and ants and mold.
:::
My father told me he still imagines
getting back together with my mother,
maybe someday, after her new husband dies.
I think he means he started to build a house
and left it unfinished. What is it about
this family that draws us back to
the uninhabitable? That compels us
to make a bed where there isn’t one?
A BEEHIVE PITCHED
IN THE RIVER
The Living Room Needs
a New Coat of Paint
When I asked for it, you built a sturdy table
for our kitchen, even though it was summer
and you had to work outside with the mosquitoes.
You sanded down all the sharp edges, stained
its thick legs. You tuned each ivory tooth
of that old piano we found on the side
of the road. You tightened the fan above
our bed, the one that used to wobble,
seasick, like a drunk. You unclogged
the shower drain, fished out a month
of my hair. You are always fixing things.
But what is this, my love? A crack
in the ceiling. A faulty pilot light.
A keyhole in my sternum that opens
to an ocean of doubt. I stared into
your chest last night as if it were
a telescope. I saw our future
in the distance, an island
I will not swim to. I have
eaten my own legs.
I have cut my own
stitches. My love:
you cannot fix
what wants
to be bro-
ken.
The Origin of the Funeral Hat
Twice, Coretta King dreamt
> of her husband’s assassination.
In the first dream, she sat frozen
as a centerpiece. He calmly opened
his mouth to let the bullet in like
a newborn leaning into a nipple.
In the second, he was dancing
in an uncrossable ballroom
and she could only watch
as a hundred tiny metal fists beat
themselves against his impervious
chest. Both nights she woke
in a sweat, shook him, whispered
“Martin, Martin,” the way she
used to when they first tried on
each other’s bodies, until her
husband finally came back
from sleep. Coretta always knew
what was coming. She grew up
watching boys who looked
like her husband grow up into
dead things, knew it was only
a matter of time—but when that
time came, all the fear left her body
like a procession. She wore a tall,
thatched hat to the funeral, black
as a crow’s beak, and a veil circling