Lily Herman

Soft Shoulder

“As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep”
—Kenneth Patchen

Harmless, isn’t it, to watch you
raze the room in which you live,
and work, and liked me once
to be in your bed, while the season
changed, about which we were
silent, about which we were not
consulted, the winter moon emerging
as a talisman for all we failed
to do before fall had ended
and now can never do even
for ourselves, let alone each

other. I cannot let you
alone:  The body you
are so casual with, dark eyes
in dark settings, like the tarnished
silver band encircling a pristine,
but less valuable, stone.

I wear it
on a severed hand I keep
stowed from sight
in one of my secret pieces
of burdened furniture
laden like an unwilling
mule with other trophies
I have earned in similar performances.
I wear it on any finger.
When I take it swimming
its weight compounds and
offers to drag me to my
relief.  There you are,

to my relief, at the foot
of the sea’s bed, terrorizing
monsters and arranging in surfaced
repression waterlogged
knick-knacks. Hapless,
isn’t it, when you sit down

with me to talk unprompted
about feeling stagnant, which
can only be properly observed
by your frustrated shrugs (like
you’re torn between one course
of action and another, and decided
in indecision to settle the matter
on your shoulders.) I wish
that the thousand contrived pieces
of advice I give you—about contentment,
about concession—would somehow
culminate in your mind like
a stumbled-upon jigsaw approaching
completion, and you knew
what I meant without even a hint
of hopeful sex was, please feel better
because I love you

and can stand letting that stagnate
if I know you’re better off far
outside the realm of my admiration.
You reconfigure your room when
I think what you want to do is break
it, like the whole space is defined
as a diorama that you in your
unasked-for genius throw across the
classroom only after you’ve gotten
your “A.”

But if you lapse out of happiness
my discouraged fire for you wonders
what the point is of its containment—
if you, faithless to your universe,
would be no less bothered
than you already are by its
burning.  If what you have is not

enough, it says, then for god’s sake
take some of mine.  I signed it over to
you already, out of adolescent’s hope
or monogrammed self-immolation,
or the simple pleasure I get
from arranging letters into the shape
of your name.  I love to see it there. I love

how its single syllable leans like I rest
heavier on one leg while I wait
like any other tempered pedestrian
for the walk signal at stoplights.  You
come in your car, withholding the speed
with which you wish to barrel through all
soft shoulders, do all things, and I knock
on your window to tell you that you’re out
of time, even in the center of the day,
the moon in you that cursed me is already
up and so you have nothing, not me,
not the unmitigated season, still contending
in the race.

Penultimate

Death overtakes genital warts, but only by a splash.  After that it’s rapists, scorpions, and loss of virtue.  Talking about my father’s death, not because I’m hurt but because the more I talk the more likely it is someone will notice I don’t really miss him, I just miss someone else looking out for me.

Not heights so much as vertigo, then crowds with no bathroom, hard drugs, dismemberment, injury to my eyeballs, losing someone else’s child.  Daniel coming back into town because every time he does one more person realizes I’m just a version of him, smarter but fatter, and with less charm, and anyway what’s funny from him is abrasive from a woman.  A twisted ankle in the woods.  A government operation in the woods.  One of the world’s active serial killers in the woods.  Bears.

Not homeless people but becoming homeless.  Abortion, not that I’ll have to have one but that I won’t, and then I’ll never be able to write about them.  Being a bad lover.  Atomic bombs and no heaven.  A flood and no plan.  A cannibal colony and no allies.

Men who need mothers before women who need mothers because in my experience women need their mothers less and in fact don’t like to acknowledge them.  Anyone who was fucked by a family member and never stopped destroying themselves in response.  Anyone who wanted to fuck a family member and destroyed themselves at once.  Riding in cars when I don’t know the driver.  The ingredients in processed food.  Being yelled at in a deli or a bus or anywhere a line can form and I can hold it up.

The death penalty but only once it’s broken down.  Electrocution before firing squad but only because firing squad would look better in a movie.  And of course all the archetypes before that, I’m heretical because I know no one can burn me for it anymore. 

Failure, though my sister argues from the next room that by some standards I already am.  I have no money.  I am not afraid of having no money.

A situation in which I have the opportunity to prove myself selfless.  Mispronouncing words in public forums.  The feeling that sets in with the first frost that I will never be warm again.  The feeling that sets in with the first fuck that I will never get off again.  The feeling that sets in getting off that I’ll never be in love again.  The feeling that I’ll never be alone again.

The tranquility I feel when the story is told of how I locked Daniel in a room on the outside of the house.  Unfurnished and unlit, I was three and managed by chance to work the latch.  He was entombed there for an hour until our mother saw my giggle and panicked.  How I pictured that little room the first time I read the story where the man keeps the girl in his basement, to watch her, but ends up having to hurt her.

I imagine they’d be different if I was someone else: If I was a man, it would go like this.  One, don’t let anything happen to my cock.  Two, my best friend and my girl.  Three, death unless I was doing something cool while it happened.

Two nights ago I dreamed that everyone I’ve ever gone to bed with was in a room and they were putting me on trial.  I was acquitted but it didn’t matter because they all wanted me to hang anyway.

At least she’s a good lay, Elise said, standing up.

Terrific, Thomas said.

Let’s not get carried away, Sean said, like a citizen displeased with the tide of a town hall meeting.  She’s enthusiastic in bed.  She’s eager.  But she’s not great.

You haven’t been with her when she’s got the home-team advantage, Elise said.

That’s another thing, Sean said.  Nobody every nailed her dead to rights so she never decided.  That’s another thing she’s done, to all of us.

You’re only here, I thought, you’re only here because I liked your red-necked chivalry.  And your stupid grammar and if anybody doesn’t belong on this panel it’s you.

If I was with someone like Sean it’d go like this: First that he would hit me.  Second that he would hit me and no one would break his legs for it.  Third I’d stick around long enough to see him pay for all the things he does.  I wouldn’t stay with Sean.  I didn’t stay with Sean and he still hasn’t paid and there was no panel, not really, but if there was, he’d pull out a pistol and implement any justice wasn’t sanctified when the hammer came down.  Gin has helped a lot of men do the things they thought needed to be done, when no one was on their side.  Gin is a good excuse.

I didn’t have time to think about it when I was with Elise because she was so afraid herself.  That I never came.  That she didn’t come enough. Of fucking on the kitchen floor of her mother of what she’d missed in the years that being a woman who loved women had kept her from church. Of eating meat because she believed in transubstantiation and she wanted the only flesh she ate to be God’s.  When I left her I made a lot of cannibal jokes and it didn’t bring us back at each other.

Never going to Spain.  Ambient music.  Semi-solid foods which means cream cheese and pudding and hummus.  Vomit, but not my own.  Women, but not my own.  Line dances I don’t know the steps to.  Samuel Beckett.  Microwaves.  Every president.  If I could dream it again I’d make it a circus instead of a trial, and in the end I’d jump off the trapeze and see who wove themselves into a safety net below.  Ten bets that Sean would help save me.  Ten that Elise would go back to Indiana.  And the rest riding on me, the rest saying I wouldn’t even let go.

One of the earliest men I met in the city said that to me.  He came from Carnie stock and called pizza, “a slice,” and ice cream, “a cone,” and all of the women he’d been in love with before me had been fat, really fat.  The kind of fat that absorbs young men, till they’re a little, floating tumor with a potency when they look at you but never when they bed you down.  Nothing counts for nothing.  His first love wore ice skates that choked the fat around her ankles.  Women like that had a lifetime of releasing the line, he said, because they’d never been beautiful and they’d never be much.

But no one waits at the bottom, he said, don’t make any mistake about that.  No one wants to know her up her skirt.

No one even looks to see if she’d live, I said, back in my mind at the trapeze artist.  You all just assume she would, even without you.  And me, you think, if I come to some really steep place, I must have gotten there by accident.

It’s not that, he said.  I just get the feeling that if you found yourself up there, you’d bail out over an ocean.

First is death, but only as a technicality.  Starvation doesn’t even make the list.  And the rest are half-jinx, half-prayer like wishing a woman would fall off the tight rope rather than keep toeing the line.

Smooch and Then Some

(or, as I affectionately refer to this essay in my head, “The Girl Scout’s Guide to Threesomes.” Also written for a memoir workshop in the fall)

Adrian and I got to know each other in a short story seminar our first semester at Pratt.  We spent fifteen weeks writing about our fierce parents, the cities from which we had traveled.  At the end of term, the class had a reading at a café called Smooch with dim lighting and couches draped in white cloth, where you could get espresso but not drip coffee.  Our professor was drunk and affectionate, insisted on buying us two slices of vegan carrot cake, and we all read in a warm, dark room about family.  There wasn’t much of an audience; mostly we were reading to ourselves, about ourselves, which is a good way to celebrate surviving your first season in New York. 

Afterward, Adrian (or Age, as she had come to be known) and I went to Alibi for drinks, ran into two other girls from the class.   They looked at our glasses of whiskey, and one of them asked the other, accusingly,  “Why are we drinking beer?”  None of us had much more to say, though we were friendlier with each other than we’d been all semester.  “Walk on the Wild Side” was coming out of a jukebox that usually only played hip-hop.  We swayed to it and called it dancing, and Adrian whispered something about how much she had loved seeing me with Sam, my boyfriend, who had recently come up for a weekend visit.  He was a painter, lion-haired and stumble-worded, as though we had decided early in our relationship that one of us would be the voice and one of us the hands.  We left the bar and walked home through piles of oak and gingko leaves that always seemed to disappear the morning after they appeared: And that was fall.  She came to my room and we spooned and watched Shirley Temple movies and documentaries about Hunter S. Thompson. 

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Taps

Here it is again—that poets’ old favorite,
the onion, returning to limp a last time
across the battlefield of one woman’s
page.  I regret it, but it is necessary

because no other has what the onion does:
Unassailable structure, despite a thousand
ready methods to its obliteration.
The destruction of layers only preempts
the existence of more. The knife is not
its enemy.  Its efforts are too easily
diverted. 

And that is how I see her now, untouchable,
the foreign specter of my former mother,
inaccessible as she was to so many years
of me, but undeniable in her form.
You can only

dissect an onion so much before you see
there is nothing to be discovered
that the outermost sphere didn’t reveal. 

I start then on this crust. I suppose the
beginning of any of these discussions is her
suicides, collected as casually as ceramic
animals.  I can say, My mother laid down
on the train tracks and her fifteen year old
son had to drag her weeping body
unwillingly home. 

But that is not a story.  Rather, an
archetype that I’m invoking now out
of convenience in the absence of any real
feeling I can muster on the subject,
because I do not have at my opportunistic
writer’s disposal the mind of that fifteen year old,
or even that of his younger sister, and in
the distance between the image and what
I am trying to understand, I see that I am just idly
conjuring wild ideas women get about life
when they decide it is no longer their
friend.  I have had

twice as many chances to decide that now,
twice as grown as the eleven year old
whose mother was an alien for entertaining
such ideas.  My mother is not an alien,
but just someone else who at times wanted
to beat the world at beating her, and somehow
survived herself long enough to grow
tired of her attempts. 

I can even say, without lying to benefit
the poem’s climate, that at times I wanted her
to die.  Insistent as she was on inviting death’s
kitsch to our kitchen, its drawers full
of bread-knives, our bathroom full of pills,
her bedroom of X-acto blades, insistent
that ordinary objects become imbued with
enduring threat. 

It did not occur to me then to feel pity
for any of us, but it is the simplest of sympathies:
If the woman who bore me wanted anything,
she should have it, and death is not exempt
from the list of feasible desires. 

And so she died.
And when I was old enough, so I died, too, and
finally speaking the language that had estranged us
in its commonality for so long, we returned to our
injured onion, and saw he was not alone in the warm
bath of war.  We served alongside him, fighting
to preserve our right to as much madness
as we could claim without being labeled
deserters.  And the battle ended, and we
joyfully lost, and tearfully surrendered the land
we had staked in the next world for ourselves,
and to commemorate how close we came we 

administered last rites to the unalterable
onion, for resembling us much more in permanence
than we knew.  And in the fields, a bugle played
over his body.

why won’t someone pay me to recite poems I’ve memorized

Loving you less than life by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Nude Descending A Staircase by X.J. Kennedy

The “holy palmers’ kiss” dialogue sonnet between Romeo and Juliet

The Russian by Robert Bly

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll if I brushed up on it a bit

hire me hire me hire me

She cannot be a real woman

This was a personal essay I wrote originally for my food blog over the summer and was re-worked for a memoir workshop last fall.

I take inventory of my life in the apartment: A second-floor space in an A-frame that was beautiful but beginning to sag from the inside.  A rent of almost a thousand dollars per month, supposed to be split between two people, but my roommate left to live in California with my brother, and months later I got a postcard saying she’d married him.  I let the bare light bulbs burn out one by one, sleep on a mattress in the front room that I’ve dragged to the floor, where I can see the door.  Occasionally, I invite Mickey over, and he makes love to me unabashedly in the middle of the day and then leaves.  I think about crying and then make lunch, wondering at the feeling I get—like a woman noticeably disheveled in public, only no one knows I’m here.  I decide it is almost worse to be left alone with your body, once someone else has seen it. I move out in the last crush of summer, get out from the ceiling bloated with water from the shower in the apartment above me. I look at it swelling and shut the door and think that I made it out just in time, before everything fell down to me.  Mickey and I stop sleeping together.

To live with seven people after living alone, first I forget fright.  I forget sleeping with the lights on in the hallway, avoiding scary movies, avoiding eating at home across the table from no one.  I have different worries now.  I must remember how people eat together, that people eat together.

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Pitch

I fear for us: the women who talk
in the immediate moments following
sex, as though the act has silently settled
some two-bodied question, who begin
making plans for our presumed futures,
now cast in a cinematic new mold
by the creature below or beside us,
the phantom with whom
we fled daylight. 

Even after several nights or minutes
or months of it.  Lulled as we are, noble
as we are to keep being droned into a lull,
by the same set of unconvincing circumstances,
certain that we could not be
so gripped if someone somewhere
wasn’t intentionally tightening
their hold. 

Don’t we know by now that
is when they humiliate you?  In their
kindness, in their empathy for the fledgling
far across the room from them, lodged
in us like a sunken piece of old
metal.  When the bed is tellingly
dim, our skin, as an extension of its
warmth, desires the warmth of another,
like a flesh-draped magnet, a current
experimenting with various conductors,
demanding that what touched once
should now logically touch forever.
That is when they sit

in brighter light than us, higher up
than we’ve ever been, manipulate
with tiny movements all the thousand tides
in our bodies, that previously moved
whimsically, dragging in and out
of the sea what floating pieces
it was inspired in an instant to touch. 

Of a sudden there is a moon in the pitch
sky and the travelers are free by the disloyal light
to determine their own course.  This moment:
the eyelashes, the forearms, bellies so recently
laborers striving for the same perfection,
each stiffens in its turn, and explains
wordlessly that we knew all, all along,
that daylight can puncture ghosts, and must
puncture what it can, so I say now 

nothing, have trained
that feral pet to stay still when I have the urge,
like other women, to hope that I can naturally
associate one affection with another, taller
one, leave the human in the animal screaming 

like a baby is taught not to cry
by being abandoned in the crib
and its father’s heart follows in pity,
but he refuses to inflict further harm
by holding it.

Body of Christ

Three words millions lazily
drawl in the course
of their otherwise-occupied
days.  I watch them and
count how few
actually picture
that tender skin
aged so briefly before
it ripped itself open
and invited them,
a pack of unsympathetic
strangers, to enter paradise
by a short walk
through all of its wounds. 

No matter the master
of its mind, a body
at thirty-three
rejects for a bedmate
death, and all its rotting
corpulent companions, his
lungs and kidneys cry out
to be taken to a man
who will think more
generously on their behalf,
give them their proper
due, in hours spent
accruing the glorious
mold of old age
like fine clothes
stored in a wet
terrarium. 

And what of Mary.
Who must have remembered
as do the mothers of all
errant sons, the shape
of her infant in her arms,
the milk that passed
between them, not made
merely of light
but of her own systems
and struggles.  The news
of his fast bringing with it
the instinct, which never
leaves a woman, to feed
the one she bore
out from the abyss
by the sweat of her
womb.

His hair, raked
with thorns as always
it is in photographs,
would have been
better suited by a chain of
daisies, or the delicate gold
gifted by a shy admirer, or
as is often the case
with youth, unhindered
in its beauty by decoration
at all. 

If the son needed
to suffer, that we might
be free, why must
it have been that moment
we chose to portray him
as one of us?  A prophet
is one of us.  A bard,
a baptist, a whore with her
head perpetually bent
to the feet of great
men—washing, washing,
and yet none of these
would we dream of undoing
bodily, or if so, no
one would tell stories
about it.  It is only
at the glance of a god
that we raise our weapons
and shoot him who dares
to stir placidly like a buck
in the woods, leave him
bleeding out, leave the meat
as an offering to our future 

selves, for all the wrongs
we still intend to commit.
No one thinks of him
with goose bumps after
the sun went down
in Judea, or the pleasure
that must have imbedded
itself upright
like a rod in his spine
when he first learned his hands
brought happiness to those
who had ailed
for so long.  All forms
celebrate their own triumphs.

Sharon Olds wrote about the Pope’s
penis because she was too
frightened to look Christ
in the eye.  But there it is:
understandable
as a beast’s, and right
where it should be, used
as daily as anyone else’s,
if one is to say, God
as man, one cannot avert
their gaze from the perfection
of men.  Perfect 

they are, we are to say,
thanks to him
and his yielding torso,
giving itself over as one
relents to persistent
love, concedes that all
they’ve ever had is not theirs
until, blissfully,
bloodily, it belongs
to someone else, too.