Lily Herman

"She reconfigured her fingers to arrive at a different position. ‘And this is the saddest way..."

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:10:06 -0500

“She reconfigured her fingers to arrive at a different position. ‘And this is the saddest way to make love; it is from the Book of Job.’”

- Salvador Plascencia

"He folded the letter, stuffed it into an envelope, and affixed postage. Saturn did not know her zip..."

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:55:36 -0500

“He folded the letter, stuffed it into an envelope, and affixed postage. Saturn did not know her zip code or apartment number or the city where she had gone. He put her name on the envelope. Below her name he described the types of places where she might be: cities with rivers, streets with breezes, apartments with steps, rooms with canopies.”

- Salvador Plascencia, from The People of Paper

Ascension

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:31:00 -0500

While he is not being watched: A man in a pair of khakis and a belt but no shirt is shaped like a boxer over his sink doing yesterday’s dishes before he’ll let himself eat again. Tidiness is next to godlessness, he thinks, just as the dish rack tilts and water from a mug with-still-life slips to the floor. In the next room his wife is dreaming about other lives: With buildings, with babies, and how daylight can be beautiful but almost never at peace. She feels a war starting in the sun above her eyelids. There are no other men in these dreams, which is why she never leaves him upon waking.

Outside, the Hudson River is being permanently romantic about the marriage that is a constant furlough from the world. They are lucky. It lives in and outside the bed. Sensing each other, she rises as he rinses the second to last dish before turning the water off, and they meet in the poorly-lit hallway halfway between the kitchen and sleep. When she was born she was called Laura and her parents emptied her from her crib when she cried from phantom insects descending from the mobile above her head. It was a whale mobile. They must have been parasites living on the whales—in their wet eyes, in their blowholes, she never forgave the sea for tormenting her, her tiny feet still riddled as they had been as a baby in bites—Only now can she turn with him to face the river and its fresh water, and its moving life, and see it as less or more than pure breeding-ground. The assailants come from elsewhere. She waits but the assailants don’t come. As he had promised in his only vow on their wedding day: I promise to let you live, and she with all the shyness of a rat venturing into a commercial kitchen, had accepted. Beneath her clear veil with a head of clouds gathered in the high point of the noon sky.

Sometimes she knew he had lied. Sometimes he wondered why he had not demanded any identical oath from her but, as now, when the blanket slipped burgundy down around her shoulder and she saw him looking, both knew they were living up to what they had sworn. She had promised in turn, in silence, to live for him, to let herself carry on like an oil painting on his porch. He was always watching. Her fingers gather salt from a shallow bowl for their morning meal. It is the day of her parents’ funeral.

Moses and Ida’s marriage had been different, they had said nothing about life and only conceded to simultaneous death when the day came, and they knew they would know when it had. It had not spoiled. They had picked it up with impeccable timing and so it required no bravery. She does not know what to wear to their service. She cracks three eggs into the hot pan: One for her, one for him, and one for the prophet Elijah which, in his absence, they will split. He watches her being superstitious. He watches her eat.

Moses had wanted very much to see them married, before they knew to want it themselves, when she was still a small girl with fists clenched like metal tools wrapped in meat. She had been taken to have her ears pierced with gold as an infant and didn’t cry then, and as he passed in his mother’s arms on their way back from market, Moses had whispered to his baby, That is your husband, that is where your luck lives, do you see, my darling, how many stars are out tonight? That is your sky. That is the bed you will be in.

Still they had let her pass the time in childhood slowly, in the raspberry bushes, her father’s carpentry shop, her mother’s pious rocking chair. God, she said, was among them, and the girl often scoured crowds for a face she didn’t know but assumed she would recognize upon a single glance. Traveling salesmen were all God. Her visiting relatives. Homeless men became pilgrims with bindles, until the whole town, unbeknownst to it, changed into the holy land, and the girl walked with her plagued, bare feet as though the dirt paths were all burning coals standing directly between her and heaven. She had agreed to marry him when she saw he had no shoes, either. They were six. The ceremony was quick and beautiful and the citizens viewed the night’s rain as their starry bed pulling its sheets back to welcome them. That, they said, would make for a good harvest. None were surprised when she gave birth to their first child the next year. He went immediately to the fields to be replanted, and her concave little body did not yet know to cry out to him, that there would be no others. Still they had their bounty, she thinks, and doesn’t think twice about beginning a new heap of dirty dishes when they had done eating. It was their way. They were alone together but knew from one case years ago they were not barren. It was their bed. No little ones had claim to it.

Of her parents she says, What should I mourn? That they planned so well? That everything they told me became the truth? Or that I was theirs at all? And he doesn’t answer because she hasn’t spoken out loud. Every year on their anniversary Ida had given them a new Bible with the word Christ underlined every time it appeared—she appeared to him this way, his mother in law, now the baton-wielder of the dead, toiling toward her god, toiling toward her daughter, in her immoveable chair. Moses, of course, had made it—Ida explained, “That earth has given, and human hands have made,” out of the beech trees Ida loved even though he had warned her it was not good wood. It had been good enough for her, to see the bark like blemished paper curling off around her feet. Each piece she thought, was a love note to his craftsmanship, to the moment he was willing to sacrifice it for the sake of his wife. He made for her what he knew in his better mind to be faulty, if it was what she craved and nothing else. It warped and never broke.

It put down roots one year through their dirt floor when the rain had been unrelenting. It had been bad for crops. In the fields the girl’s son had died and she had not heaved for him, could not sob now except for at the sight of spiders and beetles overtaking his grave. To see that what had feasted on her, feasted on hers, too. The dirt was hell. They put down tiles in their home and she grew rounder in her distance from the earth. She was becoming the perfect woman in not missing anything that had gone before, in her thorough and forgetful hips.

He made likenesses of her like this: calm as The Thinker, but with nothing occupying the space above her head except a thistle of red and perfect hair. Ida had said it was the color of blood drawn by the Lord and his thorns from her mind, born as she was celebrating and eulogizing her fate. She would be thanked for her words, and her hair was a talisman to remind Him. Now she could not help but remind her husband, and he thanked her every night for the flames she had stood in waiting for him, lonely, and five, and unsure for what she waited. Thank you for the son. Thank you for not being a mother. Thank you for staying a little while outside the realm to which I know you want to return.

The Hudson stands still and full. She does not welcome him but says only; I promised you I would live.

"There was no all-powerful god who could part the rivers of Pison and Gihon, but instead a..."

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:53:50 -0500

“There was no all-powerful god who could part the rivers of Pison and Gihon, but instead a twice-retired old man with cuts across his fingers.”

- Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper. (If I have a god, that’s maybe what he looks like.)

Featuring readings by: Chris Toll, C.L. Bledsoe, and Lily Herman...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:51:26 -0500

Featuring readings by: Chris Toll, C.L. Bledsoe, and Lily Herman (that’d be me) with an open mic to follow.

Future Prospects

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:41:00 -0500

I want to come in and out of you:
Like a mouse leisurely enters
a house the humans thought
belonged to them, but are more
obligated to, for all of their
heavy doors, I want to arrive
through a self-size hole I chew
with my own doting teeth. You

don’t have to do anything,
you won’t even know I’m there
until one day I slip across
your feet while you read
and even then you may be
convinced that I’m just
a tickle you had never before
noticed.

Soft Shoulder

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:59:00 -0500

“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

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:25:00 -0500

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

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:57:00 -0500

(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.

Jules knocked on my door around 2 AM—her group of friends had ostracized her for sleeping with someone-or-other’s boyfriend, she had done a lot of cocaine and was crying. “Can you come with me to the bodega? I need to get beer so I can sleep,” she said. We put our coats back on. I only ever did cocaine twice. Once it was fine, it went fine, though it felt a little bit like crushed and dried anxiety to me. The other time I went home from the bar with the bartender’s girlfriend, who I had half-heartedly tried to ditch. But she had figured out where I was headed, and followed me there. Maybe I told her where I was going, I don’t remember. Some women, it seems, are just perpetually on the lookout for opportunities to betray their boyfriends. She smelled like she didn’t wash a lot but she was pretty and afterward I went back to Dave’s apartment that was soon to become my apartment, too. And talked a lot about feeling inferior when really I meant feeling like I had no identity, and that time I cried a lot.

When Jules left my room I finally sucked my breath in and put my hand on Adrian—lightly, so lightly. She was wearing a grey leotard with a scoop neck and slacks. I was young and so had the stomach for whiskey, but not rejection. Years later, we would both claim to have engineered this night, to have conspired in advance for the other. We wanted to be knights where really we were sweethearts. I wanted to thank her a thousand times for being the simplest love I had yet found—the most obliging, the breathless, the one that wasn’t afraid to understand the body along with the person. The next morning we walked through Prospect Park and read to each other from a book called Dinners and Nightmares, which, I was learning, sums up the two main components of any young life in New York. She had her long hair stuffed inside a newsboy cap and I was learning that I wouldn’t ever be able to be near her again without feeling an admiring crash somewhere in my lungs or stomach or some other organ I couldn’t quite place.

Our arms linked, back at the Pratt campus we were about to part ways when she said, “How do you and Sam feel about threesomes?” the same way she might ask how we felt about polka, or walnuts in brownies. Like it was a natural question, but anyone’s guess, as a sort of errant goodbye. I had truthfully never thought of it before, when I thought of sex, and Sam, I thought how I missed it, and him, back in Baltimore. It wasn’t a time of innovation: I drank what my brother drank, smoked what my classmates smoked, and I made love to my boyfriend instinctively, how I knew how. I hated to be away from him and I hated to be on top. He operated much the same way: He loved me and he could bear to think of me with other women but not other men. We acted as it occurred to us to act.

“I don’t know,” I told Adrian. “He’s pretty vanilla.” As though at eighteen I knew the meaning of the word, my collection of jolted, sweatless lovers lined up in an adolescent tour de force. I would only stop calling Sam vanilla once he had acquired the habit of coming on me and then (tenderly, somehow) collecting it on his fingertips and having me lick it off.

Still we had a bed established, and he had already met and taken to Adrian, and he had red blood. So I called him over a carton of grapefruit juice in a hardwood booth and said, almost apologetically, “I told her I didn’t think it would be your thing.”

I was answered with a pause on the other end of the phone, followed by his voice saying, “Lily. That’s—” and another pause, “that’s my thing.” The voice said: I want to correct your ridiculous error, but I want you to feel no shame, because you are honest and precious and spoke in earnest.

So we got on a bus to Baltimore from the crowded depot in Chinatown. It was the week before the semester ended, around St. Lucia’s day, a Scandinavian holiday that Age and I had already claimed as our own. It has to do with humoring the youngest child in the house, beating out the bad spirits, and waking a house full of family before dawn with fresh rolls. In short, it was exactly the kind of hearth we were interested in creating, as fledgling cooks, fledgling women. We barely had houses that we were already toiling to make homes.

It was made easier because there was a sense of home wherever we went together. Us and our collection of poets, playwrights, darlings, astrologists, botanists, all of us disjointed and therefore all of us at ease. On the bus, we were like excited kids up before dawn for a family trip, talking about breakfast and our brothers and the writers who first made us care. The canon as we saw it. Adrian loved savory oatmeal and Flannery O’Connor and Richard Brautigan. I ate egg-in-a-hole, which I had learned to cook because I thought it was endearing. We both agreed about Salinger. “The last ten pages of Franny and Zooey,” Age said. “You know, when you can’t breathe.” Both of our brothers had been institutionalized on opposite coasts of the country for felonious robbery. Our writers and lives were different but somehow we had come across similar kin.

The first night was spent flipping through a slideshow of Baltimore—one that I knew and had forgotten, that she had never met. All the friends she had heard equated with people we knew in New York, the high school poetry teachers, the Christmas picture books in milk crates at my mother’s. We slept in the massive, iron-framed bed my parents had passed down and passed down (to their studios, to their friends who were drunk and therefore needed a place—indefinitely—to sleep) until it came to rest in my childhood bedroom. I thought my limbs would catch on fire with the effort it took not to touch hers. I don’t know why I felt like it wouldn’t have been okay, but there are many countries in a mattress, and she didn’t reach across to me, either. It felt like something about respecting who we were as children, or what those children would think of us grown.

The following night we spent at Sam’s: The three of us sat on his bed, which sat on the floor, drank Seagram’s whiskey and sank into the rainbow pillowcases. We kept the conversation and eyes soft, trying to endear ourselves to one another. Where we were already endeared, where we needed no introduction.

But Adrian was from a brew town, was unaccustomed to much liquor, and we were all drinking anxiously at the prospect of staying the night together. She later described it as getting “over-zealous,” and even though I can’t remember how she wore too-drunk now, I knew instantly then that it was upon her. Maybe I knew more then about Adrian, or women, or drunkenness, but I think more probably I knew less, and in knowing less, was more sensitive. So Sam and I marched her to vomit, then marched her to bed in a hallway futon, and spent the night with what we’d been missing of each other for three and a half months.

The next morning I realized the bus back to New York was at 1 PM, and we hadn’t, and we were there to…So I went to brush my teeth and in my awkwardness but eagerness, insisted that Sam do the talking. From the upstairs bathroom, through the heat ducts, I heard him say something like, “We wanted to know if you wanted to join us.” When Adrian was waking, wearing the necklace I told her it was dangerous to sleep in, as though it hadn’t all been her idea, and the invitation might shock her. We were all so careful then, thinking warmly but nervously of each other, like one might think of expensive china stored very high up.

And of course she came in—I say “Of course” now, but nothing felt certain then, every move we made felt like a question. By the time we were all naked, we were happier but no more sure-handed, still asking if it was alright to touch, where touching might stop, drop off, veer into some intrusive mistake from which our friendships may never recover. In the end, we realized that what was kosher between any two of us was allowed among us all, that part of what had drawn us to each other to begin with was a similar style of loving. An ability to be giving without drawing away the one hand that always protected our chests. Adrian’s prematurely wrinkled palms, Sam’s fog of hair. My tiny tattoos, revealed one by one over my body, always a source of secret joy, in that no one but a lover could possibly find them as they are placed. A fleshiness or a musculature, each as it happened naturally. Adrian’s face pressed close to mine while Sam made it with her, and none of us were embittered or disillusioned. Our hands worked in time.

Afterward, I excused myself for food while the two of them scoffed and whined in bed. “I want more,” Sam said.

“Me too,” said Adrian. And then, with the scolding air of a teacher, “Lily, you’re a part of this!”

I didn’t deny it, but neither did I deny myself the moment alone—one hunger, I reasoned, is not greater than another. I poured some cereal and sat calmly ripping photographs of women in pretty clothes out of a catalogue that had come to the house for one of Sam’s roommates.

When I came back downstairs, for a moment, they were so engaged with each other that they didn’t notice I had returned. That, I’ve noticed since, is often what it feels like to step into a room containing more than one person who you love. They are always surprised to find you, their hands are always occupied. But the pleasure to see you, once they’ve realized that’s what they’re looking at, never wanes. It comes in through the window, something like morning light, and reminds you to get up or stay. But whatever you decide, no one else will see this, so please look out for each other.

Taps

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:26:10 -0500

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

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:30:34 -0500

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

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:39:49 -0500

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. I keep silent for an entire thirty minutes once while my roommates rail against a musician who I like. I have always been this way: More likely to conceal things than be thought out of some loop, forged before I was born and seemingly impossible to break into. No matter what I say, it will always be the most stilted comment made, the least organic, the least applicable. Afterwards, I will disown whatever part of me was foolish enough to make such a comment, disengage from it so that I can chastise it from across the room of my head.

Maybe it’s this instinct that drives me to cook pot after pot of soup since I moved in. Even in the first weeks, on the hottest days of early August, soup feeds people. Lentils monastery style—with carrots, diced tomatoes and onions, a splash of cheap red wine which Sal, Amanda and I drink the remainder of. Amanda empties out her “food bag,” and we eat a plate of hors d’oeuvre: cheese, tomatoes, green grapes, apple slices. The soup is eaten as people filter in, in spite of the heat. Then vegetable soup in cumin-seasoned stock which I give to Dave to soothe a hangover so bad that he can’t make it to work by four o’clock in the afternoon.

“How is it?” he asks, as I sip a taste over the stove.

“I hossed it,” I say, my mouth pinched in disappointment. “I should have let it cook slowly.” We eat it anyway, our faces sweating and red over bowls in the fifth-story apartment. I am grateful to be able to feed people; that they let me, every time someone eats a bowl of my soup I feel a little more set in place, a little more like I’ve done something that everyone can walk away with. It’s this feeling that makes me suspect I would give out my fingers, if it would sway people to think fondly of me.

Chili with cinnamon and coriander in addition to all the usual spices, that in spite of its ornate flavor, takes only a half an hour to make, from start to finish. Egg-drop soup in “no-chicken” stock that Dave swears is standard-issue Campbell’s—kale, pink beans, parmesan.

Val comes over with her canvas bags of produce and we go to Justin’s house and cook bean soup with kale in home-jarred chicken stock. He works in the other room while we cook and won’t admit he’s Val’s boyfriend but is boyish and flirty and draws Val cartoons. Raised in the heart of Little Italy. Val lets a ham hock fall off the bone in the center of the pot, I add a lot of oregano, she is better than I am at ignoring men until they want her. She tells me that sometimes she tells them she’s busy, even if she’s just sitting on the couch watching TV. We listen to the A-side of a Fats Domino album and are both too afraid we’ll break Justin’s fancy turntable if we tried to flip the record. So we wait for him to do it and the soup is delicious and it’s too hot outside for any of us to eat, so we drink gin instead.

Later we walk around the neighborhood, which reminds me of exploring Little Italy in New York with Eric and Aladdin five years ago, not sure which of them I loved, in the same slight darkness and slight drunkenness. Cities breed uncertainty in everything except the self, if you can hold onto it, and I think, New York was too big, but maybe I can manage it here. In New York it is a given that you are trying to make something of yourself, but in Baltimore I have the freedom to look at myself like the talisman of something I am trying to remember, something to which I’m trying to return.

If I go back far enough, I have had a house like this already: Where the men cook alongside their women, where my father imitated his grandmother’s Abruzzi accent, my mother’s hair was long and she was graceful enough to let it grey instead of trying to hide it. I think of myself as a child—reading at the enamel table-top, my orange eyes set in a face that was always jacked with curiosity, eating chicken cacciatore—and realize that was the last time I felt sure that my insides matched my behavior. I never noticed then that they were the same, but I feel certain now, because I never thought to see any disparity, either. I felt allowed to be an explorer, and not slough things off as tacky or uninteresting or old news. I was perpetually interested—in musical instruments, architecture, origami, bread-baking, whatever came through my transom. It didn’t occur to me to fear any of these things because I wasn’t a born expert with them.

This didn’t carry over in many ways as I grew older, but some remnants remain. One way is people. I allow myself to touch as many people as I can, understand the texture of their skin, the innards of their books, their guts. When Val and I are both quite certain that the men we want will not work out; are in fact, willing themselves not to work out, we get drunk and walk to the only movie theater where we can openly keep drinking. We put our feet up on the seats in front of us and drink bourbon and watch a movie about casual sex with people whose personalities you like. In the end, the movie is not really about casual sex but about love, and so we leave happy but unappeased in the place we most wanted appeasement. Like kids who ask where their father has gone and instead of an answer; get a surprise puppy dog from their mother. We wanted to hear that women survive even after the golden moment for their love to manifest itself comes, and passes by unused. Instead, we saw the usual magic, the sun hit their faces just as they were about to pass out of the frame, and startled their men into action.

After I see Mickey unexpectedly at a dance performance that leaves us both feeling sedentary, we go running together in the evening. This is part of our plan to stay friends after I wanted him and he begged off on account of his neuroses, his unavailability, his ex-girlfriend who has become less of a person and more of an archetype. In the end, it isn’t really about casual sex, but it isn’t about love, either. We run in his neighborhood, not mine, along the route he always runs, which in a way is how all things went between us. Afterward, as the sweat cools in my cleavage, we eat slices of pizza across from each other in our running clothes and talk about things that make us anxious. This is the only way I know how to relate to him with his clothes on, and I remind him frequently that I prefer the other way, that I’m willing to absorb the emotional damage if he’ll only come back to bed with me, that I’ve used up four double-A batteries in my vibrator during the two weeks since we stopped sleeping together.

“Wow,” he says. “You should get rechargeable batteries.”

Breakfast as always with Dave. In six or seven years of dating-cum-friendship, walks in the park, fine dining in our cheap clothes, free drinks, free rides, and now being roommates, we have always eaten breakfast. I’ve caught his obsession with eggs in the morning, though “morning” is a term that means something different to the two of us. Eggs, though, are a way of reclaiming power; I want to feel like I woke up running. Things have been good but hard; I want a lot of energy reserves and then I want to use them all. “Every time I’ve ever been really heartbroken,” I tell Val, “I’ve started running. It’s happened three times.” I remember Noah saying something about tiring oneself out as a method of self-preservation. Your weary body keeps your head intact.

Dave and I talk about sex the way some people talk about sports, and love the way some people talk about sex. Our mutual promiscuity was the reason we were able to remain friends after dating, and the reason we can live together now. If I see a woman leaving his room in the morning, her high heels sounding off like wooden bells against the gallery floors, I think, Dave is as insatiable as I am. And (always remember) who’s to say where I was the night before. Reminding myself like this absorbs most of the jealousy that springs forth without my permission, and the rest is banished by the knowledge that we need each other. Out of necessity, we confess things to each other; because we understand that we both have to not only have sex but do so with profane regularity. Dave discusses sex in terms of, “hogs and squids,” instead of birds and bees, and uses these terms to explain why neither of us flinch as we follow our genitals wherever they lead us. (The danger in the back of both our minds, I suppose, is that lemmings follow, too.) “Hog’s gonna flop,” he philosophizes. “It’s just a matter of where.”

We both know that if you’re not careful, you can give something to everyone and keep nothing for yourself. That you have to have to work to maintain an identity that won’t drown in all of your lovers.

An identity: For these purposes is less of a person and more of a physical place. Where you go to recharge and come back out able to stand up against the waves and prods of the rest of the world. I am careful not to leave a scrap of clothing in anyone’s house. I am careful not to assume what they feel for me unless they’ve spelled it out explicitly, and even then to doubt them until their bodies prove it. I am a dogged Taurus and when I become interested in someone new, I forget every other interest I’ve ever had, and can remember nothing to talk about. I talk to a friend on the phone and refer to this as “dissolving,” which I view as devotion when I can, and unattractive martyrdom when I’m being realistic. No one wants you to close your books for them. No one wants all your work-week nights. So I dissolve and it fails and they leave what I offered like leftovers at the end of a meal. And I see what I was doing the whole time, I climb back to myself across some desert, carry what I can, and let everything else spoil. I always come away with one new band or writer or casserole that I will take from them, and add to my own collection. It will be a reminder of them, but I also know that it must be about me, if I still want it, knowing that it reeks of them.

But perhaps Dave and I’s most naïve, darling similarity, is the discreet hope we both harbor that someone will float to the top of the sea of beds and make us stay. By demand or by charm, we want to be kept, only neither of us know how. So we do the best we can, and in the meantime, talk about our orgasms first thing in the morning.

As soon as the first cold night of any year nestles itself between two hot days, I get sick. This year, I eat pad thai and drink coconut-tofu soup, fishing out huge chunks of broccoli with my fingers. My father insists that I can’t eat at home, he wants to buy me dinner since I just started classes today. I joke that this is my tenth year of college, and he says, “That doesn’t matter,” and can’t help but tell the man at the Thai carry-out that it’s his daughter’s first day of school. We sit in the park by the Washington Monument and as I eat I think about how Donna’s restaurant burned down and once I got hot chocolate there and watched them light the monument at Christmas.

While I’m thinking, I tell my father that everyone’s heartbreak is their own responsibility. “To hell with that,” he said. “I’ll break his legs,” which I know, after so many years of guesswork, is the Italian man’s version of sympathy. My father is the sort of man who gets angry when I cry, and I learned early on that this meant he wants to help and is enraged when he can’t keep the jagged world away from me. And it might have taught me not to cry, if I could help myself, but instead I absorb as much as I can until I can’t help it and the whole bloated ceiling falls.

We walk back slowly, he gives me a half-full bottle of wine, I go home and don’t drink it but instead make twig tea and fall asleep while it’s still mostly too hot to have. I reheat it on the stove at three AM and Dave walks into the kitchen, offers me some whiskey in much the same way my father offered to break legs. I remember reading Stacie’s “Cures for Love,” and think, cures for a cold are not so different. Think, everyone has their remedies, like how I knew a girl once who dotted her friends’ wrists with peppermint oil to ensure good they had good dreams. Everyone gets fixed somehow, thank god for cold nights and for colds. They give people a chance to care for each other, pause, say, I really hope you aren’t getting sick, would you like some, get some sleep.

*Title is from M.F.K. Fisher’s quote, “She likes it, she likes good food!” he said, wonderingly, to Al. “She cannot be a real woman!”

Pitch

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:35:25 -0500

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

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:15:40 -0500

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.

pumpkinwatch: anthropologydaily: Archaeologist humor. LOL.

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:17:29 -0500

pumpkinwatch:

anthropologydaily:

Archaeologist humor.

LOL.

"Did it ever occur to you that what you call insecure, I call not takin’ any shit?"

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:41:05 -0500

“Did it ever occur to you that what you call insecure, I call not takin’ any shit?”

- Garth Ennis, from Preacher

"I remember my hand moving to touch a shoulder but not the moment of contact, and it’s what I want..."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:40:22 -0500

“I remember my hand moving to touch a shoulder but not the moment of contact, and it’s what I want again, and again: the almost of any desire, the impetus to reach.”

- Brenda Miller

Words I use too much Depending on the contextconspiring or conspiracy, usuallyin a positive light,...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:30:00 -0500

Words I use too much

Depending on the context
conspiring or conspiracy, usually
in a positive light, like two people
pitching a tent in their own bedroom
just to have somewhere to put
their heads closer together, inhabit
where live would do just as well,
altar, not like change
but in a blood-of-the-lamb
edited-for-PBS kind of way,

He says she says
like after a decade of poems
I still can’t let a brother know
that someone is speaking
without having them say
She instead of I
in all the places di Prima said poets
are explorers, but not necessarily
brave

Pussy twice over
because wimp is weak
and cunt reeks too much of poets
with both hands in their pockets
trying to ignore the climate
of the fifties, listening to Lady
Day, and calling men cats

I try to avoid bringing cats
into it, even when one
is the benevolent critic
warming my lap
as I write, and we both
know life is a simple series
of variations on trying
to get fed

Methodist, because their Christ
is not duty-bound to spend all
his time up like a public service
announcement on the cross
but will walk a little way
down the street with you
if you’re headed the same
direction, never trust a poet

who has to
disclaim confess reveal
because it means there’s
something they’re withholding
during all the sober hours
of their day, and they want
the reader to serve as their
incidental heir, which is a bane
that keeps on giving,

Benefactor because
to keep working I must be convinced
that somebody up there digs me

Heart as a physical object, not
the tacky wood-paneled room
in which one’s spirit animal dwells,
hips when I really mean
I feel fat, or I mean fucking,
or young women are a curse
all their glorious own, love
when I mean tailspin, or sea-
sickness, or an excuse
to stay up late

Drunkenness
for excessive kindness, or excessive
unkindness, the train tracks
that I grew up next to and haven’t
been able to grow up from
and their many romance tongues
cargo freight boxcar
train-hopping or commuting,
depending on who I observe
in flight, the tunnels they conquer
and men who died burying their spikes
none of whom I knew personally
but if it was personal

I wouldn’t be writing about it,
intimate
in any room where two people manage
to hear each other while speaking quietly,
God, as a placeholder for any
really gorgeous sky or void or drug
like the useless zero you leave in after
the decimal point to keep the equation
balanced, math analogies
I don’t even understand, analogies
for heaven, for madness, for men,
a hundred burning bushes sounding off
like desert clockwork when the poem calls
for a fireworks display,

Solitude sounds better
than loneliness, Petrarch is the only man
who’s said, soul, without making
me gag, and I have no muse
so I don’t dare say it myself,

even though I am arguably
always writing to you, you
the most frequent flier of all
these words, who spend all your time
like an overnight security guard
watching me write and occasionally
when I’m gasping for air, you (dear)
grab the pen and with two hands
steadied by each other,
we finish the fucker off
with a period like a single shot
to the head

i love you lily herman

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:29:11 -0500

it was so important to me that he used to say it that way—with my full name—because it implicated everything of me. Between those two names exists a legion of good and bad qualities: A lot of affection, kindness, compassion, and conviviality, but also fear, promiscuity, and selfishness, vulgarity and indiscretion. My stomach when it was flat and when it was rounder. My hair long and short, my poems three lines and my poems three pages. He let me know that there was nothing of me that he wanted to escape, nothing I needed to avoid in order for him to love me. That’s a human for you. Thank God they still walk among us.

"For you beautiful ones my mind is unchangeable."

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:04:56 -0500

“For you beautiful ones my mind
is unchangeable.”

- Sappho