an abandoned chest of roistering literature for the drunk and rampant reader.
In the dark, my mind’s night, I go back
to your work-calloused hands, your body
and the memory of fields I no longer see.
Cheek wad of chew tobacco,
Skoal-tin ring in the back pocket
of threadbare jeans, knees
worn through entirely. How to name you:
farmhand, Kentucky boy, lover.
The one who taught me to bear
the back-throat burn of bourbon.
Straight, no chaser, a joke in our bed,
but I stopped laughing; all those empty bottles,
kitchen counters covered with beer cans
and broken glasses. To realize you drank
so you could face me the morning after,
the only way to choke down rage at the body
sleeping beside you. What did I know
of your father’s backhand or the pine casket
he threatened to put you in? Only now,
miles and years away, do I wince at the jokes:
white trash, farmer’s tan, good ole boy.
And now, alone, I see your face
at the bottom of my shot glass
before my own comes through.
From Prelude to Bruise. Copyright © 2014 Saeed Jones.
a woman precedes me up the long rope,
her dangling braids the color of rain.
maybe i should have had braids.
maybe i should have kept the body i started,
slim and possible as a boy’s bone.
maybe i should have wanted less.
maybe i should have ignored the bowl in me
burning to be filled.
maybe i should have wanted less.
the woman passes the notch in the rope
marked Sixty. i rise toward it, struggling,
hand over hungry hand.
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Ghost fish, tail flapping
like a translucent scrap
of linen in the wind,
flag of surrender
with a spine inside,
eyes riding on slow
light through the deep
ocean’s darkness:
Do you know what my mother
was looking for? —
—from “At the Sea Floor Exploration Exhibit, Sarah Asks”
Only a mother could manufacture such a story:
the earth opened and pulled her down.
She shows my picture all over town
and worries the details of my molestation.
Terrified she screamed for mother. . .
but I did not scream.
She says it is like having an arm ripped
from her body. But think, Mother,
what it is to be an arm ripped from a body.
Bloody shoulder bulb, fingers twitching, useless.
Did she expect me to starve?
To wither away, mourning the tulip, primrose, crocus?
And if I have changed, so be it.
He did not choose me for my slim ankles or silken tresses.
She moans and tears her hair Unfair!
There was so much I longed to teach her.
Sad Mother, who thinks she knows so much–
teach the farmer to grow seed.
The fields await instruction.
From Eating in the Underworld. Copyright © 2003 Rachel Zucker.
In him is a loneliness so complete he cannot feel it.
I grow to fit it.
My hips, under his, give way.
Everywhere the air is thin with ghosts–they float
like mist across the edges of the eye, gone
when the head turns to acknowledge. Their courtesy
makes a path for me to pass, a cleaner atmosphere.
We are not just lovers,
but no one understands this.
My mother lies with Poseidon, Dionysus, Helios, Hermes
and is unchanged. I am
becoming something
other than I was.
A consort. A Queen.
No more a maiden but still with maiden hands.
It’s true that I am less without him
but when he sees me
all the gold of this world glows against the marble walls
and the veins of the deep stones blush with color.
His bones make a soft place for me on his granite bed.
His touch is the sweet glance of the past, but his laugh–
he has always been expecting me.
From Eating in the Underworld. Copyright © 2003 Rachel Zucker.
Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterus
to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.
Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.
My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)
For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.
There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying–the thing you turn away by letting in.
I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,
I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopiness
to the branches that reminds me of my friend, the one who calls
to ask what’s the point, or the patients who come to me, swarmed
with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after
the first needle. What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.
Published in the print edition of the New Yorker September 28, 2020, issue.
The sun eats away at the earth, or the earth eats away
at itself and burning up,
I sip at punch.
So well practiced at this
living. I have a way of seeing
things as they are: it’s history
that’s done this to me.
It’s the year I’m told
my body will turn rotten,
my money talks but not enough,
I feel my body turn
against me.
Some days I want to spit
me out, the whole mess of me,
but mostly I am good
and quiet.
How much silence buys me
mercy, how much
silence covers all the lives it takes to make me.
In the event of every day and its newness
of disaster, find me sunning on the rooftop, please
don’t ask anything of me.
If I could be anything
I would be the wind,
if I could be nothing
I would be.
drunken library 