Preta (hungry ghosts)

what do i do with desire?

growling dog with blue teeth
lighting up the night?

prowl the Ping River at midnight:
the people who love me
have stuffed my mouth with feathers.

burned city inside me:
when there is nothing left
I will love the bones.

1927 Goss Street

you left
the astonished mouth of a front door
open
and a hammock in this tree: shroud for fallen leaves.
their spice in the catacombs of the yard
the only undead thing--
even the mailbox is a crushed lung
slowly breathing.

and still
I hear
what’s always
left behind in your garden (basil, begonias):

the wild
throb
of the half-eaten
heart.

Mormon Bride to Be, Boulder, CO

Where the earth splits
for final judgement
like holy burned bread
she will kneel
in a crater
and beg God to swallow her up.

But now her bag rubs against mine
on the bus up the mountain
in a most sinful way.

She talks about the river road,
how in December it freezes like a icy fist
and won’t let anyone pass
unless they walk;

how the Rockies holding
the sky are hands touching
heaven.

I ask her: fish with me
with this borrowed pole,

sleep with me
in this borrowed tent.

But at the falls
where air is thin and gray
we part ways.

I saw her loop through the pines
as alone and white as a bird.

The Naked Man Festival (Hadaka Matsuri)

Here’s the Spirit Man:
touch him as he passes
like a tossed orchid
through the wet street.

Mark him, his tenement,
win a year of good luck.

By the seventh hour his scratched face, eyes
pool blood, bearing the tattoo
of ancient pain:
tissue, bone, sweat—

you can’t really watch this if you’re a woman.

The festival forbids it: it’s for brothers, fathers:
men who wrap their dead sons and
they pray for a better year.

Even the reporter on the scene is a man
telling his crew what to blur and when,
until we can’t see what is an arm
and what is a jaw, an eye,

and what is a man anyway,

his chassis like broken stone?

When I Annoy You with My Feminist Soapboxing, Fill Out This Form

Dear ____________,


Today you offended me/the group with the following offense(s): (Circle all that apply)

*long winded rant about the new Summer's Eve commercial
*referencing “patriarchy” as well as other superstitions again
*paranoid theories about gas station attendants
*telling stories from the 90’s, when feminism was cool
*calling your husband “your partner” in an attempt to be inclusive and sexually ambiguous


Your recommended punishment:

*watch several episodes of Charlie’s Angels in silver hotpants
*listen to Lil’ Jon’s “Get Low” and not comment on misogynistic lyrics (we know you have it in your Ipod anyway)
*spend two days fishing with Uncle Johnny, who thinks women-folk belong in the kitchen

Buying A Corset from Helen Hirsch

The store Helen Hirsh is a West Orange strip mall staple, but I'm not a native. I came to live there with my boyfriend after a near decade of directionless projects like teaching preschool, working at a college, and graduate school. I say the place is a staple because the moment the engagement ring was on my finger, old women everywhere east of St. Barnabus Hospital (West Orange natives with names like Muriel and Aunt Beatrice) firmly instructed me two things: “You need to go to Helen Hirsch on Eagle Rock Avenue for your wedding day underwear. Also, you will be fitted.” I was intrigued, mostly by their almost ominous insistence that I heed Helen’s verdict on the destiny of my breasts, my wedding, and perhaps, my life.

Helen Hirsh already had a sort of mythical reputation to me. I passed it hundreds of times on my way to the movie theater at Essex Greene; the sign’s lettering was an old fashioned curli-cued invitation, slightly sad in its 1950’s undertone of confidence: it really says: Shop here, because Helen Hirsch is all you need to know. I got a good laugh when I got closer to it one day and saw the shop window loaded with mannequins in corsets and stacks of Playtex bra boxes towering proudly, the breasts of the cover models fading in the sun. Before Victoria had a secret, there was Helen Hirsch. And she doesn’t keep secrets. She screams at you.

Helen herself did not greet me when I finally visited one spring afternoon, however. I had finally picked out my wedding gown and indeed needed a corset to wear underneath. As it turns out, there are only two or three places in the county to even get a corset, so this was finally my time to meet the ladies in the time-frozen storefront.

As soon as the bell jingled to signal my entry, two women sprang like panthers from out the back. They were shrewd and mean and just shy under 5 feet. They wore bifocals and flowing cardigans; measuring tape draped round their necks like amulets and they spoke in unison like some ancient oracle. I’m not sure we had even exchanged formalities before one said with a gleam in her eye: “What’s your bra size, honey?” Her nametag read Phyllis. I knew in that moment that this was Phyllis’s favorite game. It was like a Clint Eastwood western when the drifter enters the saloon and the cocky local cowpoke says, “Now you ain’t from these here parts, are you boy?” You know, it was like a sort of throwdown. Phyllis thinks I think I know my bra size. But really she’s fucking with me. In a grandmotherly, shop lady, sort of sweet way, but still, fucking with me.

“Um, 38 C,” I ventured, already weakened somehow. I could feel my bra under my clothes start to itch. Maybe I am wearing the wrong size. Maybe I’m a B cup. After all, I’m plump, but my breasts aren’t really that big, it’s actually just my back that’s sort of wide, like a swimmer. Except I only dog paddle.

Phyllis threw back her head and roared. “Flo! Flo! Here’s another one who thinks she’s a 38 C! Flo! Come here!”

Flo responded with total consternation: “She’s a 38 C and I’m a tin of peaches!” Then Flo grabbed my breasts. I couldn’t help but giggle. She literally squeezed them like she was pondering a melon purchase. If she could have confirmed their value by smelling them, I think she would have. Then she began plotzing: “Oh no, honey. Oh no. You need to be measured. Follow me.”

Flo and Phyllis had no qualms about following me into the dressing room—which had two rickety swinging doors with at least three missing slats—and watching me wriggle out of my T-shirt. They shook their heads in disappointment when they saw my beige, nubby bra with the floppy straps. After I described to them my wedding dress and my urgent need to make my size 12/14 frame look more like a 10 on my wedding day, they nodded, eyebrows knitted together with the cooperative power of a top secret government think tank. I felt a surge of hope. They might criticize, they might taunt, they will, and will again, squeeze my breasts. But they will make me look thin.

Out came the measuring tape. As Flo measured me under the watchful eye of her twin, I had two thoughts:
1) All the perverts in the world with their creepy internet sites and convoluted schemes to video tape women in the buff should just have lunch sitting on the carpet of Helen Hirsch, because all I keep seeing are nipples and pillows of pink and brown flesh: the dressing room doors are just an inconvenient boundary for Flo and Phyllis, who keep coming in and out, regardless of how their naked customers are.
2) I have stepped into a magical world where my lumpy nudity is just another everyday challenge for strong Jewish women to surmount. There is no chubby belly a good girdle can’t smooth; there is no slooped shoulder a good brassiere can’t wrangle; there is no size 12 Vera Wang satin gown without its secret counterpart of firm spandex and ribbing. How you look naked is of little concern. It’s what Flo and Phyllis have in the back of their store that is the challenge. And they are glorious together, like two queens solving a mystery together, speaking to one another rapidly: Maybe the Chantelle. Maybe the strapless corset with the stays. Does Playtex still make that one with the buttock rounder?

The measuring itself revealed what I secretly knew all along: I’m not a 38 C, a size easily found the back of the rack of most major retailers. I’m a weird, hard to find size, and my right breast is at least three tablespoons bigger than her inferior sister. I didn’t bother committing the actual new size to memory. Instead, Flo and Phyllis began lashing me into a complicated contraption that involved dozens of hooks and old fashioned stays, and required Flo to cheekily pick up my breasts and literally scoop them into the cups so that they are presented as luscious half-moons to the world.

“Oh yes, doll. See? You look good.” This is from Phyllis, nodding with sagelike approval, squaring my shoulders to the mirror so I could admire my Mae West curves. Several other customers stepped out from their dressing rooms to weigh in on my corset at the main mirror. They nodded like a Greek Chorus, praising my tiny waist, my flat stomach. One women, bless her heart, kindly reminded me that on my wedding day, I might consider wearing silky shorts under my dress as ammunition against the dreaded “chub rub”, the clinical term for when your thighs rub together in the heat.

The corset cost a staggering eighty dollars. But what could I do? I was terrified of defying Flo and Phyllis, whose firm authority I had come to depend on after about five minutes. As I pulled out my credit card, I found myself asking them, “Where can I get a good chicken salad sandwich around here? Why is my fiancé so weird about two checking accounts? What do you think about a cruise for our honeymoon?” It was remarkable.

Several months later I had my wedding, and it was everything a good wedding should be: stressful, beautiful, with dancing, champagne, and a night alone with my exhausted new husband at the Clinton Inn. As he unhooked the forty buttons from the back of my wedding dress and watched it pool like a collapsed marshmallow at my feet, he saw my corset and assessed it with dismay and curiosity. “Now that looks uncomfortable,” he said, and with little ceremony, merrily unlashed me like a gardener unstaking his plants after a storm.

Escaping From Alcatraz

I. Escaping from Alcatraz

For courage,
men must first
imagine the night:

dark folds of stars,
the bloom of camellia perfume.

They must imagine
their girls from home, still young when they went away,

bare-breasted and longing across
the guarded shore.

To climb free from
barbed wire cages
some built boats with tires and rags.

By dawn their bodies lay
like flung lilies on the sand:

the Pacific won’t swallow them.


II. A Small Article in the Sunday Times

The Nazis buried a Jewish doctor alive.

They found his bones last year in the Belzec trench.
He ate one of his leather shoes
to buy time.

His granddaughter’s hands
held the shoelace up to the sun

like a string of sapphires—
they have not won.

Somewhere he stands,
urges us on: keep rowing, keep running.
The old man with one shoe.

Hitchhikers, Rt. 83 Lancaster, PA

A cornfield breathes them out,

two girls lithe and green

as blades of grass,

their hair bright with sun.

I’m sorry I drove by, wary

of time, my purse. 

Now when I drive alone

I wonder about them, their empty arms:

where are you going?

If I could do it again

we’d all coast together

past sunflower farms,

fenceless fields,

face the day’s gloaming

like barnstormers.

I might tell them about how poems

are letters of regret.

How even though the road stretches on

in front of us

like an uncertain, outstretched hand,

how light I’d feel

if we all walked together,

carrying nothing.

Harry Houdini Exhibit at the Jewish Museum

Your things are on display like an open casket.

Needles on a string you pulled from your mouth.
The awed, rusty faces of locks.
The milk can, the Chinese water torture cell,
manacles, keys.
Photographs of you
underwater, the four minute show,
nothing but lungs, bones. Chest, waist—
concave stomach. You smirk: what can you do?
How long can you hold your breath?

Fragile skin of journal pages—
the letters slant like a man upside down.
How you stood on East 79th Street,
remembered your father’s voice, wept—
you were ashamed to tell your wife.
There are buildings you can’t leap from.

And here,
silk shorts you wore only
a minute on Coney Island
till you stood
naked near the water’s break,
the crowd almost angry.
Let us see a man drown.

You cut through the water like
perfect praying hands.

A Poem about Hemingway....

I gave a friend of mine this picture of Ernest Hemingway in Key West. He looks so young and happy and prolific, doesn't he?

Photo of Hemingway in Key West, 1928

There are things I want to tell you but

even in my imagination

we wouldn’t talk at a party.

I’d view you from some corner like

a new map without the pleasure

of a fold.

I might say
these landlocked days

we sit in an empty rowboat
going nowhere

or

the world is a face cracked in half

or

my father fought in the Six Day War

but says real men bake bread at dawn

in Throggs Neck.

                                          

You might say,

a baker knows what a soldier doesn’t:

what you touch soon crumbles.

Everything sweet is measured in spoons,                             

then dissolves.

Tall man with brown hands:

come watch the tall ships

drift the horizon

and drink whiskey with me.

We don’t have to speak at all.

Guy on my Driveway

A few months ago I was startled to see a man standing on the end of my driveway, hands in pockets, in the early fog of my morning commute. He scared the hell out of me and wore an oversized floppy raincoat. As I walked to my car, I said, "Good Morning?" as in "Can I Help You?" or as in "Please Don't Kill Me, I'm Nice."

He just smiled and waved at me, backed away slowly, and started walking. As I drove past him, shuffling on the curb, I realized he had Down's Syndrome and was significantly older than I thought.

I was a bit unsettled about it, but figured he lived in the neighborhood and meant me no harm. Why he was standing on my driveway, as if waiting for me to come out of the house, was a mystery. I'd not really seen him before.

Since then I've seen him often walking around town, looking disheveled and thumbing for rides.

I didn't see him all summer, but he recently cropped up on my driveway's end, again, just hanging out. A few days ago he asked for a ride to Seymour's, a little coffee shop around the corner, but I shook my head no. Then he shuffled away, waving at me as I passed him on the side of the road.

Sometimes I wish I could be that person, the one who gives rides to people, the one who isn't afraid of that kind of connection. I sort of miss the liberal recklessness of my early twenties.

I can honestly say I wouldn't give a strange man a ride anywhere, but part of me wonders where's the harm in a man with Down's Syndrome who needs a ride a quarter of a mile on a rainy morning?

I wonder if I'll have this dilemma every week for the rest of my life in this house.

I'm Trying to Be a Blogger

Hi friends! I'm trying to do this blogging thing again...mostly as a forum for my poetry. I would love feedback!

Here's what's on my mind today: this girl I went to elementary school with, Krista, was my best friend for about three weeks. I remember we had the same panda bear patterned button down shirt and yellow leggings (purchased from Bradlees). She was tall and blonde and beautiful; I worshipped her and hated her, too.

In third grade, I learned, really learned, about feeling ugly.

I was looking at a picture of myself on Facebook after completing a 5k...all I could see was this pernicious blue vein that bulges from my forehead that lately has been in every picture of me. I wonder if this vein has always been there or if it's one of those weird things that starts happening in my thirties?

That vein really got me stirred up. I tried to focus on how good I felt, completing the race with a not-horrible time considering my lack of practice and all the hills.  But that third grade inner voice called me up...the one that says, Krista is so pretty, everyone wants to stand near her.

Where did you go, Krista? Probably standing in front of some mirror, mourning every line. Does she remember us, the two girls laughing in line for the water fountain, gap-toothed and happy?