Lowering your x into a tub of warm water, they
scrubbed you with stinging soap, sang songs filled
with light and lyric, then dabbed you dry with those
brutal sickbed towels, avoiding the left nipple,
smashed before it began. Wrapping you in the stiff garb
of virgins, they told you that you were healed,
there in that stark room of beeping machines
and blood vials and sterilized silver, they built
you a child's body and coaxed your battered heart back inside.
Girl
x. The violation left. x
you blind and x voiceless
And they braided your hair every day, gently,
the ritual insane, strands over, under, through, over,
under, through, fingers locked in languid weave,
until the same of it all brought your voice back.
The nurses cheered, told you they'd found a cure
for history, that the unreal would refuse to be real.
Soon you'll be able to see again, they whispered.
I know you never meant to be ungrateful, my rib,
when you rose up half and growled this grace:
that's
that's
O.K.
you
can keep
my
eyes
In the scarred fresco Joseph
is the outline, eluding.
Under close eye, the rotted color
may reveal a beard,
a muted and battered halo,
one sullen eye cast toward
the wrapped and luminous swaddle
that became the world,
damning what the world was before.
His wife, earth hips in flawed marble
or thick tempera, is spoiled and yes,
blessed silly, already beyond him,
not needing to acknowledge a mere man
etched as afterthought among sheep.
What's left of his head is always in his hands.
Crinkled and cracking backdrop
of
Sacra Familia,
he is tagged dispensable
whenever the three are considered.
The child and mother are polished,
redeemed, lifted almost to breathing.
Their color deafens. He is crutch,
inn searcher, tonal balance, ampersand,
weary of squinting against the rays of the son.
Artist, look again at him.
Give him back his eyes,
the burnished cheek.
Draw him whirling, furious about all this.
Make him holy beyond canvas,
chisel, and the saying so.
Brushstroke him a mouth that moves,
with teeth that clench and assert.
Let his wails wash over us,
we who rendered him no brighter than hill and oxen,
we who always knew his name but never who he was.
for Danny Solis
But you have poetry,
you say.
And if you can tell me what poetry is,
where the line is drawn
between the beauty and the breathing
of breath into something to make it beautiful,
I will claim poetry as my own.
Poets, when last breath sought to seduce,
your mojo flashed skinned nerve to the open air.
You bitched and cajoled until I was pissed enough
to assign you the task of my wounds.
You said
Patricia,
come to us if the world bleeds through.
You drove in from the city and backhanded me
with your clunky rhymes, your limp couplets,
your falterings, your leaps for the sky,
your lean and joyless works in progress.
You jumped up and down on my heart,
yelling
beat beat,
when I was June's only sin, you screeched
beat beat,
when there was nothing I could do but be a liar
flat under everyone, you angled storm boot heels
at my chest until the irritation warmed dead muscle
and pulled it onto the dance floor. Ignore the mic static.
What unflinching poems spring from the mouths
of the almost dead. I could never love me like this.
I'm convinced it's a man's smell that pulls us inâ
faux leather and spiced soap, splashes of lemon
and Old Spice, the odd oil tinging his sweat.
As women, we were designed to wither beneath
the mingled stench of them. As a woman, I was
yo, yo, baby work that big ass, you must want
designed
what I got
to wither
c'mon honey just let daddy stick it in a little bit
beneath
bitch of course i love you i give you money don't i
Why else would i cage myself in glorious raiment
of spandex and lace, paint my panting the hues
of burn, twist my voice from madam to smoke?
Why else, once he has left me, do I bury my face
in the place his sex has pressed, inhale
what he has left, and pray to die there?
On the day I married, I was such porcelain,
delicate and poised to shatter. I was unflinching,
sure of my practiced vows,
already addicted to the sanctity of bondage.
I was an unfurled ballad in a scoop-necked
sheath carved of sugar. And him on my arm,
grinning like a bear, all sinew and swagger.
Bibles were everywhere. Dizzied by rote,
I stared at the gold rope around my finger.
He owned me.
And that felt nice.
That felt right.
the first time i hit her
I thought the loose tooth a temporary nightmare
the second time i hit her
He cried himself to sleep, and that was nice,
that was right
the third time i hit her
He counted my scars and whispered
never again
baby never again
When
i'd die without you
turned to
i'll kill you if you ever leave me
I bristled like a hound in heat, I didn't
understand the not being aroused, when
let's get away
turned to
you'll never get away
such heat rippled my
belly such crave in me screeching
walk run run run
run
i etched a thin line into the throat of her running
run
i stalked streets just a breath behind her
run
i
shattered our son's skull with a shotgun
run
i wanted her dead.
My first thought as he jammed the
still smoking barrel into my breastbone
her first thought
as the blade mapped my chest, the
hammer sliced the air toward my hair
the bullet pushed me through a plate glass window
my last thought
you won't believe this
my last thought
you really won't believe this
my last thought
was
he must really
love me
for my granddaughter Mikaila
Hard-sewn, soft-belly, huff, hip swing,
teeny woman catapult, dings in the walls
of your body. I know your scars, badges
earned in the grave pursuit of scienceâ
jump rope whips along a curve of calf,
toes stubbed purple, tender uncolored
patches of skin woven shut over your
small traumas. Wily dervish, you flip,
hurtle, fly, daily rattle your soft spine,
send your bones to the wailing places.
This is play in the age of
Grandma, who
knocked those buildings down?
This is
8 years old in the age of could-die-soon.
This is life as collision and scrape, hard
lessons in the poetics of risk. Daring
the world to harm us, you pull hard
on my hand.
Grandma, let's run!
We laugh
and trip as the sidewalk sniffs our skin
and stars along our path flame shut.
Die fast, die slow, die giggling, die anyway.
Our speed tempts the Reaper as I shelter
you in this first death, the loss of our throats.
My job is to draw the pictures no one can voice,
to soothe and bellow toward the numbed heart,
to breathe in your chronicles, discuss them out
in lines weak enough for you to read and swallow.
My mouth is a jumble of canine teeth, I bite only
at the official whistle. My job is sexy leads for the
bones clattering in your closet, to sing you sated
each night with a forgettable soundtrack of paper
and ink. I am neat, easily folded, a sifter of truth
born to be burned. I count your dead, fathom their
stories, bless them with long, flexible histories
and their final names. There are no soft stanzas
in this city of curb sleep and murdered children.
We need soft words for hard things, this silk
brushing the inevitability of rock. Birth truth in
this way, just once. Craft the news and overcome
all that you ever wereâa reason to turn the page.
“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”
     Â
â
Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966
I.
Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made
myself come.
I'm right here!,
he'd sputter, blood
popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks,
goddamn it, I'm right here!
By that time, I was
in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my
pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train
slicing through my blood. It was easier to suffer
the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives
and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking
with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and
codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership
of things? I was sneaking time with my own body.
I know I signed something over, but it wasn't that.
II.
No matter how I angle this history, it's weird,
so let's just say
Bringing Up Baby
was on the telly
and suddenly my lips pressing against
the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought
wow this is strange, what the hell, I'm 30 years old,
am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt
go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy
I had never had it never knew, oh I clamored and
lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried
writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping
and machine-gun diddling their insistent c'mon girl
c'mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing
blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing
left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has
rocked she, he who has made she weep with script.
But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby,