Smile! (1993)

Smile!

by Denise Duhamel (1993)

for Nick

PRINCESSES

Ten Qualities as a Cosmo Girl I Really Want in My Man

for Jean Valentine, after seeing Bambi

I want a boyfriend with antlers.

(I read somewhere if I long in specifics, I’ll be more likely

to get my wish.) A boyfriend like Bambi, he’ll be the one for me.

He’ll have sort of a feminine name

so I won’t immediately think of cuss-words and muscles.

Yet he’ll battle for my honor, save my life if he has to.

And when he fights, he and his opponent will turn into shadow.

He’ll never be offensive. He’ll have really good posture,

hold his head high. He’ll look like me, but not cuter:

I’ll have longer lashes and bigger bluer eyes.

He’ll have seen a loved one die, so he’ll understand loss

but will have worked through his grieving by the time we meet.

Yes, he’ll be a prince. He’ll think of me only and give me twins

as calm and easy to take care of as no-iron sheets.

A First-Love Poem

(Crawford Allen Children’s Hospital)

The static cracks like whips over lions

as the nurse yanks a comb through my hair.

Since I’ve come, I’m most interested

in things that aren’t there.

 

The trick for remembering opposite colors:

I stare at the lemon soap dish for hours and blink

grape-purple dots in the porcelain sink. Then, I scout

the halls for him. He’s Sleeping Beauty and I am the Prince.

 

I have some sense that kids don’t always live, but he will

if I visit him, insist that I am too in the sixth, not fourth, grade

and borrow text books to cinch my new made-up age.

Mornings he speaks in whispers. His chest barely lifts

 

the sheet. Then, at noon, it’s time for me to breathe

into the asthma machine. As the liquid in the cup I hold turns

to mist, I play with the coils of hose looped in my lap

and watch the dials to see how many pounds I can breathe.

 

I could be testing my strength for him at the carnival game,

sending a marker up the thermometer-shaped gauge,

ringing the bell until I’m dizzy with exhales.

My horizontal boyfriend. He’s thirteen and he actually talks to me.

 

With my chin on his bed rail, I listen to secrets —

his father in a strip joint; “Busty” Somebody

placed a breast on top of a bald patron’s head.

I wonder about where the contact hasn’t been:

 

if my hand could fit under his neck,

through that dark tunnel formed where his scalp hits

the pillow and where the mattress meets his back.

I follow the bridge over his lip and plan

 

a hazy rescue, a nebulous kiss —

It’s late and I’ve snuck into his room.

He’s sleeping; but suddenly I’m not so sure

what to do. It’s the first time

 

I’ve wanted to touch someone and couldn’t.

I’ll still see his profile laid out in landscapes,

the blond snow-dust on his cheek

by the precipitation of light falling from his humming tv.

Asthma

In the Stadium Theater, a movie about Santa Claus

going to the moon in a rocket. My mother doesn’t want to see it,

but takes me after I beg her and beg her. It is the first day

I’m not wheezing for a while, and she hesitates

bringing me outside, but we make it. Sudden temperature changes

can kick me off, like bee stings in summer

or walnuts in a friend’s birthday cake. I know I can die

any number of ways. I saw a casket the length of my sled

whisked down the steps of Founier’s Funeral Home. I belong

in a glass globe, where the snow isn’t cold,

where my lungs can’t constrict so easily, shying from life.

 

I wake up in hospitals sometimes — my skin, pale green,

and my mother shows me my face in her compact.

There is a crayon called seafoam that is the same color.

The doctors, in fact, say I’d be best off in a boat, far away

from the shore, because pollens, with their fertile sense

of direction, have no reason to make it very far into the ocean.

And it’s also best I’m kept where I can’t fall.

I’ll never be able to have stitches — my skin

will form keloids, too sensitive to heal, and bubble

like the muciferous coughs I’ll never outgrow.

I’m no pushover, though. I fight, for example, the armada

 

of dust mites in my room: plastic over my mattress

and pillows, the humidifiers, vaporizers, and my stuffed animals

all bundled up in Glad Wrap. Instead of holding hairy pets,

I watch fish through a tank. My eyelids and theirs,

on the look out, and thin as soapsuds… I know how and when

to take my medicine, but this day I forget,

so excited about the matinee, a Christmas in the open waters

of space. During the opening credits I’m silent. I don’t want

to miss a minute by asking my mother for some change

to buy a soda at the stand, so I pull out my pills

from my jacket pocket and, without a drink, try to swallow them

 

with popcorn. My windpipe retaliates and everything

is stuck in my throat. I choke, then I throw up.

The vomit sprays on my sweat shirt, a hand-me-down from my cousin.

Red and white, it reads, peace love peace love…

in lots of thin rows that wind all around.

My mother says, “Why don’t you take that thing off?”

when we get home and she sees the crusty orange stains

on the front. But I only half-hear her, imagining

the movie plot I’ve missed, what the air quality might

be like inside an astronaut’s helmet —

and if I could run up a hill if I were weightless.

The Pink Bubble Technique

On Shakti Gawain’s self help tape

she endorses the Pink Bubble Technique —

placing our worry in an imaginary dome

and projecting it out into the universe.

On the brink of my meditations, I’ve rocketed

whole countries, entire banking institutions,

and my nieces, so they’ll be protected

from drunk drivers and AIDS. I’ve launched

the Blue Cross/Blue Shield budget, the security

of my teaching job. A whole building on 23rd Street —

poof! My mother’s slipped disc, my father’s prostate.

Pieces of everyone I love

have been cast upward in a pink bubble

at least once.

                     As our troubles lift, getting smaller

and more distant, Shakti Gawain advises:

“Now, there’s nothing left for you to do.”

Because I’d been taught that the wish, the prayer

is always enough, I was only partially surprised when

today, before I reached the sulking cashier

at the end of a long Dagastino supermarket line, I found myself

in a pastel air ball, suspended high above Manhattan.

My friend had been concerned because I’d been looking

down — afraid, because of the recession,

that I’d lose my job. She must have been the one

to cast me into the floating candy-color womb.

I was still holding a bunch of bananas

and a TV Guide I was browsing through but never intended

to buy. In a bubble hovering near mine

I saw my landlady Leona Helmsley who had ascended herself.

There were countless other mini-bubbles

full of stray kittens and brown and pink babies.

South America was wedged in an oblong sphere.

A dolphin, an eagle, a chunk of biopsied breast,

a coiled colon with hopes of being cancer-free —

things people worry about most.

                                                    I was ashamed

I’d left dishes in the sink. My papers

were hardly in order. But because the bubble

was airtight, doorless, I tried to relax

as I peeled a piece of the fruit I hadn’t paid for.

I checked my TV Guide horoscope

for the week ending November 25. Woozy, I saw

my stolen future, through a gauzy pink concave — the world

I, with all the others, was drifting away from. The world

left, for better, for worse, to fend for itself.

Four Hours

My sister picks up her daughters at the bus stop

ever since a nine-year-old girl from the neighborhood

was coaxed into a car by a man

telling her he’d hit a kitten down the road.

His story went that the small ball of fur

ran somewhere near the railroad tracks

and he needed an extra pair of eyes to find it.

The girl was smart and had been taught

everything grownups thought she’d have to know

about even the worst of strangers, but she wanted

to be a veterinarian when she grew up.

And the man looked as though he’d been crying.

“He had that child in the car four hours,”

my mother tells me, my mother who would cut off his balls

if she had the chance. She sounds fed up, middle-class,

when she says it, and I want to say “no,”

but I too share her sentiment. My father

thinks the rapist deserves worse, to be shot dead —

no questions asked. My brother-in-law has a gun,

and my sister knows he’d use it if anyone tried to touch

their daughters, my nieces, my parents’ grandchildren.

Four hours is longer than some double features,

longer than some continental plane rides,

longer than a whole afternoon in grade school.

Nothing is slower than time when you’re nine years old,

nothing is more fragile than trust.

The rapist dropped the girl off at the pizza parlor

where the men who worked there called an ambulance.

Before this, my nieces walked the short distance home

and they protest, wanting to know why they can’t anymore.

The after-school rapist hasn’t been caught,

but the second and fifth grade rumors aren’t terrifying enough.

My sister wonders how to tell her daughters,

who love small animals and only want to help.

Fear On 11th Street And Avenue A, New York City

Now the papers are saying pesticides will kill us
rather than preservatives. I pass the school yard
where the Catholic girls snack. Cheeze Doodles and apples.
No parent today knows what to pack in a lunch box
and the plaid little uniforms
hold each girl in: lines in the weave cross
like directions, blurry decisions.
A supervising nun sinks in her wimple. All the things she can’t do,
she thinks, to save them, her face growing smaller.
She dodges their basketball.
Who said the Catholic church has you for life
if it had you when you were five? I remember my prayers at odd times
and these girls already look afraid.
But it’s not just the church. It’s America.
I fear the children I know will become missing children,
that I will lose everyone I need to some hideous cancer.
I fear automobiles, all kinds of relationships.
I fear that the IRS will find out the deductions I claimed this year
I made up, that an agent will find a crumpled draft of this poem
even if fear edits this line out… I have no privacy,
no protection, yet I am anonymous. I sometimes think
the sidewalk will swallow me up. So I know when the girls
line up to go inside and one screams to her friend
“If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back…”
she means it. She feels all that responsibility, that guilt.
There’s only one brown girl who doesn’t do what she should.
She’s dancing by herself to a song on her Walkman.
One of her red knee socks bunches at her ankle and slips into her sneaker.
And the shoulder strap of her jumper has unbuckled so her bib flaps.
Maybe she can save us. I clutch the school yard’s chain link fence.
Please, little girl, grow up to be pope or president.

Mr. Donut

They tumble from closing bars into here.

Uninspired men nicknamed for their hair:

Whitie, Red; the bald one, Flesh.

 

What a way to save to go to Europe.

But that’s what I’m doing,

the donut waitress taking advantage

of drunks. I look through

the fatty blurred window,

remind them often of my aspirations,

drum on the counter top: I am not like them.

 

Red’s got a novelty passport

and motions me over. He thinks

his finger’s alluring as Cape Cod,

the farthest I bet he’s ever gone.

“Guess where I’ve been?”

he slurs and has me open the blue book.

A rubber jack-in-the-box penis pops out.

 

I think of adding sugar to the diabetics’ coffee

when they laugh, describing their naked wives.

Twenty-four hours, any day, they know here they can.

There’s not even a lock on the Mr. Donut door.

SO when there’s a fight on the corner, Flesh tells me

to call the police from the phone in back:

“If the bikers see you finking, they’ll get your ass.”

 

From behind the muffin case, the motorcycle clash

looks like a home movie: skipping loops, a volume lapse

as bikes are kicked over, heads smashed.

The blood puddles slowly, graying.

Connie strolls in, her lipstick all crazy:

the fight’s over her. She wants a light.

I know she’ll stain the rim of her cup.

 

But they all leave big bills under the saucers

and I get to read the few

quiet hours before dawn.

Bird

for Denise B.

Your mother loomed all hips and breasts,

big mad curves like boomerangs

always coming back, while you sat in front of your plate

taking small bites, chewing a bit,

then spitting the food back out.

You were in junior high, starting to read —

how women were always on a diet:

refraining from taking late night walks, restricted

from getting their own credit cards, maybe working construction.

That was pop-politics, your mother said

the day she was tired, and the run in her stocking made her cry.

You would never be her, you commanded your body

when you noticed your hip jutting from your waist

and the first bit of fat on your chest —

straining towards that mortal hour glass,

that sandy digestion. Birds eating rocks

because they don’t have knives or forks.

“She eats like a god damn bird,” your father complained,

always talking about you in the third person.

“I don’t need anyone,” you might have said, over and over,

sometimes aloud, sometimes to yourself until your periods stopped

and your breasts flattened back to how they were

when you were a little girl, running in the front yard

without a shirt. Until you were in the rehab

and you realized your bones would never be hollow,

your hospital smock like a spotless bib tied around your neck.

“This is no bimbo disease,” one nurse said absently to another

as she hooked you to the tube, a robin feeding its baby

a worm. And when no one was looking,

you turned your spiny back to winter, the crack of an open window,

and tried your best to catch pneumonia. A thin

coat of feathers grew over you, trying to save you.

Bulimia

A kiss has nothing to do with sex,

she thinks. Not really. That engulfing, that trying to take

all of another in for nourishment, to become one with her, to become

part of her cells. The way she must have had everything she wanted

in the womb, without asking. Without words,

kisses have barely the slurp-sound of a man entering a woman

or sliding back out — neither movement with even the warning of a bark.

The Greek word “buli,” animal hunger.

Petting, those kisses are called, or sometimes necking.

She read this advice in a sex manual once: “Take the man’s penis,

slowly at first, like you are licking melting ice cream

from the rim of a cone.” But the gagging, the choke —

a hot gulp of tea, a small chicken bone, a wad of gum grown too big.

That wasn’t mentioned. It’s about what happens in her mouth

past her teeth, where there is no more control, like a waterfall —

or it being too late when the whole wedding cake is gone:

 

She orders one from a different bakery this time, so no one

will remember her past visits and catch on. She’s eating

slowly at first, tonguing icing from the plastic groom’s feet, the hem

of the bride’s gown, and those toothpick-points that kept them

rooted in pastry. She cuts the top tier into squares,

reception-like.   (The thrill she knew of a wedding this past June,

stealing the white dessert into her purse, sucking

the sugary blue gel from a napkin one piece was wrapped in.

She was swallowing paper on her lone car ride home,

through a red light, on her way to another nap

from which she hoped a prince’s kiss would wake her.)

 

The second tier in her hands, by fistfuls, desperate

as the Third World child she saw on tv last week, taking in gruel.

Her head, light like her stomach is pumped up with air.

She can’t stop. She puckers up to the sticky crumbs under her nails.

Then there are the engraved Valentine candies;

CRAZY, DREAM GIRL, ACT NOW, YOU’RE HOT. She rips open the bag,

devouring as many messages as she can at once.

They all taste like chalk. She rocks back and forth.

She has to loosen the string on her sweat pants, part of her trousseau.

The bag of candy is emptied. The paper doily

under the cake’s third layer, smooth as a vacuumed ice-skating rink.

What has she done? In the bathroom, like what happened

 

to the mistakenly flushed-away bracelet, a gift

from her first boyfriend — the gold clasp silently unhooking

as she wiped herself, then, moments too late, noticing

her naked wrist under the running water of the rest room

sink’s faucet…She’s learned it’s best to wait ten minutes

to make herself throw up. Digestion begins at this point,

but the food hasn’t gotten very far. As ingeneous as the first

few times she would consciously masturbate, making note of where

her fingers felt best, she divises a way to vomit

that only hurts for a second.

 

She takes off her sweatshirt and drapes it over a towel rack.

Then she pokes a Q-Tip on her soft pallet. Keeping in mind

the diagram in her voice class, the cross section

of the mouth showing each part’s different function,

the pallet — hidden and secret as a clitoris.

The teacher’s mentioning of its vulnerability, split-second

and nonchalant like a doctor and his tongue depressor.

It’s a fast prayer — she kneels in front of the toilet.

Her back jerks and arches the way it n-dght

if she were moving her body to meet a man’s during intercourse.

She wipes what has sprayed back to her chest,

her throat as raw as a rape that’s happened to someone else.

She cleans the seat of the bowl with a rag, and cleans

her teeth with a second toothbrush she keeps for this purpose.

Her sweatshirt back on, she gets to the kitchen

to crush the cake box into a plastic garbage bag.

And leaves to dispose of it, not in the trashcan downstairs,

but in a dumpster way on the other side of town.

High School Reunion

The troublemaker has become a monk.

No longer able to push the puny boys down the stairs,

torture the wearers of glasses and braces

or set fire to anyone’s locker,

he says an invocation before our meal.

It’s been ten years

and none of the cheerleaders are as fat

as we had hoped, but pretty Suzy is skinnier

than we could have imagined.

One of her arms is covered

by the long sleeve of her sequined gown,

and the other is bare — cavewoman-style.

Suzy’s perfect teeth seem to have grown yellow and pointed.

It is rumored that her track-star-husband beats her.

The locals say his name has been in the paper, more than once,

for drugs. I imagine him asking her

which shoulder will be hidden in her asymmetrical dress,

where else he can safely punch. The troublemaker monk

might hear the track-star’s confession,

then say, sadly, he understands.

Suzy dances like it’s not very fun,

with none of the energy she used

to scoot to the top of a pyramid of other girls,

her saddle shoes firmily planted on the backs

of their maroon and gold uniforms.

Her legs barely shook and her arms belted out

as though she were singing an opera.

When her husband says she doesn’t deserve any dessert,

we feel the guilt of wishing her those extra pounds,

of wishing Suzy any harm at all

Song For All the Would-Have-Been Princesses

Consider the gall of the bullfrog,

throatily calling at night for a mate,

longing for a kiss from a Beauty

that could change his fate. Some say a frog

is the male sex. And girls

who kindly put their lips to its

are promised to get over their fears.

But what about the cowfrog?

No mammary glands, no sweet milk, all her eggs

outside herself — not a frog in history

ever turned into a princess by a peck

on the cheek from an innocent boy,

as though female royalty and luck

sprout from other stuff. Once, before the Ranidae

were green and slimy, a young she-frog,

acting on impulse, shyly flirted with a prince.

She batted her eyes, big and bright as flash bulbs,

but, busily adjusting his white mink capelet,

the prince said to someone in his court,

“Get this commoner out of here! Does she not realize

such a scandal could cost me my throne?!”

And like St. Brigid, the defeated she-frog

might have mumbled, “Please God,

make me ugly, so I will no longer tempt men.

So I will no longer be tempted.”

As though for a cowfrog, a would-be princess,

desire itself is shameful.

As if Lovers, by Virtue of What They are Called, are More Attractive than Husbands or Wives or How

I still remember John Nickels poking me

in the stomach, then putting his arm around my waist, saying,

“Hey, I like your style.” A seventh-grade tingle

went through me like a potion.

I just had vague notions of sex and orgasm, my only analogy:

a pebble ripple in water.

And, though the flutter lasted long after, I missed him.

He barely spoke to me again.

He’d avert his eyes as I came down the hall

like it was all too much for him to bear —

A poke, we both knew, was a promise, a commitment.

He must have thought he’d turn into a frog or something if he’d admit it.

Sometimes the First Boys Don’t Count

Walking home through the woods from a movie at the plaza

that I didn’t remember minutes after it ended,

an action adventure that I didn’t want to see, but said yes to

just in case you held my hand, and you did.

Walking home by the shortcut, the path

the developers made because they’d be building houses soon,

we had nothing to say. It was our first date

and you stopped to kiss me, the cold of the mud

wetting my feet. Your tongue, like an animal’s

rough and eager, through the chain link of a zoo’s fence.

I didn’t know you, but you put your hands up my shirt

like it was nothing to either of us.

You cupped each of my breasts as though holding me back,

or measuring me for something, then kept walking,

not taking my hand anymore. Even at fifteen,

I knew you were the type that after the first kindnesses,

the honeymoon was over. Your face in the night

was even flatter, less pronounced than it was in the light.

I knew, before this, that I didn’t love you or even want

to talk to you the next day in school.

I told my girlfriends you weren’t very smart. You took shop

and fixed cars with your dad, not even the intricacies

under the hood, just body work. And when I went to that garage

in your back yard because we were going to another movie

and your mother said I should get you

so we wouldn’t be late, I saw calendar pages curling under a picture

of a topless woman in short-shorts. She was holding a wrench

to her lips. Your dad looked at me the same way you did,

but that was how I wanted to be looked at then — that was how

I thought it should be. You washed the grease from your hands,

wiped your brow with your forearm and were ready. A few dates later

I held your penis as though it were a science experiment

and put it in my mouth when you asked. A kind of aspic squirted out.

I swallowed like a brave girl, taking her medicine.

Chlamydia

for K.

Sex was as beautiful as flowers.

The orchid unfolding between his legs,

the baby’s breath on his chest,

the blue bells under his arms.

Tea roses on your nightgown,

and, of course, you would have wanted him:

the only boy at camp

who didn’t vie to tie your underwear to a tree,

who instead folded it neatly and hid it

so you’d later find it under your pillow.

Although he could have, he didn’t follow tradition

and read your letters — he secured them,

along with your diary, between your mattress

and the cot springs. The only boy who gave you privacy.

So you gave him yourself. At sixteen,

you’d collected all the pamphlets. You knew

about the pill, nonoxynol-9 and condoms.

Still, sex was as delicate as flowers.

An infection, like the limp cactus

I watered too much in the glass terrarium

my first boyfriend gave me.

Maybe your sex could not take so much love.

Maybe your sex needed to be diluted

with sketchier pasts, a stronger fear of AIDS,

a few more seeds of mistrust. Or maybe,

more simply, it wasn’t your fault. Chlamydia

is easily treated, the doctor assures you

although now your mother must know

and your father, too, with whom you haven’t spoken

in months. I stood holding you once

when you were just a baby, your diaper

in the crook of my elbow, and I was counting

the days, longing to be a teenager.

I said I had the back of your head

with my other hand, no problem,

because I really thought I had — and, besides,

anyone could take care of a little kid.

But when I took my hand away from your neck

just a second, you flipped backwards

like a blossoming bud a movie camera had captured

on high-speed film. Your mother caught you

and held you for the rest of the day.

The doctor says you are not pregnant,

the yellow pollens whirling

outside the girls’ tent. The sleeping bags

stacked and rolled up tight

like the whorls of petals, rolled up unfairly tight

and meant only for one.

On the M104

(New York City Public Bus)

The longing we know that does not have a name

may be for our lost twins, our cellular siblings

who flaked away from us

only days after our conception.

Like a singular petal tugged from its floribunda,

most of us were left alone in our planet-wombs,

gravity-less balloons, loose space suits. Galaxies of mother

around us, we slept the way I still like to:

my back nestled against someone else’s chest,

my knees bent and at rest on his

as though I were sitting in a chair

but my weight askew, pulled away to a 90-degree angle.

No wonder, regardless of who it is,

love is what I feel every time.

He is my lost one, my lost twin,

the dolphin, the underwater uterine-angel

who loved me regardless, who continued

to swim up against me, whether I pulled away or not.

I miss him the way a soldier

has a phantom itch on the elbow

of his amputated arm. I look into mirrors

and dress up as someone else.

Our lost Gods are so hard to find

though they are as many

as the flakes of novelty confetti

that snow from a bridal shower bell.

Or the pastel dots

that rise to the roof and multiply

on this city bus

as the sun hits a stone

on some piece of jewelry a passenger is wearing.

The magic blinks away as we turn the corner

and a building’s shadow takes over.

We all check our watches

and bracelets, wondering which one of us

could have been the source

of such beauty. The travelers who saw

look at each other to confirm.

Our lost Gods, so hard to find —

their appearances so short, their bodies so small.

Reminded Of My Biological Clock — While Looking At Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pelvis One

(Pelvis With Blue, 1944)

I see so many things, a primitive ring,
a nest with a fallen-out bottom,
a white rubber band snapped into blue.
But mostly it’s real memory
and the doctor holding up my x-ray
to the screen of light, a mini drive-in.
The bone was mine — big, oblong
and intact, even though my skin was purple,
my muscles sore. I’d fallen
off of Matthew’s ten speed.
There were whispers that my hymen was probably gone,
first broken by the cross bar
that separates a boy’s bike from a girl’s,
rather than by Matthew himself. And now the x-rays
were showing my ready pelvis, an empty hammock,
just waiting for a sticky fetus sucking its thumb.
“It’s beautiful,” the doctor said
admiring my illuminated centerfold-skeleton
before he turned to me, the real — and therefore
less interesting — thing. He smiled:
“You have the perfect hip bones, miss,
for carrying babies.” To my mother, he said,
“If everything else inside her is OK, someday
she’ll be in labor for no more than an hour.”
I was thirteen and I wanted no baby,
only a boyfriend, only some petting.
I wasn’t even sure how I felt
about tongues. My favorite game was
swimming deep underwater, kicking through
a tent of spread legs, scissoring my thighs
in short quick ups and downs so I wouldn’t lose
by booting someone in the crotch.
“But I don’t want a baby,” I might have said aloud.
The doctor and my mother might have conspiratorially laughed.
My pelvis was as white as the ones Georgia painted,
except the weather surrounding hers
was robin egg-hopeful.
My bone was a whorl in an x-ray-gray storm.
My disembodied pelvis, like a melted hoola hoop,
a coiling snake meeting itself, a lasso
without the rope of control to catch what I wanted.
“The women in our family are all Fertile Myrtles,”
my mother explained later, when I changed my mind, and tongues
and other appendages boys had
become more to my liking. “When I got
pregnant with you, I think I was just
looking at your father,” she said as emphatically
as if she were telling me the truth. So I found out how to get
a diaphragm and pills and foams and condoms and used them
all at once, memorizing the percentages
of their individual effectiveness: 80, 82, 89.5.
“I’m pregnant, I just know it,”
I would panic every month, my pelvis
a nebulous halo, a loose fitting noose.
Exasperated, my first real boyfriend would remind me,
“Impossible. We didn’t even have intercourse last month.
Remember? You were too nervous.” In the meantime,
my girlfriends, one by one, skipped their periods.
There were trips for abortions or quick marriages.
One young mother left high school
to become a cashier at the Stop & Shop.
While she was still nursing, she leaked milk
through her shirt and smock, leaving
something like a perspiration spot
every time a baby cried in her line.
This wasn’t for me, though I felt guilty,
my pelvis being the right shape and all.
My mother watched her talk shows, sometimes
on the topic of childless women, and muttered,
“How can those career ladies be so selfish?
If they don’t have babies now,
they’ll grow old and die alone.”
Sometimes in my dreams I’m back on Matthew’s bike,
not falling this time, but riding off
into the orange-cowboy sunset. Other times,
though, a crown of thorns sprouts in my belly —
my nightmare grows dark.
It is always daylight around Georgia’s Pelvises.
The sky is the blue that the child she might have had
might have seen when she was first born.
Sometimes I dream bluebirds land on my hipbone
as though I were a round limb
on a desert tree. I feed them anything
they desire. Then the mother birds
feed their youngsters, and I tell them
they can stay as long as they like.

Testament of Sex

(October 6,1990)

Every Saturday the saxophone sage

plays in front of Chelsea 2nd Hand Guitars.

Each wordless chorus is his testament, as tragic

and purple as bruises, as alluring

as a woman’s bare shoulders.

Every Saturday I listen to the musician’s wisdom:

that he is gold and she is wood,

that he is one and she is all. He has his reasons

for playing in front of the guitar store —

the actuality and reflections of acoustic hips

surrounding him like halos of protection

from the blows of the world.

He doesn’t want to fight. He’d rather slow everything down

and let us all rest after each tumble. So sure am I

that his voice will sound exactly like the swimming teacher

who taught me to dive, I never wait around

long enough for him to speak.

Between songs, the saxophone player silently wipes his forehead

like he’s tackled the hardest lessons in a book.

The silver coins against the red velvet insides of his case

glint like blushes of afterglow in an unlikely bed.

Between his songs, the silence

of the city is so full and tenuous

that it can’t be called silence at all,

but rather the sound after great sex,

the sound before a great war.

David Lemieux

My first boyfriend is dead of AIDS. The one

who bought me a terrarium with a cactus

I watered until it became soft. The one

 

who took me to his junior high school prom where I was shy

about dancing in public. The one who was mistaken

for a girl by a clerk when he wanted to try on a suit.

 

In seventh grade my first boyfriend and I looked a lot alike:

chubby arms, curly hair, our noses touching

when we tried our first kiss. My first boyfriend

 

was the only one who met my grandmother

before she died. Though, as a rule, she didn’t like boys,

I think she liked my first boyfriend.

 

My first boyfriend and I sat in the back seat

of my mother’s car, and on the ledge behind us

was a ceramic ballerina with a missing arm.

 

We were driving somewhere to have her repaired

or maybe to buy the right kind of glue.

My first boyfriend was rich and had horses

 

and airplanes he could fly by remote control.

My first boyfriend died on a mattress

thrown in the back of a pick-up

 

because the ambulance wouldn’t come.

There was a garden in my first boyfriend’s yard.

One day his mother said to us,

 

“Pick out some nice things for lunch.”

My first boyfriend and I pulled at the carrot tops,

but all that came up were little orange balls

 

that looked like kumquats without the bumps.

My first boyfriend and I heard ripping through the soil

that sounded close to our scalps, like a hair brush

 

through tangles. We were the ones who pushed

the tiny carrots back down, hoping that they were able

to reconnect to the ground. We were the ones.

The Big Black Book is not in Heaven

Once, late at night my lover and I drove into the desert.

He was a geologist and, in his pickup,

he told me not to worry so much about the end of the world:

humans were too egotistical for their own good.

If Shakespeare and skyscrapers were lost,

really — so what? Around us

the saguaros were straining against crucifixion.

I marveled, to myself, the sparkling of the stars.

The farthest I’d ever gotten away was in orgasm,

the ones that rolled on and on.

                         This was the beginning

of my knowing something about the rest of it —

that maybe it wasn’t safe to leave, or if I did find a good escape,

I’d never be able to take everyone with me.

So as his tongue was lapping me softly,

like a dog’s, like a best friend who loved me, I had to tell him

it wasn’t his fault that I could not come, that I could not go —

the desert air wrapped around us just so,

my back against the corrugated bed of his truck —

It’s just

that I was thinking of his friend,

the woman who claimed to see auras and who

actually witnessed her husband’s

puff into nothingness as he stepped into a malfunctioning elevator

and dropped to his death. I asked my lover

if he thought that his friend was making this up.

His patient hand ran over my collarbone

and felt for a pulse on my neck.

Suddenly happy

to be caught in a life-giving trap, I saw

around us, a party of one-size-fits-all souls

carrying on, dancing like there was no territory to speak of,

dancing like there would definitely be a tomorrow.

The desert rippled like my boyfriend’s truck

was a mere rock plopped into a vast body of water.

The shapes multiplied like Jesus’s fish,

like neighbors, like light-oblivion shadows.

Mary Moppet’s Daycare Center

(Tucson, Arizona)

I call the police to report the bruises, on my way to work buy a few boxes of cookies, but as soon as I can, believe me, I quit. Bill, again, is climbing the fence, running into the street from what he’s become. His skin, which discolors so easily, shows every mark. He’s just beginning to sprout patches of moustache and beard, to resent being the oldest kid here, and knowing his mother and father are brother and sister. His eyes stare bland as tap water.

 

****

 

Coco’s, Tucson’s family restaurant, is giving out kids’ paper hats. When I go there for breakfast, I ask for one and keep it in my sock drawer.

 

****

 

Meg and Angela, the other teachers, line up the kids to come in. It’s too hot for the after-school group to be crying, though nothing can muddy the playground dust. Some choke as it’s spanked off with the big brush.

 

****

 

Bill’s mother wears a Circle K smock and his father, a Seven Eleven cap. The only parents who come in together: they see a lust in my smile when I ask if I can take Bill to a matinee on Sunday. If I interfere, his mother says — she draws on her lips — she’ll kill me.

 

****

 

The nightmares are starting to come back. I try to find a therapist, but the only clinic I can afford has a man and he asks, “How does this make you feel, being five minutes late? Is this a pattern? Are you addicted to drugs? Do you drink? Were you ever abused?”

 

****

 

Angela really cares for the children. One night it’s two hours since all the others have gone. Still no one has come for Dana whose mother calls and says everyone is tied up. So Angela keeps Dana overnight at her house and Mary Moppet’s finds out. Dana’s stepfather always comes now exactly at closing, drunk. He knows he’ll be charged a dollar each minute he’s late from here on. The daycare, he grumbles, just wants to make a fast buck.

 

****

 

In one of my favorite movies, Atlantic City, Susan Sarandon’s character washes herself with lemons after working at an oyster bar. I try to find something like that for me to do. I get tanner and blonder as I sit my free afternoons by the Prince Garden complex pool.

 

One day a married man asks me how I am adjusting to Tucson. His wife is pregnant with their first child. I don’t know him well. He says we should go for a drink.

 

****

 

Everything at Mary Moppet’s is starting to have a form. How big the burn mark determines where Sandy is sent. If it’s smaller than my thumb, her parents have to take “how to be a parent” classes. Bigger, she’s sent to a foster home and her real mother or father can’t sign her out. A record is kept of subsidized suppers: macaroni and cheese, barely drained canned peas. No refills — there’s inventory — for milk spilled.

 

****

 

There’s a naked man, except for underwear tied on his head like a mask. The light bulb I’d left on over my door has burnt out. And past the dirt driveway lined with cactus is the prickly field where I could have been dragged, where I could have been mangled, where he could have done all the terrible things to me he was mumbling.

 

The moon above is but a slice of anyone’s terror — Sandy’s or Dana’s. I crush his hand in the door, keep slamn-ting it with my hip and somehow hook the chain. I’m afraid to turn on the lights so I get a kitchen knife and feel in the dark for the phone. The first time I dial the police, not a sound will come out. And I’m sure I could say even less if more happened. I push the table in front of the door.

 

****

 

Meg is in a rock band and, when she dyes her hair calico, some of the parents complain she’s unfit. One Halloween, she brings in face paint and does up the children with it. Mother after father threaten it better come off.

 

****

 

My sister has her second baby, Katie. She calls from Massachusetts and says the labor was easy. I’m glad she didn’t have a boy. To me, everything male has begun to look ugly. Even the lie of protection, of kindness: the way the lock thrusts its bolt from the door into the jamb. I constantly check to make sure it’s in and hear every noise when I’m in bed or taking a shower. My robe hangs on a hook like a torn bouquet of flowers.

 

****

 

The toddlers stay penned in with their shit. Diapers are changed only every three hours. Spitty blocks are dumped in piles on the floor and Tex is always draining his playmates’ bottles. At rest time, we put down mats and pin blankets over the windows to shut out the sun. In the grayish light, small figures slump down. “When nap?” some children even ask as though this is a favorite slot of their days.

 

****

 

It is easier for the teachers to escape. We get passes to go dancing at “Cowboys.” We’re extras in a made-for-tv movie once: Star Struck produced by Dick Clark. We sit at a set bar and watch a soap opera actress’s all-girl band, nudge each other on the shoulders or elbows, point, and look like we’re having fun.

 

****

 

The police send helicopters out the night that guy tried to attack me, but never find him. I hunt like a detective for men with bandages on their right hands long after his would have healed, long after I move away from Tucson. The cop that comes to take the report at the complex says, if this ever happens to you again, you should never run home; now he knows where you live; instead, run to the street where there’s traffic, some stores; surely, someone will help you.

 

****

 

Meg leaves Mary Moppet’s when she gets enough gigs. Angela goes to Mexico. She’s getting married, wants kids of her own.

My Mother Dreams: If Her Husband Dies, Who Will Cut the Lawn?

My mother drags her money across the street

from Old Colony to Fleet National Bank

because she reads Old Colony has been having trouble

collecting property loans. What if the bank had closed?

What if there were big day-glo letters

slapped over the hours telling her so?

 

What would my mother have had to do to get her money?

It says on the door deposits

are federally insured up to an amount

she has a lot less of. But how long

would the reimbursement have taken? How many forms?

She knows the government. She was born

 

at the tail end of the Depression, her childhood

was the Second World War. She knows

from raising her own family

about meat-stretchers, how to sew. She knows

about wanting, about lies, although with babies in diapers

and working full time, she can barely recall

 

Vietnam. She’s saved all these years, but now

she can’t get on the plane to Florida.

She doesn’t want me to go on vacation to California

because of the quakes. She doesn’t want me

to ride the subways, or, for that matter, live in New York

at all. She’d find me a job in a small place

 

with a small husband.

The way she lives is a little safer

though there are murders, too, in our hometown,

and last year some teenagers broke in

in the middle of the afternoon,

when she was home. In her dream, my father dies

 

and on one will help her cut the lawn.

I am gone, as is my sister.

When she asks the children

on the street, says she’ll pay them,

they just laugh at her. She looks in the phone book

under hired help,

 

but in typical dream-fashion,

the letters and numbers all blur.

When my mother attempts to call the operator,

the touch-tone buttons melt

under the heat of her index finger.

From one window, she sees the grass has grown

 

as high as the trees

and from another, there is a drift of snow

blocking her entire view.

As though her dream is real,

I tell my mother: Do not worry.

If it comes to that, I will mow the yard, I will shovel,

 

but she is silent, knows this is false comfort.

I’m too far. But the phones will always work,

I assure her, I am only a train ride away.

My own dreams are full of AIDS —

My friends topple, slowly, in pain.

And my mother and father, in the ones

 

where they’re still alive,

go to banks where their cards have been revoked,

their PIN numbers have been brainwashed

out of their heads. I can’t help

because there are no more trains,

mail carriers, planes, Western Union.

 

“It is the end of the world as we know it,”

a singer is singing the same song,

except all the lyrics are different, unrecognizable

to me because there is no more English.

Locks and owning anything is forbidden.

“My narents have been through enough!”

 

I am screaming. The streets are cobblestone

and dark. Soldiers are hiding in dumpsters,

between slats of scaffolding surrounding construction.

When I wake the first time, I am sitting

in a rocking chair. My mother’s head rests

on my right knee, my father’s on my left.

BOY

What Happened This Week

(May 1, 1992)

David didn’t come to school Tuesday,

the day his essay was due.

Instead the police showed up —

a Dragnet team — asking if anyone

had seen him since Friday.

The class huddled at the implications

of the words: missing person.

David, eighteen, too old for milk cartons,

but just ripe for the morgue

and a numbered tag around his bare toe.

Just ripe for a knife, a bullet,

a bat. He was gentle, small enough to be raped

then stored in a car trunk

if there was time, or left on a subway platform

with his empty wallet by his head.

When I called his mother the next day

the phone didn’t ring a full ring before she picked it up.

Not having slept, she couldn’t remember her address

when I said David’s English class

wanted to send her a card.

She said David was the first of his family

to go to college. I told her he wrote

beautiful essays, then I said, “I mean, he writes

beautiful essays,” trying to keep him alive

by using present tense. When he showed up

to class on Thursday, we all thought we were seeing

his ghost. Blue bruises tinted his black forehead,

like a halo collapsing inward.

He said he’d been arrested in East New York,

and we all clapped because he was still alive.

He told the story — stopped as a passenger

in a stolen car, which, of course, turned out

not to be stolen after all.

“Run, so I can shoot you, nigger,”

a police man said to David

who shook and whirled inside

like a blender. He had to concentrate

on his feet, keeping them steady

so there’d be no mistake about any sudden movements.

He was tossed in a cell, questioned

about the two hundred dollars in his front pocket

since he was on his way to buy his girlfriend

a ring for her birthday. The white cops

made fun of his musk oil, stepped on his sunglasses

though, he was assured later, this was by mistake.

Though everyone in America is still entitled

to that cliched one call, this particular jail

in East New York didn’t have a pay phone

that worked. David cried into his cot,

and the guard called him a mama’s boy,

hitting him, heel of his palm to David’s head.

No phone, they laughed the first 48 hours,

and the tri-state Dragnet team took two more days

after that to find him, even though

he was in one of their own jails.

David told us his story Thursday morning,

and to cut the tension I said he could have an extension

on his paper. He said not to worry,

he had a good lawyer from Jacoby and Meyers.

Those of the class who knew better groaned.

“You need a great lawyer,” I said.

“An expert in civil suits — you could sue the city.

Just think of the psychological damages

to your family alone.” Then someone in the back row

held up The Post, the front page declaring

the jury had acquitted

the policemen who’d beaten Rodney King.

We all knew what we had seen —

yet today’s paper seemed less real,

more frightening than the video tape.

I wrote the words irony and metaphor

in big block letters on the chalk board.

David stood up and bowed,

the best of definitions we could come up with.

From Lorca’s Deli, New York City

The cashier who usually winks at me was watching the hanging tv over my shoulder — Kojak or something like that. And a cat sat on the counter. A little boy was asking for cigarettes for his mother when I heard a gun shot, a little loud, I thought, for a tv. Then, no, it can’t be. On Avenue B the first bullet missed, but as I turned to the window the second one got him and a man went soaring and flopped onto the sidewalk as though it were his bed and he’d had a long day. The little boy was looking, too, out through the door where his head only reached Pull spelled backwards. He started screaming when the cashier said, “Hey, I know that guy,” and I had to stop the little boy from running out to the street where a mob was forming. The assailant ran and took a right onto the block where I live, and others began running, too.

 

It was only five in the afternoon — a mother would send a boy to the store. We heard more distant shooting, then the squealing ambulance, cop cars in the rain. The police moved a little tired, a little afraid. One came into the Deli asking, what did he look like? Spanish, male, a jean coat, I ventured 5’8″, but added that I’m really a bad judge of height. The cashier said nothing about this guy looking familiar and the little boy just wanted to go home. The policeman said, “Little man, why don’t you give us a few minutes to find the bad guy before you come on outside.” So I bought this boy a bag of popcorn, lifted him up onto the counter where he sat and stroked the cat. We both watched through the glass, and he said he felt OK now, that it was kind of like watching tv.

Stories From the Body

He hopes I’m not squeamish about scars.

His long-sleeved arm, where he’s been shot

by two bullets. Two hints

of what lies beyond his cuff: scars

on the flip side of his palm

like grooves on a record album, the thick grooves

that separate songs. I assure him

I’m not easily shocked — why, when I was ten

I was bitten by a dog. See, the pink slug

below my shoulder that never healed quite right.

 

When he takes off his shirt, the graphs

on both of his arms are like two big kissing fish —

fish almost the size of each of my hands,

the fins fanning away, outlined

by big cross stitches, the symbol

for kisses closing a letter.

The fish scales, unevenly dimpled,

like scraps of persistent wallpaper

during a renovation. Still, he says,

the doctors did a good job.

 

When I touch the fish, he says they don’t hurt.

And there’s something of a coin slot

on his stomach where the second bullet,

having gone through his arm, grazed.

And then on his leg, a lighter patch

as though someone has clouded him with a chalk eraser.

This skin was taken from here,

he explains, for his arm. And, on his back,

another impression, where he was stabbed,

but that happened when he was a kid.

 

He once beat up someone who teased him,

then took all his money. He’s rigged candy machines

to drain out the change. And long ago,

he tied up someone who took his stereo.

I want to know if he’s ever stolen a car.

He hasn’t, and those mini-crimes

only really happened, he says,

at the first of his adolescence,

marveling at his new bigness — no longer

the little Black Jerry Lewis

 

without rights to even his own bike

once the boy next door got a hold of it.

But yesterday, when in a dispute

for a New York City parking space,

he stepped out of his car,

and the leery contender drove off.

This isn’t the kind of thing I usually admire —

the people who push their weight around

are hardly ever the people I know. Yet, for a moment,

I felt the thrill, vicariously the bully.

 

But what of the safety implications for me?

Blond, a woman vs. black, a man.

Then, before I get more scared for one of us

than the other, I remember his story of the line-up,

to identify the smirking guy who shot him,

the frustration of a dividing two-way mirror.

The months of physical therapy for him

to be able to produce a legible signature,

just because of his hesitation to give up his wallet,

in the dark, on 11Oth Street, in August.

The Boy who Dimmed Light Bulbs

for Phil
That’s the way it started.

Split-second brown-outs in his kitchen

as his mother made him his favorite sandwich,

then later a flicker

in a neighbor’s lamp. He was like Harold

and his Purple Crayon,

but backwards —

things blackening into nothing

when he thought about them.

When his friends said that this darkness

never came to them, the boy who dimmed light bulbs

realized he was different. He told himself

maybe he’d outgrow it in his adolescence,

but didn’t. A night beyond his curfew

he walked the long way home in Smithtown,

each suburban street light

blinking off as he passed.

All becoming part of the background night.

No stars, the length of Long Island

a velvet gloved finger,

what his shadow would have been like

if he had stopped to pause

and the watts had stayed on.

His teachers said he had no other choice

but to become an artist,

so he moved away from home

to Manhattan. He sublet an apartment

on the Lower East Side

and the radiators started to spit

and crackle like the teeny dots

of gunpowder sold to kids on red paper strips.

A girl on the steps to his building

played with them all day, her mission

to get at something, to free

the small sulfur ghosts.

More than envious, sometimes the man,

who as a boy dimmed light bulbs

and didn’t know many girls,

paused and watched her

as she let off her steam.

Next, fuses started to blow,

and a fire began when he tried to iron

a shirt for his waitering job.

The City of New York made the landlord

of the building he lived in

rewire the property,

and the boy who grew into a man

without outgrowing his tendency

to dim light bulbs

muttered under his breath

that it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t painted

anything yet, though he still

told everyone who asked that he was an artist.

His tv split in the middle

like it had been hit by lightning,

and he was only looking

at the TV Guide. He went to four churches

and the offering candles

were instantly snuffed. He went to a nutritionist

who said he should stay away

from high-energy foods

and slowly sip drinks whipped in a blender.

Then he went to a shrink

who asked about his mother.

The man who had dimmed light bulbs,

not only as a boy, said maybe,

now as he thought about it,

he did have one resentment.

He told about those liver sandwiches

he only said were his favorites

to make his mother happy,

but that really made him sick.

The shrink said not to separate

the boy who dimmed lightbulbs

from the man who dimmed them still

as he reached in his pocket

for a cigarette. The shrink

asked the boy/man if he minded

if he smoked, but didn’t wait

long enough for an answer

before rubbing the tiny wheel

of his Bic lighter. Shards

of light bulb fell like slices of snow.

And both hot and cold,

the Fifth Avenue office

went up in flames, then the hall,

the elevator, the whole floor.

The boy who dimmed light bulbs

cleared his throat.

Not Much Difference Now Between the Sky and the Lake

My father slides into third base

and falls on the sandy pavement of the street

where we play kick-ball. The varicose veins

in his legs leap like frogs who can’t get out,

and his knee is skinned like a kid’s.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he says, heading into the house.

“You finish out the game. That’s an order.”

The neighborhood kids adjust, call someone else

up to kick, and put back the cardboard base

my father’s spill has misplaced.

But my concentration is lost. Is my father

washing his wound thoroughly enough?

I bet he doesn’t know where the Band-Aids are.

 

My father continues to fall, in replay fashion,

as I watch him a few days later in his hospital bed.

The fluid in his inner ear, waving

and whacking him out of balance. He says

it was like he’d just hopped off of a spinning whirligig

when, at work, he went to wipe his hands on his apron

and the bakery ovens were suddenly on the ceiling.

When he collapsed, he thought he was bracing himself

against the wall. A spinning screen, a time-lapse in a movie.

When he was on the ambulance stretcher, he says,

he was better, clutching on to the side’s metal bar.

But it was, for him, the ledge of a building’s roof

because his left and right had become up and down.

 

On our next visit, my mother tells us in the hospital elevator

not to cry or stare at the tubes and graphs

on the monitors. My father claims this time

he’s feeling quite well — we didn’t even have to come.

He has the chilling confidence of my sister who will,

in a few years, wake up from a coma,

after her car accident, and answer, when asked,

that her name is Michele and she’s seven:

“Now, where’s the peanut butter ice cream?”

Over the next couple of days, she’ll age herself back

to eighteen. And my father, too, will soon loosen his grip

on the empty food tray suspended above his counterpane.

For now, it’s the safety bar on his roller coaster car.

 

And each time his family visits, his wife and daughters

inch their way down the wall, eventually

crossing the corner of the L and standing on the floor.

His disease is rare, the specialists say.

So when my father sleeps after his medicine,

I study one of his ears for something out of place.

The C of his helix is perfect, the antihelix

tucked neatly beneath, and the concha

winding down smaller into that dark canal

where his trouble lies so deep, even the light

of a doctor’s speculum can’t reach it. Maybe there’s something

like an air bubble, adrift as it might be

in a carpenter’s level when his line is slightly crooked.

 

I ask my mother to explain to me again why ears pop

during a hilly car ride, why sometimes my ears ring when I sneeze.

Can he drive? Can he read? Can it happen again?

That top setting itself into twirling…Not much difference now,

for my father, between the sky and the lake. He walks with a cane,

aiming for what he thinks is his destination,

training himself to then go twenty degrees to the left.

In this world of gravity and one-way streets, my father wanders,

refusing any help. And as though his topsy-turviness

is passed on in my genes, I stand, in a window —

more like a mother than a daughter — trying to let go:

my father shovels the driveway, his hands

without gloves and a lit cigar in his mouth.

Departure To The Depths Of Heaven, Via Grand Central Station.

It’s closing, Grand Central Station. And I think I see my Uncle Wil, only one month dead, sitting with the homeless, eating a sandwich out of a brown paper bag, and wearing the coat he entrusted me with last Christmas. He asked that I deliver it to the vagrant who lived on my block. I think, though, the guy sold my uncle’s Hagar for liquor because within a week it was gone.

Grand Central is bigger than usual, as big, in fact, as a Midwestern field. An angel- nurse pulls a train of empty ambulance stretchers like a child pulls a chain of wagons looking to give rides to her friends, or like circus elephants link by tails and trunks. Some of the homeless follow her, wanting to get on and lie down.

As I get closer, this isn’t my uncle after all, beyond the information booth, the big clock. The man whose back leans against the blue hazy light of Chemical Bank is someone else. He is screaming, although his words are faint by the time they reach me: “We are all homeless on Earth. This is not where we should be….”

Outstretched hands like llamas’ heads pushing through zoo bars, and voices chanting, “Quarter, quarter, please spare a quarter…” The saxophone, so romantic in New York, turns to a harp that I suspect I am hearing from the roof of heaven, and I swoon to the floor like I did on Fourteenth Street in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. It was the AIDS mass, and a priest touched my forhead–though I kept saying, ‘No-no-no-I won’t fall,” I eased back onto the floor, was lowered into a grave which became a womb, and came back within seconds to sn-dling faces telling me I’d been very receptive.

This time when I awake crumpled Zaro’s bags and cigarette butts, littered around my face and arms, slowly disappear. And above the glorious Grand Central ceiling, all quarks and quasars and gods with arrows. Without moving, I’m all energy like I’m idling in a car with its hood down or being strapped into a rocket. Then I’m off, pushed and pulled headfirst like a birth, past the windows, the ceiling, toward the light where my uncle is waiting — where nothing looks particularly familiar yet is, like the hospital I can’t remember, but in which I was born.

On Being Born The Exact Same Day Of The Exact Same Year As Boy George

We must have clamored for the same mother, hurried for the same womb.
I know it now as I read that my birthday is his.
Since the first time I saw his picture, I sensed something —
and with a fierce bonding and animosity
began following his career.

Look where I am and look where he is!
There is a book documenting his every haircut
while all my image building attempts go unnoticed, even by my friends.
I’m too wimpy to just dye my curls red
or get them straightened. I, sickening and moral,

talked about chemicals when I should have been
hanging out with George’s pal, Marilyn.
He would have set me right:
Stop your whining and put on this feather tuxedo. Look,
do you want to be famous or not?

In the latest articles, Boy George is claiming he’s not
really happy. Hmm, I think, just like me.
When he comes to New York and stays at hotels in Gramercy Park
maybe he feels a pull to the Lower East Side,
wanders towards places where I am, but not knowing me, doesn’t know why.

One interviewer asks if he wishes he were a woman.
Aha! I read on with passion: and a poet? Boy, I bet you’d like that —
You wouldn’t have to sing anymore, do those tiring tours.
George, we could switch. You could come live at my place,
have some privacy, regain your sense of self.

So I begin my letter. Dear Boy George,
Do you ever sit and wonder what’s gone wrong?
If there’s been some initial mistake?
Well, don’t be alarmed. There has been,
but I can set it straight.

Every Movie

Today, you say, as though an actor

in some bad coming attraction,

that you did not leave me for a man, but for all men,

and I grab a loose hand, Max’s leather mitten,

shake it something like: nice to have met you.

He is all outside, your new boyfriend.

His cheekbones as perfect as a summer playground, he’s steel

rings and slides. My face is lost in a muddy flush.

You’ve made me hate that I am intricate, all insides,

a pink watery cave, an occasional gluey pearl.

 

We were just driving age when I picked you up

for a matinee. Both sticky and cool, you showed

me your unmade bed that summer afternoon

and winked. Your mother on an errand,

you closed the door and opened your clothes,

the green plaid shirt from your newly showered skin.

You helped me with my belt.

We arched our waists in some strange ballet.

Harder than we thought, it was hot and cold

and slippery all at once. Calf-straining, like ice-skating.

 

We heard a slam as you entered. I jerked

my feet into my jeans, pulled them up

past my knees, before I spotted my underwear

wound, a figure eight, on the floor. I coiled the cotton

into a ball, a twisted lump in my back pocket. Stay here, your palms

told my shoulders, weighting me down with Winning The Oscar:

Pictorial Glances in my lap. My lips pouty as stars

and all swollen red. Your mother yelled:

I want her out of here! I was just — your voice as though prying

two stuck pages apart — showing her my book.

 

I can name every movie we saw for the next five years

but that one on that day. You quiet, except for:

I can’t believe you let me do that…Maybe my mother is right.

You broke our pact the way we broke each other:

driving faster, I swerved a cry. You shrugged:

Don’t be sentimental…Besides, men are different.

Were you looking, even then, for your own shoulder? So many

shirtless boys on the street. I’d be alone

and in the cinema restroom with my first-time blood —

it streaked my hand, admittance, the color of my ticket stub.

April 18, 1990

My friend has cervical cancer

that grew from a wart virus she contracted

from an ex-lover. There was infidelity

and lying, the worst relationship she’s ever had.

And now surgery. Possible sterility.

Her cells keep growing like they don’t know any better,

and her gynecologist is calling back all the wart virus patients

she’s ever treated to test them again,

this time for the kind

of cancer my friend has — a rare, dangerous strain.

We agreed earlier today — it’s like science fiction.

I am tired, alive on the subway,

and Ryan White’s on the cover

of the People magazine I just bought.

It is dated in advance — April 23rd —

like the eagerness of a virus itself.

Today, one of my students mentioned, in passing,

asbestos takes 24 hours to leak

from a ceiling onto a floor and fully contaminate the air.

And it seems too soon to put Ryan White in a poem,

concurrent with all the newspapers and tabloids.

On a television talk show, one child in a studio audience

asked Ryan if it was fun to meet celebrities like Elton John

and Michael Jackson. Adult America realized the question,

once it had been posed, was exactly the one we’d all been wanting

to ask. The AIDS-infected boy answered gracefully,

with an understanding laugh. How easy it is to love

blond Ryan White, his white straight teeth,

the white down on his delicate teenage neck,

the kind of boy I know I’d have had a crush on in high school.

There is a homeless man right in front of me

begging for chemotherapy money. I’ve seen him before

on the One Line. He blames Agent Orange

for the knob on his stomach. He pulls up his tee shirt

to show us — those who will look —

and I fixate on his glob of cancer rather than meet his stare.

He says he’ll get off with any of us at any stop,

sleep on any one of our floors.

He’ll eat anything we don’t want in our refrigerators.

His story includes his two teenage daughters,

something about the pipelines in Alaska.

He is furious, like all of us, at the government.

A fist rises up in his otherwise empty stomach.

He has not learned the art of forgiveness,

as Ryan White had, only because he hasn’t

as yet found a sympathetic ear.

Two days from now my friend will have a part of her cervix removed.

Two days ago I sent off what I owed to the IRS,

writing “No bombs. We need AIDS research!” on the memo line

in the bottom left hand corner

of my check, but debating first for some time.

I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself.

I didn’t want to be audited. So I turn

from the Agent Orange man

and from People’s Ryan White story

to the Poetry Flash magazine I am carrying.

I see Robert Hass’ “A Story About the Body,”

a poem I’d heard him recite at a reading last year,

the one about the composer who’s attracted to a painter,

but who cannot make love to her

because she has had a double mastectomy.

She cannot say her anger, but instead leaves for him

a bowl of dead bees.

I burst into tears seemingly not related to me

as though my eyes were breasts

I could lose at any time. My eyelids, supple

as the condom I never thought would break.

                                                                   “It’s nothing,

really — it’s been coming on for a while,”

I tell the woman sitting next to me

who offers a Kleenex, probably because I am almost as white

as Ryan White is white

and well-dressed, just coming from work.

When I first heard Robert Hass read

“A Story About the Body,” I thought the man in the poem

was an unfeeling asshole. But today

I want to give that composer a hug,

then lead him to the gorgeousness of the artist’s breastless chest.

I conjure her face, the pallets of her ribs.

I tell them they could have a meaningful relationship.

Because they seem like nice people, I explain to them

what I’ve learned from my self help books:

If they don’t work out their problems with each other now,

they’ll just have to work them out

down the line with someone else.

The Agent Orange man tries another car

and I am left with these tears, these embarrassing tears

that taste embarrassingly like sex.

That taste: don’t just sit there, do something.

That taste like beautiful pollution.

Pollution

for Julia and Madeline Kunin

As a child visiting Hampton Beach,

I was one day so chilled by the ocean

that when I went to the bath house to pee,

the warm, by comparison, temperature of my urine

burned me. I swore I saw a chimney line of smoke

rise between my legs from the toilet. My mother

didn’t know enough about chemistry to explain it.

Instead, she insisted on her rules.

This is the first thing I think of as an adult

learning that there is a river in Yugoslavia

so polluted it cannot even be used

to cool down machinery. As a child taught

to bless the lakes and brooks and tide pools,

I didn’t cheat until adolescence —

relieving myself in Social Pond, my water

a hot pocket I swam away from fast.

This local spot was a place for floating ghostly

arm and leg casts, cigarette butts, an occasional diaper.

Any one of these could have given me

my first eye infection, and my mother barred me

from our local pond completely. I went to my room

where I thought about the fact that somewhere a fish

choked on the Band-Aid loosened from the blister on my heel.

Litterbug was the in word then. Neither my mother nor I

could have defined carcinogenic or toxin.

The world went on with us, damning its own baptism

and cultivating tempting orchards

of mutant delicious ultraviolet apples.

Riding the Subway in New York, I Remember

The time I was ten and walking

to my friend Donna’s house,

and the German shepherd came out of nowhere.

His paws on my shoulders

as though he was bracing me for something,

about to teach me a lesson

or new dance. He was like the four foot tall

rag doll with stirrups on her hands

and feet that Uncle Ray and Aunt Shirley

had given me for Christmas. I’d strapped her on

to learn how to waltz. I could lead her

or dip her, flop her cotton head

on my shoulder, but this German shepherd

was all will and might and silvery gray gums.

The sky above, a sky of gray sweatshirts

of lifting barbells or running around tracks.

The dog leaned into me and I was on the ground.

He bit in four places, my two shoulders,

my right hip, my left arm,

until a man with a hard hat as orange

as any construction, as orange as a pumpkin,

came out and whacked the dog on its back.

“You’re trespassing,” he said,

no kinder to me. “You’re supposed to go

by the street.” Behind him the sky

loomed like a trainer, the meanest gym teacher.

The man yanked me up by one arm,

and I started to run to Donna’s

knowing from another little girl’s scary story,

men can be even fiercer than dogs.

“You OK, kid?” he called after me,

like a bad friend who all of a sudden

wants to make up, if only because he’s afraid

you’ll tell his mom. I ran

all the way, as though I was on fire

and didn’t know enough to roll in the dirt.

Donna screamed when she opened the door

to her house, the back of my tee shirt

all covered with blood, all of it.

Her mother wasn’t home. And so I’d believe her,

she made me look in the bathroom mirror.

I called my house and left

red finger prints on her phone.

Not until then, did specific places

on my body start to hurt.

The pinking sheared notches

on my shoulders, the ripped open bum

in my hip. Donna wrapped a facecloth

around my elbow, near the only wound

that was exposed. Blood had dripped down

my leg, around my sneaker,

and underneath, into the grips on the soles,

so that each of my footprints also

left little squiggles of blood

on the tiles of her bathroom and kitchen floors.

“I was trespassing,”

I confessed as soon as my mother

pulled up in the yellow Impala

and finally I was able to cry.

She said, “Here, lie down,”

and from the window

of the back seat, the sky

a big gray brick, as hard

as the sky ever gets with no storm

in sight. I asked how much

blood I could lose, and my mother

said, “Don’t worry, honey, it looks worse

than it really is,” and I pictured

the seven pints everyone had,

but outside of us all, and filling

the nickel waxy milk cartons

the lunch ladies sold at school.

I comforted myself — how juice in a glass

always looks like so much more

after it’s been spilled.

In the emergency room,

the doctor peeled my shirt

from me like a wet bathing suit,

told jokes about firemen and rabbits.

My mother was there, too,

a strong silent angel. And no one

said anything like I was wrong

to be on the path we kids cleared

through the woods, that ran

from my street to Donna’s,

long before all the new development

had started. There was a path, too,

behind Madeline Avenue

that went clear through

to East Woonsocket School.

Safer for their children

to walk there, parents thought,

than on the big busy streets

that didn’t have sidewalks.

Now, having the time to react,

my body said what it could

to the German shepherd.

From the crook inside my elbow

emerged a purplish blue ghost,

like the hickey bruise

on Donna’s older sister’s neck,

soft and full of status,

hurting less she said

than getting pierced ears.

She showed us how it changed

to a yellowish green

when, a few weeks later,

she scrunched down the ribbed collar

of her turtleneck

and told us once again,

“Remember — this is our secret.”

I had to have a tetanus shot

so I wouldn’t go crazy

and foam at the mouth, or twirl

the way I’d seen a boy at school

imitate his dog who’d died from rabies.

Breaking all the fourth grade rules

about opposite sex friends,

this boy sent me a book to read

while I was recovering.

My scars were pink shiny maggots,

even that boy admired, that said

I could survive anything,

that said I could go

wherever I wanted.

Easy

In 1981 I was on a train in Milan

where a man would later try to molest me,

where later I’d push him so hard

he’d call me a bitch, though he said nothing else

in English, and he’d rip the collar

of my shirt, and I’d kick him and run

only to be trapped on the platform

where I could see him masturbating

through the window of the train he stayed on.

His friends would block the entrance

to the terminal where I wanted to get help.

His friends would call me “bonita,” surround me,

and touch my neck and hair before the police

would come and do nothing because, they said,

it wasn’t a violation, really. I was all right.

 

In 1981 I was on a train in Milan

trying to write my sister a letter

because she is a year younger than I am

and because she was living at home with my parents

and she was pregnant. I thought, then I wrote,

“You could get an abortion.” But she was eighteen,

and she was in love with her boyfriend.

She wanted to get married and have a husband.

So I scratched out the abortion sentence

while a man sitting next to me was reading the letter

that panged on my lap. I was crying when he whispered

he was able to read English and smiled as though his hand

was already on my knee. He was like the man

who would, in a few hours, try to rape me. He asked

if it was true, if American girls were easy.

Assumptions

for Pat Vega

First, I’m assuming that gravity is working.

That you’re, at this moment, being pulled

towards the earth. That your head is bigger

than your hand. That you know what a computer is.

That your arms are shorter than your legs.

That you get around. I assume

that the land and water masses on the globe

are proportional representations of the land and water

masses on earth. I assume the stars

are where the astronomers tell us they are,

that such scientists have no reason to lie,

that there’s life on other planets, and the infinity sign

is symbolized by that little figure eight

lying on its side. I assume you know how to count and add,

that you’ve never gotten to the biggest number.

That your telephone is currently in service.

That you have a phone and a pad to take messages.

That you know your number by heart.

That you have a few good friends to talk to.

That they know your phone number and call you often.

That you think killing someone violently,

for no good reason, is wrong. That you get hungry.

That you eat vegetables sometimes.

That you buy produce in stores, that you wash

the leaves of lettuce first. That you are troubled,

at least a little, about our environment.

That you have a sexual orientation.

That you can draw a fish or flower.

That you’ve never meant

to deliberately hurt anyone. That you define yourself

as boy or girl, man or woman. That you are a product

of your upbringing. That you’re more than

the sum of your parts. That you

have been stereotyped at some point.

That you have a legitimate gripe

That you know more than you let on.

That you can’t always express what you feel.

That a diamond costs more than a rhinestone.

That, no matter how rich or poor, you have a price range.

That you usually get the right change.

That you have used a stove.

That you think some behaviors are more acceptable

than others. That you live by a code of ethics.

That when you break your own code, you feel bad.

That you think you’re different.

That you are indeed different.

That paint brushes are made in an assortment of sizes.

That you were once smaller than you are now.

That you are alive.

That you have celebrated holidays.

That you have the same birthday as someone else.

That you think about sex.

That you have a mother.

That your father is either dead or alive.

That you have met your parents or not.

That there are technicalities.

That you fantasize about the lives of strangers.

That you didn’t always have those shoes.

That when your baby teeth were growing in you screamed.

That you aren’t always paying attention.

That there are certain things you can’t remember.

That you can imagine petting a small animal.

That you have thought about what love means.

That sometimes your tongue gets dry.

That you’ve felt inadequate.

That you are sometimes hot, sometimes cold.

That you’ve reached out for help.

That you can do two things at once.

That your blood is red and you can wink.

That you are using Marilyn Monroe

as a reference point for beauty.

That you have an ego.

That you worry. That you go to the bathroom.

That there’s a toilet where you live.

That you live under a roof.

That you are sometimes ultra-aware one day you will die.

That you have seen children.

That you have seen a coat and skirt made of ultra-suede.

That you know the difference between a spoon and a fork.

That you sometimes are at a loss for words.

That you have an opinion.

That you know how to read or that someone

will read this to you aloud. Assuming

I could be wrong, I’m also assuming

that you understand English.

That you weren’t able to read this before it was written.

That you are partially made up of bones and plasma.

That someone else hasn’t already written these letters

in the same exact order with the same exact spaces

in between. That your body has been immersed in water.

That you see the same color and shape as I do

when we look at the same peach. That there is a theater

near you. That a movie will be released

at Christmas. That you have been to visit a dentist.

That if someone says “profit” or “prophet”

in a conversation you know from the context

if he or she means “accumulation” or “wise one.”

That you have seen the inside of a church.

That you’ve bought someone a present. That you think

I’ll leave something out. That you can grow hair,

that you sometimes clean your fingernails,

that your fingernails have gotten harder

as you’ve grown older, assuming you’ve grown older,

and that, when you were a baby, a caretaker

peeled your soft cartilage away so that you wouldn’t

accidently scratch yourself. That both your fingernails

and hair will grow on after you die,

that you will indeed pass away,

that you will be buried or cremated,

that your body will be found,

that someone will cry when you die,

that you’ve cried when someone you’ve loved has died,

that you have loved someone —

either sexually or as family

and that those two lines didn’t cross,

or they did. That you want to talk about it.

That you fret if people say they don’t like you.

That you’ve been to a party.

That you like some kind of music.

That you have felt jealous.

That the world is round

because Columbus said so. That you have been to

or seen pictures of America.

That you have been exposed to ritual.

That you have rejected certain traditions.

That you like some people more than others.

That you have been angry.

That you have been oppressed.

That if a stranger saw your naked body

you’d feel something like shame or surprise.

That you know what a gun can do.

That you have watched tv in color or black and white.

That you identify your skin with a shade

that doesn’t accurately specify

the richness of its tones.

That you have put check marks in boxes.

That you’ve observed someone with chapped lips.

That you have suffered.

That you have relatives and a background.

That you have said something you didn’t mean.

That you have a preference.

That you’re only human.

That you have made a mistake when writing

and had to cross whole words out. I assume

that the operator will help you

place your call. That the post office

will be opened as scheduled this week.

That you have a goal. That there’s a want

in your belly and a heart in your chest.

That you’ll look up any words you don’t understand.

That you’ve had misunderstandings.

That you believe some things can be mended.

That you have a dictionary and enough light.

That the pages in your dictionary are arranged

in consecutive order, that your definitions

are close to the same as mine.

The Night Before Father’s Day

The fireflies might have been bouncing balls in a sing-along.

You could have followed their luminous bellies, recited

the right lyrics, and lied so easily. It was night.

I wouldn’t have believed you anyway, honest —

because of the raspberry liquor and the swaying candles.

It wasn’t even your boat in which we were going to make love.

And I kept wondering if the flies, too, were for hire,

like passionate fireworks so far away from the shore.

It was a lie, a skit from Love American Style,

except you didn’t love me at all

 

the night before Father’s Day. I wasn’t really young enough

to be your daughter, but it was close. You kidded

that you wanted a present because you had had four abortions,

four trips to the clinic with three different women.

I started to cry because of everything,

but mostly because you’d forgotten my birthday.

You said as though I had no right to my tears,

“Look, I never thought about you in that way at all.

You were just fun to have sex with.

You’re a spunky girl, but honestly, you’re not even my type.”

 

It was like Christmas in an awful house

with no presents, just a blaring tv, and no one even trying

to sing a carol or make a turkey.

A voice in my head said, “You can fix this. You can fix this.”

But was it my house or yours? It was a whole different

time, in a different part of the country.

A stronger voice in my head,

one that I usually only hear witnessing accidents

or getting a phone call about death,

said, “Get out. Get out for your life.”

 

I looked through the porthole. Could I swim to shore?

What was lurking in the bay water? The dinghy,

like a diaphragm, elaborately tied up in knots, would take too long.

“I’m an old man, and I still look at each woman

I pass on the street. I wonder if she’s wearing a bra

or the color of her pubic hair — I can’t help it.”

I was the child whose mind, in part, is off, far away.

Another part was stuck listening to a ranting parent.

You were unbuttoning your shirt like it was a turn-on,

regardless of me, regardless that I was planning my escape.

Ernest Hemingway, Your Mother Made You Wear Dresses Until You Were Three

Well, maybe that explains everything.

In your house in Key West, where the pastels of the town

must have driven you crazy, above the fireplace mantle —

like an expose — you’re pictured in frills as a toddler.

“Knickers were fashionable for boys,”

the tour guide explains, “But Hemingway’s mother, well…”

Her perky voice trails off as though, after all these tourists,

she still hasn’t found the right words.

 

But there you are again, all grown up and in plaid flannel,

against the far wall. “You’ll notice,” the tour guide says now,

her monologue-pace restored, “Our Hemingway was quite a sportsman.”

You stand with an enormous fish, cranked so that its nose

is to the ground in defeat — its tail is hoisted straight up,

making the fish double your height.

And in another photo, you hold a pair of antlers,

proud and with no apology, as though they were a bowling trophy.

 

Deer heads and moose heads are mounted in your study to extinguish

any lingering doubt. You typed with two fingers and married

four times, each wife dismissed when she showed too much independence.

Liquor-locks, around the vodka insured no one would drink

unless you were home. But bored with you always gone, Pauline,

Mrs. Hemingway-number-three, put in a pool and raised

the kitchen counter six inches so you’d have no excuses — from now on

you could clean your own fish without straining your back.

 

Hemingway, we know you loved cats, but you even machoed that,

bringing home a urinal from Sloppy Joe’s

to make into a drinking trough for your pets who’d leave a line,

a geometric progression of offspring. Mutant cats,

every generation with more toes than the last, each extra

jutting from a front paw like a little potent penis.

Maybe you were rough, wrestling the kittens and throwing them

into the pool, then toweling them dry, saying things like “Ah shucks.”

 

And it’s true, mothers so often get blamed for it all — but a dress?

Some whisper also that your father was henpecked.

Freud was forty-nine when you wore a skirt for the last time,

and he would have forgiven you, freely, the way we do — the way

you forgave your mother when you dragged your three-legged labor chair

to a bullfight, and sat in it to watch the gore. Did you think

of your mother as you sat, as though daring someone to make fun,

in an antique chair in which antique women actually gave birth?

Buying Stock

“…The use of condoms offers substantial protection, but does not guarantee total protection and that while there is no evidence that deep kissing has resulted in transfer of the virus, no one can say that such transmission would be absolutely impossible.”
-The Surgeon General, 1987

I know you won’t mind if I ask you to put this on.

It’s for your protection as well as mine — Wait.

Wait. Here, before we rush into anything

I’ve bought a condom for each one of your fingers. And here —

just a minute — Open up.

I’ll help you put this one on, over your tongue.

I was thinking:

If we leave these two rolled, you can wear them

as patches over your eyes. Partners have been known to cry,

shed tears, bodily fluids, at all this trust, at even the thought

of this closeness.

Boy

I run into my old boyfriend’s new boyfriend
on Boylston Street and, as he talks, I fish around
in my handbag, my pockets, for something sharp
so I can stab him. He prattles insensitive circles:
how my old boyfriend is impossible, but I already know that.
I want to call him queer boy, a faggot: he keeps calling me “hun,”
twirling the fringe on my scarf. We have nothing in common
until his goodbye: pink gums show between his teeth
and upper lip. He has my goofy kind of smile,
the kind my old boyfriend always made fun of.
Boy, is this guy in for trouble.

SMILE!

Smile!

My dentist was Doctor Alexander.
I chose him because he was within walking distance.
There was no indication in the phone book
that he was into S&M. I might have been
into it too, if I could have played S,
but stuck as an M in his chair as he patted the top of my head,
I felt queasy when he seductively said
he’d checked me out
long enough to find a cavity
because he likes all the young pretty ones to come back
before their customary six months.
I brushed him off, anesthetized to the routine
of hooting and whistling
women encounter everyday
on twentieth century New York City streets, the sleazy smiles
and hands pawing ours
when we get change with our newspapers.
So I kept my next dentist engagement, dreading it
only slightly more than a usual visit.
This time Doctor Alexander wanted to give me a crown —
a $650 expenditure if I’d go away with him
for a weekend. We could get to know each other first,
he reasoned, as the procedure takes four or five visits.
But all that gold wouldn’t have shown,
wouldn’t have taken me any closer to royalty.
My dentist retaliated to my polite rejection —
pinched me with a Novocaine needle,
then drilled way too deep, hitting a nerve.
His square dental light loomed like the flash of white
before the start of a horror movie — one I, at that moment,
decided to write the script for — warrior women
with teeth in their vaginas to curtail their rapists.
Doctor Alexander asked me a question about what I did
for a living, pretending I’d be able to answer
though both his hands worked in my mouth.
Then he volunteered he’d become a dentist
because the pay is terrific and there are no emergencies
in the middle of the night. Once, in a childhood fight,
my sister bit my arm as hard as she could,
her upper and lower biting partners
trying to connect, to rip through my flesh.
The imprints she left
were like horse shoes, battle scars of good luck,
that bruised into purple, pale blue, then faint green.
Doctor Alexander had no way of knowing that this was the memory
he was inspiring in me, but I knew he could see,
on the occlusal surfaces of each of my teeth,
little imprints and shadows like characters
of a language neither of us could understand.
They spelled out my learned and archetypical rage
at every situation this reminded me of.
The dentist’s metal explorer and drill bits
righteously displayed on his instrument tray,
his towel clip civilly clutching the paper bib under my chin.
He could lower or elevate me at his will
with the lift pedal at his feet. Human teeth
last longer than bones which is why
some have looked to them, instead of the stars,
for answers. Crowded-toothed persons
never straying from home, pointy-toothed others
unworthy of trust, and those unfortunates
with spaces between their two front teeth
never to be happily married. Babies
born with nubs of enamel
poking through their gums, the wisest of all.
Doctor Alexander’s handpiece hissed, then stopped
for the last time in my presence.
As he silently stirred the silver paste
with which he’d fill his mistake —
a sparkling inlay in my upper second molar —
I pictured the future of women,
what part of them would live on
long after their flesh and skeletons —
their lips no longer there to purse or frown, their fists
and legs no longer there to clench and kick —
only their smiles left to grin and bear it.

Dream, Vagina Dentata

It has something to do with sex, I’ve read.

Teeth hanging by gum threads. I twist and swing

them, cradle-like, with my tongue, a thick wind

rocking tree-bound babes, while keeping them embedded.

And what if they’re grown-up? It’s cold and hard

as a coffin, this stretcher. Wind-up choppers

clatter among scalpels, circular mirrors,

liplessly wording, Your smile won’t grow back.

What has been under pillows? Teeth, a gasp —

piggy bank quarters or nickels closing eyes.

And the gynecologist won’t hear my heart

as he fits me for dentures, so I start

to sprout, all molars, bicuspids, canines

and incisors from my antarctic mouth.

Clitoris

for Aminata Diop, who refused an excision, who fled her Mali village

glistening comma

           listening ear

           tonsil magnificent

           heart

                                  flag

powerhouse nub

           pulse to otherworldliness

taste bud

                       voice box

           mighty red tongue

Just Saying

for Karen

Since AIDS, a rape is worse than rape,

we were just saying that the other day.

Then it happened. Worse than we could have expected.

You were sleeping in your loft bed

six feet from the floor, and nowhere to go,

when you woke to his knees on your shoulders,

his hand on your face, and a knife at your throat.

Such awful aftershave, you choked

and wiggled just enough to free your mouth

from his palm, to take an occasional breath.

He could have crushed you, broken your neck

with one arm behind his back. He said that.

He said he was showing you mercy.

He said it was the first time

he’d done anything like this,

like you were so special. And there was a mask

on his face for the occasion,

and you woke to him there with you in your bed,

darker than your worst childhood fears.

Darker than dreams of ovens and coffins,

you wait for your period,

pray you are HIV negative,

and will wait again for a test in another six months.

America is a place where all privacy is gone,

we were just saying that the other day.

We were saying maybe it’s because one day soon

there will be no room for any of us

to have as much as a lawn. But we were just talking,

we didn’t really expect it —

this man who raped you, who snuck

through a back window, and then left

through a front door.

Kitchen

I’m jealous when my mother touches anything else.

The potatoes that roll in the stainless steel sink.

The water runs and my mother rubs each bump —

under their chins, behind their necks — clean.

Sometimes she bathes me here, washes my hair

kneading small circles on my scalp. I trust her,

“Keep your eyes closed. Cover your ears.”

Now there’s a flame, small and round as a hand mirror

taunting from under the pot on the stove,

“Who is the fairest child of all?”

And I stand on a chair to watch water bubbles pop a soft “Oh no,”

then disappear. My mother gently plunks potatoes in, one by one,

and says, “Careful not to tip. These will be done

when the skins crack, when I can stick a fork in.”

 

There was a mother in the newspaper this week

who cooked her baby and served it to her husband

as though it were a chicken.

Communion

for Monika Beerle —

b. 1963, St. Gallen, Switzerland; d. 1989, New York City

 

“…an East Village couple met Rakowitz outside a Times Square theater showing Friday the 13th Part VII.

‘He was trying to round up people for a cult he was forming,’ said the woman who asked not to be identified.

He was carrying a copy of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kempf — as usual.”

-from the New York Post, September 20, 1989

If Daniel Rakowitz had only dreamt

about eating Monika Beerle’s flesh,

these dreams possibly could have expressed

his desire to live off her money

or perhaps his devouring passion —

with an element of oral sadism.

Or even a regression on his part,

an attempt to psychically reincorporate with his mother —

reverse the process of his being disgorged

from her during delivery,

as if the opposite of birth

wasn’t really death at all.

 

But it wasn’t a dream:

Monika’s head boiling in her own pot, on her own stove.

Daniel seasoning, then eating, her brains and her heart.

Some say he thought in this Satanic-cult-way

that he would finally be able to control her.

But could it be, instead, that she’s wound up

controlling him? Maybe now, in prison, Daniel dances

the way Monika had at Martha Graham.

Maybe he will suddenly share her love for everybody,

including Jews and Gays and Rastafarians.

Maybe he will develop a taste

for things Swiss. Yes, maybe now, in prison,

 

Daniel will become Christian,

having had Monika as his communion.

So transformed, he will apologize to the cops

for ever having called any of them pigs, and

because of his sincerity, the courts will set him free

so he can play himself

in the made-for-tv movie. Then, with the money he makes,

maybe he’ll begin his own ministry. He’ll return

to feeding the homeless in Tompkins Square Park,

but with more of Monika’s gracefulness, a lighter step.

Maybe Daniel will teach us, through his transformation

and repentance, no one can ever truly destroy a spirit.

Jung Says the Soul is Round

(Tompkins Square Park)

Jung says the soul is round.

And so is a bird bath. Round?

So are the bracelet slots of handcuffs and mounds

rising on a pair of brass knuckles.

Jung says the soul is round.

And I see its reflection everywhere

in one of the poorest parks in America.

What I want to say first is there are no flowers,

but then joy takes over because there is the sun and an orange

a gray man is gratefully holding.

And the round pockmarks on the orange.

Summers before, there have been riots,

but today in the park, a library book

rests in a child’s lap. His wooly head peers

at a picture of a round pie before it’s been cut.

The fork marks around its perimeter

as mysterious as designs on a mandala.

A hoola hoop flies askew on a young girl’s hips,

a ring around her rhythm of Saturn.

The tiny unseen beads swishing music in her striped loop.

The parabloid trash receptacles.

And that round sun again that doesn’t let up.

The spidery umbrella, no longer any good against the rain —

a floppy parasol, doing what it can,

over the fair round and round-freckled redhead.

Prayer, or Nostalgia for Heaven

Please, just give me a map, and I’ll follow it.

And, if I’m worthy, throw in a sign —

maybe a miracle to show me I’m on the right track

 

or a coincidence, a deja vu so strong

I’ll say, “Aha! This is the way to heaven.”

Dear Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, or Genderless-One,

 

I live among your humblest achievers. It was easy

for me to get A’s in school because I was told

what to study, and I did it. My meals

 

always look exactly as they do in the pictures

of the cook book. I’m not a deviant. I’m only here

to serve you, whoever you are, but like

 

an overwhelmed waitress, I’m not sure

you’re in my section of tables. I run around

in Zen circles, climb the highest totem pole — I love all

 

the directions of the cross: West, North, East, and South.

I love the twelve apostles and the zodiac. The numbers,

the colors, the letters of a name all mean something to me.

 

The lines on my palm, the configuration of my tea leaves.

The tarot, the runes, the pennies, and the I Ching.

But like a sorceress pleasing too many masters

 

and mistresses, too many shepherds at once,

I am a sheep and, as you know, a consumer — therefore I need to

be told what to buy. And you must understand this —

 

even paintings of baby Jesus change through the ages:

sometimes he’s fat, black or white, sometimes lean.

So Goddesses and Gods, I plead again for direction. If only

 

you could put me on a special mailing list — or send me

an advertisement like the ones that only go out

to preferred shoppers announcing a special sale in advance.

 

Show me the way, and I’ll go. In the meantime, you’ll find me

down by the river, getting close to what is left

of nature. I’ll wrap my arms around me mummy-style and roll

 

down the biggest hill — sky, grass, sky, grass, sky, grass —

and wait for your reply. I’m ready for anything. Maybe

you’ll be little green men and women. Maybe

 

you’ll charge out of the doors of your flying saucers

on horseback. Maybe you’ll plant kisses

on all of us, on each Earth-bound Beauty’s sleeping cheek.

An Answer to a Question

You said that if we could just touch

we’d be able to figure it out.

Your palm scanned me up and down

like we were two parts of the same computer —

screen and mouse, bytes and search keys,

orphans and widows, open windows.

Your hand finally found what she wanted:

the pea under my mattress. We referenced

my clitoris, then cross-filed it

with beauty, ocean, politics, the deep.

We grew small in each others arms

the way lovers can in their dreams.

Then I exclaimed the pea was a pearl.

Each ring shadowed a halo. Lifejackets bloomed

the colors of tropical fruits.

Knowing no ending was completely happy,

we slipped through mighty thorns,

sliding safely through technology

until there was enough room for us

to be home wherever we went.

The Sky Sings

The sky sings in plurals.

Sun, moon. Moon, earth. Star, wish, and us.

At night we wake to these songs

which circle like whole notes, whole rings

around the earth, around Saturn, and Venus.

Mars, we hear this singing, half cold

and half light. Beyond buildings, beyond traffic,

sometimes beyond text books or maps, all eyes raise

seemingly at once. EGBDF:

Every Good Boy Does Fine. This was the way we learned

what sounds rested on what lines of our music books.

Our ears, bass clefs, trembling cliffs

with small oceans inside, keep our balance

and ping with this cadence. Like spoons

tapping on glasses of water, on glasses of wine,

the stars sing in the sky. So even when we pull away

like receding waves to look at our sorrow, to look

without love at each other, we are struck by the curve

of these sounds which pull us, rising, always

reaping, always towards joy.

Mrs. Shaw’s Cadillac

When Cindy Shaw told me

her mother wrote The Happy Hooker

I believed her. On our way to Scarborough

Beach, we read passages aloud

from the creased paperback.

All three of us in the front seat

of the powder blue Cadillac

convertible. Mrs. Shaw’s pink kerchief

flapping like a cheerleader’s skirt,

her platinum waves stuck in place.

Lucky, their black labrador, sprawled

on the back seat, barking

sometimes when we laughed.

 

Mrs. Shaw told us everything.

She would make up our bottom lips

with her gooey finger

then point to her breasts

between the plunge in her bathing suit,

asking Cindy or me to lean over and check

if her freckles were turning into sunspots.

She had stillborn triplets once

and said she was too old now

to go through three more births.

Maybe I was like one of the daughters

she’d lost. She buried the babies

giving them names all beginning with “C.”

 

Cindy’s magazines spread out

on the blanket, blazing fingernails

and hair. We watched Mrs. Shaw giggle

for lifeguards, pretending to chase Lucky

in shallow waves, while we tugged

at our suits all gritty. In the shower

Mrs. Shaw promised an “R” rated drive-in

and hooked each one of us for a moment

into her bra. She pinched at what she called

“two empty sandpails.” Then she made us

swear not to tell Mr. Shaw any of this.

His construction working hands seemed

sometimes as big as car fins.

Nearly Drowning at Six

The blue of Bill’s Pet Shop fish tank was all

I knew to know, so down, down, eyes open

for pastel gravel, plastic scuba men,

sausaged air on their backs. My slow fall.

I was thinking wax bottles, sweet liquid

inside, the penny-candy case Terry

kept in her store: Snow White-like I would be

laid next to gummy fish, magical-dead.

Then, nothing at once, but a seaweed bruise.

Grasses of mangers or Easter baskets,

muddle of holy days. Palm, pine, confused.

I was just six enough to know regrets.

My sister kicking, sunlit, above me:

Sweet Jesus. Her feet, I must kiss her feet.

A Conversation in Stereo

for Michele

There were always two of everything (one for each of us) but

in different colors so we wouldn’t get mixed up, and

one color, we thought, was always definitely better. The one

both of us, of course, definitely wanted. The same thing

was true with lunch boxes — they may have both been

blue, but with unlike logos. Or

shoes — one pair with laces, another with buckles.

Or two music boxes, but with separate songs.

 

With their girls only one year and four days apart, our parents

didn’t have time to learn how to play favorites. Twins,

some people thought we were. Our Zodiac sign Gemini, we multiplied

times two our personalities, times two

what we really felt inside, times two

because there were two of us. And when we fought,

someone usually said, “You just want that

because your sister does, too.”

 

But some things in two

were more clearly unequal: the foretelling halves

of a wishbone; heads or tails meant one of us had to lose;

or the samara twirling like a green set of wings

from the maple tree in our yard. When an adult

snapped one apart and handed each of us a section to open

and wear on our noses, one side was always blessed

with more sticky sap. And the less lucky of us

had to hold the witchy nose-extender on with our fingers.

 

And even though we weren’t divided that terrible sibling way:

one pretty, one smart — one was prettier, one smarter.

Those comparatives like: one had better boyfriends,

longer hair, or nicer clothes, any given year.

Or we were known by events. One played softball,

one couldn’t. One cracked up the car, and one didn’t.

And although sometimes two seemed too much, sometimes

it wasn’t enough. We lost out, for example, on the superlatives:

 

Being only two, we couldn’t be the best of anything.

We were more like our scrambling hands in the game we played —

opisthenar, palm, opisthenar, palm — only one of us

on top for a split second at a time. And as we grew,

sharing the same room, one of us might have been watching tv

while doing homework. The other

talking on the phone while reading a magazine. And

instinctively, like a conversation in stereo,

 

we knew when to pass the com chips. So sometimes,

when I think my sister’s children are mine or

my sister feels like she’s just finished my poem,

they are and she did, in that moment sometimes…

because somewhere our mother closes her compact two-sided mirror, and, in a dark

corner of her purse, the enlarged and lifesize

reflect each other. And maybe somewhere our father

tells a joke, how I kept the womb warm for the second one.

That’s Going to Mean Something Later On

for Kathleen Rockwell Lawrence

“See the way she fumbles for her keys while he keeps talking —

that’s going to mean something later on.”

You were whispering to me about the movie on the screen

of the Orson Welles Theater. In your third year of film school,

you said with authority, “Because film is so expensive,

                                                                                 nothing

 

is shot that isn’t connected later…”

You paused when a character was killed, then continued:

“Not like in novels. You don’t have time to be sloppy

with description — will it matter after or not?

“No, I think every word counts in fiction or poetry, too,”

I lamely said, my major English Lit.

 

We didn’t have sex, and though you didn’t say,

“That’s going to mean something later on,”

it did. The track marks on your arm — I thought

they were as tragically romantic as suicide bracelets.

You had been in a rehab, and I said,

                                                       “Anyone

 

overcoming such obstacles must be an angel.” No one we knew then

knew anything about AIDS. You said, “Let’s not spoil our

friendship,” or something like that. And I stayed for the night

anyway, falling asleep on your bed while you were looking

through your books to show me something. You moved to Belgium

that summer, and I never heard from you again.

 

Walking home the next day I saw a little boy on the Fenway,

his mother was whacking him on the back with her purse.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, “when will you learn to listen?”

That’s going to mean something later on —

someone is going to pay for this,

                                                  I thought.

 

But as though karma those days was a boomerang

caught in a whirling wind and coming back off course,

it was easy for me to feel like a victim. I was sure

the witness would pay, or perhaps someone on this block

whose windows were closed, who was cooking supper right then

for her husband. But maybe if the moon is a projector,

I reason, and our actions are now what happens on screen,

then the karma is all right, though not always a karma

of happy endings. The close-ups might be headlines:

wars, land fills, national deficits. Or maybe

our personal triumphs and tragedies.

                                                          More likely wdre players

 

in a thriller — the audience watching us knows computers

give us cancer, though the few characters who read about it

in the New Yorker can’t get their editorials published

anywhere. And the cancer researcher is not-so-mysteriously

bought out. I pray we are as precious as celluloid,

and someone watching knows all of this means something.

Love-Struck in New York

I kiss a homeless woman on the lips,

soothe the angry young man passing leaflets

with a hug and his angry young causes dissolve.

I tell the Yuppie couple, “I think you’re nifty.

I hope you get every appliance and gadget

you want.” I invite my new DINK neighbors

(Double Income, No Kids) for dinner

and a menage a trois. I pet a mangy dog who growls at me

straining against his owner’s leash

while I hold a baby with a rash as his teenage mother

folds up a stroller. A hood spits, missing

the sidewalk, and hits my shoe. So what?

I pay for a mustard-laced pretzel with a ten

and tell the vendor, “You keep the change.

I love everyone today.” “You’s crazy lady,”

he says, looking afraid. And my feelings

towards him, well, they don’t change.

Ode To The Ferris Wheel, On Its Ninety-Ninth Birthday.

(June, 1992)

Oh, Mr. Ferris, what an invention!
Your diagrams and blueprints, your wild imaginings
finally turning, slow and high that initial time —
the toast of the fair, rising over the rest
of flat Chicago. I feel like one of the first to ride
this night of my birthday, a century later
in another city, another state. The summer
moon is rosy pink and maybe it’s the climbing
and falling like sex that makes the man
who stands in front of my lover and I in the long line
boast he’s taken the same girl on this ride
for twenty-six years in a row. His wife blushes,
half of her coy, the other half embarrassed
that her husband’s so loud. I will be married
in a couple of months, and in my mind
my ring twirls like Mr. Ferris’s first initials:
W. G. W. Letters con-ting back
to eclipse themselves. Ford Madox Ford.
William Carlos Williams. The palindrome
of my birth date and age: 13 and 31.
My lover and I will kiss, sure
we are blessed, every time
we go over the top crest.
The luck of the circle and the sun.

Why, On a Bad Day, I Can Relate to the Manatee

The manatee tries a diet of only sea grass, but still stays fat.

Mistaking her for a mermaid from afar,

sailors of long ago lost interest when they got too close,

openly making fun of her chubbiness. She knows Rodney Dangerfield

would write jokes about her if she were more popular.

She’s ashamed of her crooked teeth, her two big molars

that leave her sucking and grinding

with bad table manners. She swims towards danger

over and over, scars from motor boats on her back

reminders of her slow stupidness. She resents being

called a sea-cow. She hopes her whiskers don’t show

in the light. She is the mammal who knows

about low self-esteem. I first met her on my honeymoon

in southern Florida. I was on a cruise in my one piece bathing suit.

The women in bikinis squealed and pointed to the nearby dolphins,

clapping so their sleek gray backs would come to the water’s surface.

In the shadow of her prettier ocean sister, the manatee swam by also.

No one but I paid her much attention. I wanted to lend her

my make-up, massage her spine, lend a girlfriend-ear

and listen to her underwater troubles. I dreamt of her

as I slept in the warmth of my new husband. I dreamt of her

as he slept in the warmth of me. On a good day, too,

I can relate to the manatee, who knows

on some level that she is endangered

and believes in mating for life.

Pork

No one warned me he’d long for loins and hocks

so soon into our marriage. My husband munches from bags

of second-choice pork rinds on the porch, not wanting to exclude me from the dinner

he really wants to make. Back in college, his roommates loved his pork chops.

At midnight he and his friends often drove to a diner famous for its spare ribs.

 

I catch my husband looking longingly at the pork.

I’m on my way from the dairy aisle and, not wanting to make it an issue

then, place the milk and cottage cheese in our cart

loud enough to give him warning. He obediently slides over to the chicken

and picks out a four-pack of yellow dimply breasts.

 

As a wife who doesn’t eat red meat, I feel inadequate. I wiggle my toes in the pink

slippers he gave me for Christmas. I’ve read enough to know what happens

when husbands don’t get what they want. Should he romanticize his unabashed

pork-eating past, he’ll start to resent me — fast. I remember with a shudder

his sheer pleasure when I passed him my slice of ham at our wedding reception.

 

Whenever we’re in a restaurant, he orders sides of bacon. I find cans

of Spam and Bacos behind the breakfast cereal in the cupboard.

I explain I’m not trying to hold him back, that he should eat pork in the house.

I’m not self-righteous in my decision to keep boars and sows out of my diet.

But always polite, my husband swears he doesn’t want to.

 

What’s the fun of eating sausage alone? My girlfriend, who loves pork too,

makes her point. Of course, I feel worse. Aren’t I woman enough to meet

my husband’s needs? Threatened, I confront him about his behavior

at the pork counter. At first he doesn’t recall, then he says he was only looking.

So now he’s only looking. Marriage disasters from my childhood sizzle.

 

Uncle Waldo always said, “Hey, it’s not a crime to look, is it?”

when a good-looking “babe” walked by. But Aunt Charlotte knew it was.

After a few years, she threw all his clothes out of the window, crying it’s over,

calling him a swine. Always loving, my husband hugs and reassures me.

I look down at my fuzzy slippers and feel better. Uncle Waldo hated pig’s feet.

For the One Man Who Likes My Thighs

There was the expensive cream from France

that promised the dimples would vanish

if applied nightly to the problem spots.

Then, when that didn’t work, Kiko, the masseuse

at Profile Health Spa, dug her thumbs

deep into my flesh as she explained

in quasi-scientific terms that her rough hands

could break up the toughest globules of cellulite.

I screamed, then bruised over, but nothing

else happened. When they healed, my legs still looked

like tapioca pudding. There was the rolling pin method

I tried as far back as seventh grade,

kneading my lumpy legs as though I was making bread.

Cottage Cheese Knees, Thunder Thighs —

I heard it all — under the guise of teasing,

under the leaky umbrella mistaken for affection.

I learned to choose long dresses

and dark woolen tights, clam diggers instead of short-shorts,

and, when I could get away with it, skirted bathing suits.

The nutritionist said that maybe Royal Jelly tablets

would break up the fat. I drank eight glasses

of water everyday for a month. I ate nothing

but steak for a week. I had to take everyone’s advice,

fearing that if I didn’t, my thighs

would truly be all my own fault. Liposuction

cost too much. The foil sweat-it-out

shorts advertised in the back of Redbook

didn’t work. Swimming, walking in place, leg lifts.

It’s embarrassing, especially being a feminist.

I wondered if Andrea Dworkin had stopped worrying,

and how. If Gloria Steinem does aerobics,

claiming it’s just for her own enjoyment.

Then I read in a self-help book:

if you learn to appreciate your thighs, they’ll appreciate

you back. Though it wasn’t romance at first sight,

I did try to thank my legs for carrying me up nine flights

the day when the elevator at work was out;

for their quick sprint that propelled me

through the closing doors of the subway

so that I wouldn’t be late for a movie;

for supporting my nieces who straddled, one

on each thigh, their heads burrowing deep into my lap.

I think, in fact, that it was at that moment

of being an aunt I forgot for an instant

about my thigh dilemma and began, more fully,

as they say, enjoying my life. So when it happened later

that I fell in love, and as a bonus,

the man said he liked my thighs, I shouldn’t have been

so thoroughly surprised. At first I was sure I’d misheard —

that he liked my eyes, that he had heard someone else sigh,

or that maybe he was having a craving for french fries.

And it wasn’t very easy to nonchalantly say oh, thanks

after I’d made him repeat. I kept asking

if he was sure, then waiting for a punch

line of some mean-spirited thigh-related joke.

I ran my fingers over his calf, brown and firm,

with beautiful muscles waving down the back.

It made no sense the way love makes no sense.

Then it made all the sense in the world.

Copyright © 1993 by Denise Duhamel
All rights reserved

For permission to reprint contact the author at Denise.Duhamel@fiu.edu.

About the Author


Denise Duhamel has published three chapbooks: It’s My Body (Egg In Hand Press, 1992), Skirted Issues (Stop Light Press, 1990), and Heaven And Heck (Foundation Press, 1988,1989,1990.)

Becque Olson performs Denise Duhamel’s Barbie-poems in a one-woman show This Is Nothing New. Her poems have also been staged by actors at the Medicine Show, New York City. As first-prize winner in the Last Poem competition, her poem “Fear On 11th Street And Avenue A, New York City” was developed into a poetry video. She has read her poems widely and has been a guest on Jack Veasey’s radio show Verbatim and Watch This Space, a television program on Central Pennsylvania’s WITF.

A New York Foundation for the Arts recipient, Denise Duhamel has had residencies at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BFA from Emerson College. She has been resident poet at Bucknell University and has taught at the West Side Y’s Writer’s Voice in New York City. She lives with her husband, the poet, Nick Carbo.

Text from the back cover

“Denise Duhamel is the only poet in the world who would dare to name her book Smile! The title alone is characteristic of Duhamel’s work, which has a sense of irony, humor, and flamboyant detail. These populous, startling poems have true depth beneath their dazzling surfaces. Duhamel’s compassionate vision encompasses human beings in our difficult, heartbreaking emotional grandeur. Duhamel is not just bold, she is brave, and that is the quality we need desperately in poetry today.”
-Elizabeth Alexander

“It is so rare that one can say a book of poetry is entertaining, but even the Table of Contents of Smile! is fun to read. Though I smiled and smiled through her relentless, even manic cheerfulness (courage’s comic mask,) I ended the book blinking away tears. More than any other poet I know, Denise Duhamel, for all the witty, polished surface of her poems, communicates the ache of human existence.”
-Edward Field

“In deftly written narratives, outrageous, and sometimes heartbreaking, Denise Duhamel has found just the right voice for making poems that take a swipe at the myths America lives by….Fiercely honest, and on the mark, her poems are welcome news indeed, and deserve our praise.”
-Colette Inez

“This is a wonderful first book — Denise Duhamel’s poems are wild, irreverent, funny, sane, poignant, original, passionate and utterly, utterly human.”
-Thomas Lux

“Denise Duhamel…she’s seriously real, personalizing rape, anorectics, and other well-worn distaff subjects with straightforward lyric economy.”
–Village Voice

Acknowledgements

Poems from this collection first appeared in the following magazines: Bad Henry Review, Blue Unicorn, Confrontation, Downtown, Ellipsis, Folio, Free Lunch, 420, Gargoyle, Journal of Progressive Human Services, minnesota review, Mudfish, National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side, North Dakota Quarterly, Ontario Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Plum Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Flash, Poetry New York, Sarah Lawrence Review, Sycamore Review, West Branch, The Wooster Review, and Zone 3.

“Four Hours” (West Branch) appears in Instant Classics, Volume 3. “Sometimes The First Boys Don’t Count” (North Dakota Quarterly) received Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize, XVI (Simon & Schuster, 1991.) “The Night Before Father’s Day” was reprinted in the anthology What’s A Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Relationship Like This? (Crossing Press, 1992.)

“Song For All The Would-Have-Been Princesses,” “Riding The Subway In New York, I Remember” and “Communion” were published in the chapbook Skirted Issues (Stop Light Press, 1990.) “Love-Struck In New York” was published in the chapbook Heaven And Heck (Foundation Press, 1988.)

With gratitude to Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry, The MacDowell Colony, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and Yaddo.

With love and special thanks to my family: Janet and Normand Duhamel; Michele, Marc, Kerri and Kate Tancrell. And with love and special thanks to my other family: Kathryn Kopchik, Becque Olson, Gregg Shapiro, Stephanie Strickland, Steven Styers, Jack Veasey, and, especially Maureen Seaton.

First American Edition, 1993
Printed in the United States

Cover photograph by Janet Duhamel

ISBN 1-879294-044
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-091159

Warm Spring Press
P.O. Box 5199
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 17110