Read an Excerpt
KATELYN
1
Fucked-up Greek movie on Easter Sunday
Mulberries made the doves drunk
Kite’s foot was a reedlike grass
How are you supposed to be survived
Grief does not make us weaker
But it might not make us strong like they said
I love when celebrities cry on Instagram
Like I love my first love
And life in my eyes then outside them
My house dying for the Lord to come
In the form of a nonlinear accumulation
In the synopsis you are described as a vulnerable screenwriter
But you tried to strangle the fiancé you proposed to yesterday
When I couldn’t hear the sink running
Singing so loud in the shower I’ll fly away in the morning
If I die Hallelujah by and by
Starting from the top until my house had flooded
2
Concerning the bartender Jef with one f
It was like the Middle Ages and I was like the angel
Talking to Molly who was trying to work
I’m back I said
Maybe it was only my kink radar speaking
A kink angel with a recitation just the same as the other kind
Looking like a Mylar balloon in the yard
I would calm down if it weren’t for the risk of dislocating my personality
You’ve written beautifully about your manic episode
What wonderful things to believe
There is always reason to stop a sentence
But no structural obligation
I want to smell like Rachael Leigh Cook smelled
In the scene where they go to prom
I want to smell like a Roman centurion
I had this lazy baseless idea I would go back to writing regular poetry
3
My boyfriend’s brother does the voice-over
On a half-hour television show about animal rehabilitators
Called Hope in the Wild
Brittany watched it while she ate tomato pie
I put bronzer on my face saying
Bronzer is the velvet of the face
The disgusting seal who keeps trying to escape
In the third episode quickly became my North Star
The cycles of love and torment coming faster
Small and in my heart
Last night propped up on one arm to delete larger files
To free memory in my phone and saw the cat
A month before the divorce
Follow me along the counter
The thin strip of fake granite by the sink
I sat up crying afraid of the bad dreams that would come
But from the dream that came I woke up laughing
About the way my student wrote his last name on a star
A red paper star like in a car lot
And everyone in your dreams is you
So you never know the you you are
And you’re the only one who does
4
I began to see all art is about organization
Yes, all of it
And the portrait show seems to have no faces
Only the deeply ingrained human need
To make useless things
Everybody makes mistakes
That’s what this shirt is about
I called Anne-Louise, my anxious student
The loudest opera recording played in her house
Her mom said Anne-Louise can’t talk right now
She’s giving birth to animals
There she was in the background on the floor
Her mom in dangling elaborate earrings said
Anne-Louise made me wear these
We are making soup out of Play-Doh
Anne-Louise drank the purple water we rinsed the cabbage with
I play along but know that of all the children
This lifestyle could break Anne-Louise
Who wants to count the circle crackers on each child’s napkin
Who needs to help me pass out the snack
Who can’t sleep at rest time because she is so excited to have a job
But I’m not lucky
My fear is that I will forget to do everything my fear
Is that my love is weak
What will I do when my little students start organizing the world this way
Anne-Louise did once write a poem, though not an alarming one
Only mimicking the organization that will ruin your life
It was about eating a rainbow
Then Mikey lying on the floor said I’m writing a poem about circles
And we saw
a circle has 0 sides
but I can’t
have 0 things
5
I had my second revelation
The thought planted in my head in usable language when I woke from sleep
Was not a novel idea
We are supposed to recreate our lives the way a little child would
Inside the realm of your imagination
And the small realm of your control
Pronoun incongruity is retained because it was a revelation
I do not love the revelation
Which pretends to know the way a child’s mind works
So many adults do that
Even I talk to the children this way sometimes I say
We aren’t yelling today, my love
When that’s clearly what we are doing
The people who made up that revelation
Are the same people who think every kid likes the Beatles
We make our own music here
Oh my word / I love that bird
All the same it was my revelation
If someone else has a revelation I get to keep mine
I have had a revelation
And I will have no other worry
Well I have one
My love being weak
DIED SINGING
At 9 a.m. holding a sponge bloated with soap and water
I burst into tears imagining my life without the constant torment
Of my relationship with alcohol
My arms became weak and more realizations entered
About what I was afraid of
What was beautiful in my village
What gave stories necessity
It was the personality I have
Oh it was myself
John Cassavetes knew something about me
In all those scenes when someone forces someone else to sing
There is a dark interpretation to the sweetest song
The children gathering seaweed
The unreliable narrator you follow to the riverbed
Reading meaning in the garbage
Flowers growing in the garbage
My heart has been totally eclipsed with an unhealthy need
Through the countryside I’ve been dragging this shovel
I will drag until I find the right clay for building a bell
My hero designed the ugliest restaurant I’ve ever laid eyes on
My captain told me I’m only a transmitter for other things
Feed the dogs
Give the demons to the pigs
Wear a simple garment
God will forgive you
That’s not your job
I love these drums
I am so pure of heart I didn’t believe in evil until it befell me
Women gather at the fountain
Small radios hung from their necks
Men laid down to rest on rugs with intricate patterns
Kim said she has learned remarkable things by living
Receiving hostility with no motivation
Transmitting
Withstanding forces of love
The clay became pliable as my hands warmed it
More red than brown
Many hands dedicated their heat to the red bell
In dreams I pursued the bell until my waking life took on the quality of a ringing
The contour of all sounds added pressure
Under which I was compelled to submit
To the sharp rim of the bell
The tongue inside it being swung by a strong angry man
With ginger on his breath
It comes down to a few things
Vessels and bags
Every crude tool
Every day a friend to tell
Raphael’s fresco
The two angels flanking
And his manic episode a few years ago
And you’re told they have the knowledge of the causes of things
And they tell you where to look
And you’re told to have fun with it
You there at the limits
Having your breakdown in the kitchen with the whole day ahead
POEM AFTER MY FIRST REVELATION
I’m it I’m not a part of it
It is a narrative of immaculate control. Marjorie,
by meeting me in my experience of reality imprints
what she could’ve only said in person: Everything is a choice.
She would’ve decided this to be the most predictable moment
for the rest of my life, here at Andrew’s house, choosing
not to wear shoes outside to sit on the bench. I heard, Looks like
somebody doesn’t have shoes on. It was a choice.
Andrew operates as light from a dead star
says if I learned anything from Marjorie Welish it’s everything is a choice
and the work is done in a mechanism we are fools in believing
taught by nature’s incoherence, the disorder of how leaves fall how
sometimes the bank is just closed and same, each other. In ways
the outside might know down into each self, and dimly
inharmonious with not.
I received a revelation, I will have no other worry
I don’t think about it
Sitting in Delaware beyond the revelation, I will have no other worry
I don’t think it
The revelation is that this narratological
structure is included in the perfect disorder.
The point of this narrative, as particular fatal intervention
arches back over the looseness of a friendship, a time spent
in schools, and swallows, joins the river returning to bare feet
the song of Marjorie’s maxim, it is not the narrative, but that
the structure exists, that it is possible
It is not thinking it which I do
That these should not be tercets, but they would not be tercets,
and it never goes back to the way it was, if someone else gets
a revelation I keep mine.
Across the marble countertop someone says he is just getting started.
To say started on the comparative outskirt of life’s first moment
after revelation, nothing could start. In bed I can’t explain this,
I feel like the revelation is going to text me, it feels different.
Life after having the revelation is not receiving
the revelation. How is life after. Slow, the holy
emerging fit for use. Not because of the revelation and not despite it,
it’s not that good. It is just between, it is alongside.
I give a value judgment to prepositions
because they have them.
2008
After the shrimp festival under bug glow
little moving pieces of light in the pale
light halos responding to my motion
threw rotisserie chicken bones into the
woods that night. The quarter hour alone I
read from the Bible on my phone and thought
is this about me? I went listening, let
words between myself and one who is no
longer in or has not yet entered this world
be few as pure strategy. I was so desperate
for information from outside
the event, like the dark outside the windows
but from outside it was the house that was dark.
In comparing myself to others there was a slippage,
from other bodies to somewhere between
myself and works of art, first a documentary
about a very rare type of mirage. I
was nothing like the mirage and nothing
like the way the men talked about it,
a kind of respectful wonder I doubted I had ever felt.
Then there were the poems I was nothing like.
Kyle reached out having read Ecclesiastes
to his father. I remember you loved
there is a time for casting stones away and a time
for gathering stones together.
From the rectangle of blue light I read all is vanity
all is vanity and a striving after wind and I did
love that but at 90 degrees, sweating
in the middle of the night, my nearly euphoric
fear, how much I didn’t know I didn’t know,
that one day I would turn around and see
lined up all the things I had done in order to survive
and think what’s amazing is not what you did,
not that you did it when you were a little child
but that you did all these sad strange things for me.