My Favorite Apocalypse: Poems

by Catie Rosemurgy

Overview

A lively, fresh, and outspoken debut, My Favorite Apocalypse reveals the poetical influence of W.B. Yeats as well as that of Mick Jagger. "Everything in my life led up / to my inappropriate laughter," Rosemurgy writes. With a deep sense of irony and sharp-edged wit, she shows readers why the cruelties of relationships, inevitable bad luck, and soul-searching rock-n-roll deserve both cynicism and reverence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973230
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/01/2001
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.86(w) x 9.36(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Catie Rosemurgy's poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 1997, Ploughshares, Verse, and Poetry Northwest. She teaches at Northwest Missouri State University and co-edits the Laurel Review.

Read an Excerpt

My Favorite Apocalypse

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By Catie Rosemurgy

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2001 Catie Rosemurgy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-323-X

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Chapter One

TWELVE AND LISTENING TO THE STONES Yeah, you got satin shoes. Yeah, you got plastic boots. - The Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" If I had a best friend, I might not tell her that once you find your insides and can tighten them, you can bring the ground up to your face, bring the earth you're standing on up through your body, until you can breathe the grass as it comes through the dirt. I might not tell her I have muscles no one can see. Not only can I keep rhythm and bring it inside me one beat at a time, I can also clench right in front of the paperboy's face until I feel a fist loosening its grip on the largeness inside me. The most he can see about me, even if he looks impossibly close, are the barely colored wisps of hair against my forehead. They might tremble. I tighten while I wait for the school bus. I've worn the snow into ice. How quiet I can be. I close my eyes and change the size of things. My house disappears below me. The dark moves inside me like hands. GRACE LIES FROZEN IN THE FRONT YARD She's stunned, made of colors, and afraid to move anything but her eyes. She has landed in the snow like a tropical bird. She was going somewhere, a camellia bush beside a lagoon, a branch so new she would seem to hover in the air. But someone threw a switch. The humidity shrank into ice, and she dropped, frozen, mid-flight. Exactly the way she'd planned it : her coat bright and broken, her face a serious mistake in a field of snow, his name caught inside the cube forming in her throat. Better her than him. When the branches stopped their kind, slow scratching of the sky, she could tell that somebody, sooner or later, was going to freeze. She'd lose him either to someone else's latest kiss or to his own stillness. Lying next to him would lead to waking up, and waking up would lead to finding a lump in the bed. Either dead or disinterested. She hasn't decided yet if it's good or bad that nothing lasts forever. BILLY RECALLS IT DIFFERENTLY The rattle of my tin shed where I kept my crocus bulbs was like the rattle of my teeth as I slid into bed. Packed blooms. Sweet fists. I liked to be able to look at the delicate things I would never say. My house rose up through pine needles and dust. My house reared up in its white paint and cobwebs. I shivered as I slipped from its belly into the snow at quarter to seven every morning. I blinked to strut my stuff. Every morning there was a second of darkness. Every morning it calmed me down. Every morning cold wind for blood. Every morning was not like this one. A girl-shaped leaf had fallen onto my bed. WHY GOD INVENTED THE COLD To give the people a break from repositioning their lawn chairs. To give us a glimpse of life without bugs. Without weeping welts, the odd fever, and yellow smears on our shoes. To confuse the boys. To force them to ask, "Why do teenage girls smoke outside in January until their nipples get stiff? Why do they stand around with their coats undone and life smacked onto their cheeks? Am I that promising?" To caution the men that the boys will turn into against following their semi-aroused girlfriends into May lake water. Seasonal Affective Disorder. To break up lonely highways into manageable chunks. To make it clear just how stupid it is to climb the highest mountain. To encourage sweet futilities like cuddling and mittens. The powerful sleep lobby. To give drunks a softer, deeper alternative to liver failure. Blue lips and frosted eyelashes. Ski pants, for Christ's sake. Dark roads, tight sweaters, no boots, and stalled cars. Wanna ride, need a lift? Country love or homespun complex legal issues. His word pressed firmly against her word. Zero degrees and fourteen snowmobilers missing. Natural selection. Two feet of fodder for made-for-TV movies and more expected. No fiber, calories, vitamins, hallucinogenic properties, or nicotine without the tar. Just pain in your membranes, unexpected falls, sprained ankles, and hyperextended thumbs. To see if you can catch yourself. To put you down. You thought you were mean and hard to figure out until you found out about windchill. To give us a way to understand people who won't give us sex, meter maids, Siamese cats, what it's like to kiss your best friend's lover. To distinguish the sweat of euphoria from the sweat of shock. To up the ante. Because he could. Because he's lonely and it leaked out of him. Because he wants attention and a fluffy blanket that's big enough to cover his toes and reach his chin. To create melting. To give us another hint that the body is dead. To add ice. To let him come as close as he can to holding some of the glittering water he made. To let us skate where we couldn't two weeks ago. To let us glide on top of darkness. To show us what it means to break through. WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY Wouldn't it be a good idea if we got married? I take thee salty, sweet, And tart to be my lawful wedded flavors. I take thee hornet, squirrel, and sandpiper to be my skittish, hungry brides in sickness and in health. Our life together will come and go like daisies, and when winter comes we'll have our babies: ice, pine, and moon if we survive the stiff, blue morning sickness. So I take thee chill and cramp that sweeten my stringy muscles. I'll pay the piper for the song of fever, the chef for each flavor of my slow burn. I take thee sweat that flavors my kisses and the ones who kiss me. How come twining stars in my veil is only a pipe dream? I've taken them for richer and for poorer, and if nothing else they often lie beside me, sweetly dying of time, which is my favorite sickness. I agree with the little girls who are lovesick: the hungry never get to taste the best flavors. Good thing lying in bed alone leaves the sweetest sting of honey on the tongue. When real life comes, bringing midnight, white nightgowns, and grown-up skin, if it can, I hope it wakes us. We're unsmoked pipes

until then. We're everything else too. I pipe the endlessness into the ocean. I take its seasickness to have, hold, and die from. Especially if while I drown it savors me like a new flavor. In the end, which is my favorite time, it all comes down to need, which is what I can give you, my sweet husband, wife, betrayer, mistress. My sweet coo, fall, wing. My silk, velvet, stain piping. I take thee full, weak, perfumed, wilting. Please come home, which is like a box. Love is a sickness I hate to cure. Time, scent, dirt, flavor, we'd make promises if only we could.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from My Favorite Apocalypse by Catie Rosemurgy Copyright © 2001 by Catie Rosemurgy. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Festoon	3
	Twelve and Listening to the Stones	5
	Cranberry Juice	6
	Grace Lies on the Sofa and Waits for Her Boyfriend to Get Home from Work	8
	Billy Sees Stars	10
	The Angel and the River Water	11
	Iceblink	14
	God, as Quoted by Two Adulterers	15
	Grace Lies Frozen in the Front Yard	16
	Billy Calls Grace Darling	17
	The Feeling of Accomplishment I Get When He Is Pretty	18
	Little Bay de Noc Softball Field	20
	The Mistress Notes	22
	What I Wanted to Say Instead of Yes When a Guy at a Bar Asked Me If I Grew Up near Lake Michigan	24
	Grace Lies in Her Tent and Talks to the Psychiatric Experts She Saw on TV	25
	Billy Recalls It Differently	28
	To My Lover on Returning to His Wife and Then Finding Another Lover	29
	My Mom's Cobalt-Blue Glass Collection	30
	Lying in Her Sleeping Bag, Grace Makes Her Tent Her Home	35
	If Billy Were Invisible	37
	Lake Superior Confesses to the Shore of Keeweenaw Bay	38
	Steel Blue	40
	Jesus, the Perfect Lover	42
	Grace Lies Down to Write Her Boyfriend a Letter	44
	Billy Considers Leaving the World Alone	46
	The Office Party	47
	Creature	49
	Why God Invented the Cold	50
	Grace Lies on the Ice	52
	Billy Talks of Daybreak	54
	The E-String Strut (or Heaven According to the E String on Steve Earle's Acoustic Guitar)	55
	Ashtray Elvis	57
	Hard Put	58
	1, 2, 3 ... I'm Perfect Starting Now	59
	Grace Lies Down on the Hood of Her Car	62
	Billy Pretends to Understand Grace	64
	Mostly Mick Jagger	65
	Doll Up	67
	Grace Lies in the Backseat While Her Boyfriend Drives the Backroads of Southwestern Florida	69
	Billy's Vision of Grace	71
	Pretty	72
	Fifteen Minutes after the Movie	74
	Blow Your House Down	76
	Grace Lies on the Public Beach	78
	Billy Watches from the Garden	80
	Invitation for a Dead Friend	81
	Glimmer	83
	When She Gets Home from the Grocery Store and Notices the Fireflies, Grace Lies Down next to the Driveway	85
	If Billy Were Invisible, Part II	87
	Singing the Accident	88
	An Angel Finally Admits What She Knows to Lou Binkler of Bethany, Missouri	91
	The Return to Skin	93
	We Are Gathered Here Today	95
	Notes	99

Editorial Reviews

Rosemurgy is best when she speaks outright. 'Show don't tell,' goes the old mandate, but Rosemurgy understands the power of telling directly . . . A clear, authentic, compelling voice.” —Billy Collins

“Anyone fearful of prodigious imagination should get out of the way of My Favorite Apocalypse fast . . . [Rosemurgy] is bluesy, Plathy, magnificently unabashed, yet possessed of real gifts for rhapsody and tenderness.” —Rodney Jones

“My Favorite Apocalypse is full of wonders. It has a confiding, urgent, lit-up tone.” —Amy Gerstler

“My Favorite Apocalypse is seductive: I couldn't stop reading such luscious, insouciant work.” —Alice Fulton

From the Publisher