Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

Practical Considerations of Dancing, for Open Link Night

The mystery isn’t in the feet,
left and right or left and left,
but in hand on small of back,
silent pressure, a presence
of body through clothes.

In fourth grade, we danced
in gym class, making squares
on green tile floor, lunch tables
pushed aside; this was our barn,
the record player called our tunes,
our movements. We were the interior
of a clock; allemande left, honor
your partner. We knew nothing
about honor then, or we were
learning it. We were too young
to hurt each other much.

If you wonder how you’re dancing,
you’re dancing badly. But I could
no more abandon this watchfulness
than I could unravel my skin,
walk around like that for a while.

In eighth grade, a boy, deer-nervous
and spiky-haired, asked me to dance.
I said no because I knew he was just
making fun of me. I fled to the restroom,
looked in the mirror to make sure I was
unacceptable, all wrong, and thus, right
to decline, right that there was no way
anyone could see me on the edge
of a gyrating circle and want
to pull me closer.

Sometimes you’re wrong
when you’re dancing
or not dancing.

Sometimes you only learn
the mistake later on, once
the streamers have been
taken down, all the punch
drunk, the boy gone home
or somewhere like home.

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Broken In

When I was crazy,
I did crazy things;
I’m not going to say
I wasn’t and didn’t.

I was offended by
all those small fissures,
synapses, gaps between
tectonic plates, moving.

How dare they move?
With enough baling wire,
I could fix every place
that was cracked,

hold it all together,
keep it still so that
my children could
never fall off

the face of the earth.
What’s crazy is that
I’ve given it up now,
the whole notion of

fixing; my children
hold on however
they can. Every day,
they watch me open

the same broken gift,
the only one I ever
get, the only one
any of us need.

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Broken In, for Open Link Night

Aside

My Feather Road, for Open Link Night

My Feather Road

I mainline birds
until I can’t stop
fluttering; there is

a nonstop stream
under every word
I say. I am learning

to drive this car
made of wings,
lurching down

a street of strewn
feathers. Your car
made of stars can’t

drive my feather road.
Greater love affairs
than ours have ended

over smaller things
than this: certain
blocked exits, gaps

of little consequence
that somehow come
to mean everything.

 

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Desi Arnaz Western Hills Hotel, Palm Springs, for Open Link Night

Desi Arnaz Western Hills Hotel, Palm Springs 

Phyllis poses on the diving board, arms out
in front of her, stiff as if she’s frozen there,
a zombie in a black bathing suit. Awful.

I should have been the one; I could have
given it a real sense of motion. My parents keep
my medals in the cedar chest they’re saving

for if I ever get married someday. But I
filled out the yellow bathing suit better;
the good thing about that is, I am in

the foreground. I’ll be the one you notice first,
on my chaise by the pool, as Phyllis and I,
Donna, and the rest—I feel sorry for some,

the girls whose heads will be dots in my
background—spin on a rack in the lobby,
by the cigarettes, next year and the next.

 

 

For Open Link Night, at dVerse Poets. Also, take a minute to see if you can figure out, generally, what I’m talking about … and then click here and see how close you think I got. (And many thanks to Kitchen Retro for giving me something to write about today.)

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Remora (Latin for Delay), for Open Link Night

Remora (Latin for Delay)

My shark mother
flies me through the reeds,
up and out to where
the water is deeper
under me, under her.

I have found
a good place
to attach.

I don’t worry much.

We have errands today.
She is hunting, will pass me
the pieces she doesn’t need.
It will be some kind of fish;
I don’t need to know
how to name it.

Everything used to be someone,
and anyway, names tell lies.

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Instructions, for Open Link Night

Instructions

Welcome to the step-down unit.
We hope your stay is very pleasant
and that the curtains don’t turn you
into lace. That happens sometimes.
The left curtain in the dayroom is
named Sheila. Watch out for Sheila—
she bites when you least expect it.
Such as when you are secretly
eating the Lorna Doones that
were given to Paul on visiting day.
There are Lorna Doones at the
nurses’ desk, too, but they
never taste as good.

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Driveway, for Open Link Night

Driveway

I don’t think the whole class needed to know about
wet celery in the drain. If you never eat a plum,
how will you know what it tastes like? Sometimes
there is a buzz in my brain like a, like a what do
you call the thing that lashes out and cuts down
weeds with its vicious-fast snake of a tongue?
It’s like that, only nothing stays down for
long; the driveway of my mind won’t stay
edged, devolves into broken pavement and
ant-blasted dirty sand, all the scrubby stems,
meaningless leaves. Nobody sees them.
Everybody sees them. If you forget I was
talking about celery, don’t forget I was
talking about celery. And what
should we do with
the plum?

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Post Office, for Open Link Night

Post Office

If only I could live
among the specks
of these tiles,
whirling in vinyl
constellations
of chips.

If only this rug were
a good place to rest,
its textured surface
prickling my cheek.

If only this blue neon
accent lighting were
the closest thing
I had to daylight.
I could atrophy,
watch my skin
lose its color.

If only a P.O. box
offered a space
to hold my heart.
Cool, corrugated
metal; I’d keep
the key.

If only I could wear
this webbed ribbon
that marks where
to stand. I would
pull it from its posts,
wrap it around myself
like the belt of Orion.

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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