that I am bleeding ovaries, that
I talk to my children in dreams
where I am running through ferns
to discover them inside me someday.
That I had sex, too, and practiced
speaking of this pastoral body.
I find some space of yours
in a splash of blood; your sister
peed on you—my sister’s head hit
the coffee table spinning
and I was soaked. It seemed like
pomegranates exploded into rain
and she was dripping. I laughed
at my father when he cried and sat
with my mother over her cottage cheese
and disorders, watched her slam a feeble
fist into the glass atop the kitchen table
because I wouldn’t use a fork
to eat my sushi. I am a part
of this Freudian demeanor—the long hair
down my spine like man-o-war tendrils
ready to shock or choke any toucher,
the glasses that keep me one wall
from my meeting Baudrillard—
this poetry is a matrix of movers
and your speaker is some
anthropomorphic women
trapped on the page like
the woman in the yellow
hedges of insomnia, crazed
she didn’t have the audacity to jump.
February 29th
It was early. I was standing
on the platform at 72nd street
waiting for the 1 train to arrive. I was
reading about meeting the things
that scare you. The book was
blue with a black trim
and the first page had a pleasurable texture
and was patterned in an interlocking chain
that made it look like wrapping paper
one might use
to wrap a bottle of scotch
for a grandfather
or journal for a
nascent father.
The train flew in
and a man standing
too close to the platform edge let himself
fall in front of it. He twisted
to lie back against
the face of the train for a moment
so he could hold a new perspective
and then tumbled under
as the train lurched into
the stillness of the emergency.
All women on the platform
started screaming. I
started screaming. I started screaming
from some place inside
that doesn’t even discern
the why of it. I felt
a shock of silver
shoot down
through my organs
as if my body set off a flash
and my memory
snapped a picture of the feeling
to store in the place that
registers the viscerals.
I kept looking around hoping
to see someone I knew to share
in the fear of it all
and when nobody registered
I hugged my book against
my breast so tightly that
my fingers were cold
when I released. I heard
the conductor’s voice
over the loud speaker indicate
there were delays on
the 1 train and that
the express train,
whose doors were open
across the platform,
would run local. I walked into
an almost empty car
and a woman with sunglasses on
and green hospital scrubs
hugged me into her arms
and rubbed my back. She
sat me down. She kept
repeating “It’s okay. Calm
down. It’s okay.” The train
was there as
a sitting room. His
body seemed
to collapse
into the moment of its death
as if it knew relief
was coming. There was
no fear in his posture, nor
steadfastness in his spine. He
fell like a limp fish. His coat
was olive and beige and
his blue jeans looked flaccid like water.
I did not look into the woman’s eyes
who consoled me. I did not ask
her name. I said “I need to go up
to the street,” and I walked
towards the stairs. I had been waiting
at the end of the platform
for the back of the train
so had to walk
the length of the suicide
in order to exit. People
were crowded around where
the man was under the train wheels
trying to peer into his life.
All of the people exited the train.
They wore blank expressions
through the doors and did not know
the reason for the abrupt end
to their journey. Nobody was
in control. Some new commuters
were walking onto the platform.
The express train left. I walked
onto the street and called Matt
right away. I was sobbing and hiccupping
among the suits. I told him
I loved him and then
walked the 12 blocks up to work.
Sam Pittman
Growth Memory
A cluster of hungry cells on my chest racks a bill
Fit to pay for a martyr's resurrection. Conjecture
Alone could prove my innocence. Hive mind of the body.
My body is not my body when the hill is still raised
In my skin's memory. I'm poised, aching to pick
At phantom cancer, wanting to have hoed this row myself
But knowing one must unthink such ambition. To myself
I've mailed a letter, no return address. What works is to pick
A font I've never used. Anyway, I was raised
On shirtless pleas in cardboard California, where a body
Is worth what it can sell. But forgetting's all conjecture.
Besides, I'm in the mirror when the envelope arrives. It's a bill.
Another Stupid Question
Did the doctors sedate her or had she drugged herself?
The toaster starts talking in tongues and even I know
to risk a burnt ear to listen. The papers mention battle
but when the woman, a learned dropout, comes to,
she'll see signs meaning bottle. Had she read more
Agatha than Emily she would have said I imagined it,
said I was seeing things. Her monument in the closet,
a box the color of potatoes, or so many crushed insects,
or her memory the sound of a cannon traced in midair.
The lines “said I imagined it, / said I was seeing things” are borrowed from Agatha Christie’s Three Act Tragedy: “What does Mrs. Dacres say?” “Says I imagined it. Says I was ‘seeing things.’”
Imaginary Vigil for My Mother
In the city they go on about marriage.
The three-walled studio, a hollow darkroom
Where the same negative outlives each new bite
Of the shutter. 1: Tawny couch with hemp blankets.
2: Tented blankets of hemp over tawny couch. 3: Hemp
Blanketed, couch tawny. A swingtop full of vodka
Prisming the light before it reaches the urn.
She made sure to say this and that was vulgar.
If she knew I lived in the city and went on
About marriage, went on about marriage, went
On and on about marrying another man, surely,
Surely, this or that bottle would be close to empty.
Daily Burial
I am the urn
itself. As I wane
my cells eat
me up. Deep
belly pocket
hordes my body
in long quiet
vigil. Hunger of
phagocyte
army sucking
poison for good.
What prayer
stops intent
burn or flood
in dark empty
porcelain neck?
Flick of fast
dream ghost
from in my
boiling bellies.
Again the rote
swallow, sweep.
Again, blind
mouth, again.
A Brother’s Love
We’ll see what holds your interest.
I’ll lock the front, you the back,
making sure to leave no hair,
pubic, otherwise, or prints.
Take the pillow, whatever
you want to call it, to rest
the feet, the head: we don’t want
you overworked. Remember
the betting system? For all
we know this never happened.
When everyone leaves, you can
clean the room so it’s ready.
Alex Linden
Family Tree Says:
Our ancestors cannot be touched. They sleep
with lights blaring. Their bodies
become centripetal, moving always toward
their houses of death. The snap
of their flat shoes against wood mimics
each floating moment:
a horse gives birth to twins and vibrates
feverishly. Her body’s cadence sends
my grandfather into a panic: his truck careens
into a ditch. He quits downing brown
liquor in the afternoon.
What I’m trying to say is that
clocks sync predictably.
My mother grew in the country, in
the country’s country, embedded in a field
of corn or a mine. In the aching farm
house the dogs could not quit mouthing
their versions of truth.
Look: either this is true or it isn’t.
One day a man entered my mother’s house, axe
in hand, copper-handed, hands like glass
or a spider unwinding. The German Shepherd sank
into him from behind.
In that moment she wasn’t a dog.
Family Tree says: apparitions become real
once they are spoken of.
This man became my father
or a ghost or both. He became
a transient I knew in Tempe, Arizona. The hot
crackle of that state melted his shoes. He became
a transient I knew in Dallas or Oklahoma and
he spoke with a lilt. He became so transient
that in his disappearance clocks whined
and refused to be wound. Lights moved as animals; blue
ness became obsolete. The ground under
my feet soared upward like a chime and I
only knew concrete things: pendulums click trochaic, loop
always back to simple paths.
The Blues of In-Between
A woman flicks
a pinch of hair between her lips
every 28 seconds.
I am counting the interval
and I can’t stop.
On the bus I am trying to decode family signs
but there is no clicking, no machinery.
Finally, in a deafening moment
something prompts a recollection:
father throws tennis shoes onto the ruddy porch
(thank God sister isn’t too heavy to carry).
I can punch the wall if a person deserves punching.
(Keep the doors locked and we might be fine).
Our tires are slashed in the theatre parking lot.
(Mother says mother but won’t finish the word).
On the bus I anticipate
this hair-eating woman like a downbeat.
I know her like myself
if I were to misplace my teeth.
She grinds those exposed bones like a ritual.
Her daughter is eight, obese, she’s
combed her own hair into two neat pigtails.
She offers her doll to everyone.
This bus is going to:
a. Disneyland
b. The neighborhoods we grew up in (we’re too good for them now).
c. the white and violent blocks we assume
will stress fracture our feet.
In another world, mother brushes her teeth
an hour per day.
She says People are judged by the shape of their mouths,
as a woman you must accept this in order to move up, and out.
Body Murmur
What luck to live
next to a harpist,
to learn through symbiosis
the callus behind the nail
and the trail of the fingers,
brush of nylon or wire.
I was so busy counting the specks
of dust in the atmosphere
which attach to a droplet
and freeze in their descent
that I forgot to call it snow
and lost the concept of any name,
of any drifting through my window.
Yet even after winter’s release
I begged for a moment whose atoms
could not materialize,
and when I knew you, those bending
strings across my ribcage, had gone
I got going on myself,
yet held this hereditary
pathogen, some incalculable integer,
and it pulsed forth a blood-born
murmur, rushed from your chest
toward a stethoscope, through my window,
through my chest.
Trading Sacrifices
1.
As a child I watch her stop traffic.
May brings indelicate heat.
The ground cracks into a puzzle.
We walk hand in hand
through the parking lot
of a grocery store named Smitty’s.
The butcher is in love with my mother,
he is getting a divorce.
I think about this as he meticulously cuts meat.
I see words as shapes, hear names and picture foods.
His name, David, is pepperoni.
I am some type of pasta
and Diana is cantaloupe.
We are playing this game in the parking lot
and David turns to wave goodbye.
Distracted, I do not see the car barrel toward me.
My wrist becomes a rope.
I turn in time to see her shoulder jam
into the side of a stranger’s car.
2.
At twenty-four I watch her fall.
I am driving across the Great Plains.
Last night after I heard she swallowed a bottle of pills
I lapped whiskey from the bottle.
The only time I cry is when I think of the Mormons
who touched oil to my head, a gift from a friend.
I do
think of this, and the car nearly flies
from the road.
I clutch the can in my hand and it is her shoulder.
It cuts my palm.
From this moment forward I can’t remember
much of the drive, except the barrels of hay
rising up from each hill like roughened knuckles,
drumming the beats of our collision.
Retroverted Uterus
When the baby came all
pale and thin flecks
of cotton floated through
the air and I told the girl
all of my names. I asked
my husband to fill his
hands with the drifting
cotton but he said
its texture, like that of
chalk, would render him
weak and queasy.
I recalled, then, the time
I almost fell in love
with someone else:
the next day
I puked until my stomach
bruised, until I could
feel my abdomen growing
taut and southward, pushing
my uterus into its compliant
position—crowding it
up against my spine. When
I explained my situation
to the male gynecologist
he told me I should quit
sit-ups and nausea and focus
more on cardio, and my child.
Even still, sometimes when I hold
my daughter I feel my uterus
nudging along my vertebrae
and for the life of me
I cannot decide if it’s a threat
or a dance.
Creating Distances and Asteroids
She leapt too soon.
In Amsterdam I pretended her death.
I slept not alone but scattered across the hotel.
I left notes: bobby pins, straws,
a man and a pink bra.
I pretended as the plane touched down.
I worried about papers to grade.
She wouldn’t set foot on a plane,
didn’t trust the churning
in the air and under her feet.
Did I admire suicide until my mother
tried it on?
In the weeks after her scattered pills
I imagined her carrying oyster shells,
shucking them bare-handed, loving
a pearl, loving a cut finger—but no,
that was me in New Orleans eating