My Favorites

Because I've borrowed or drawn ideas from Tania Rochelle's blog lately, I figured the best way to end the week was to share a few of my favorites from her book Karaoke Funeral, available for purchase here.


THE REPLACEMENT

For months I've imagined brass
and polish, sharp edges--
a food critic, maybe,
or a stripper-someone
agnostic enough to tolerate
an indifferent lover, reluctant
father, petulant payer of bills;
and all that time, she's just
got to get to class.
Ten years younger, she shakes
her long brown hair
from her clueless face,
asks if I want my husband back.
She tells me she wouldn't compete,
as if it were a gift,
more lead crystal
to leach slow poison
into my daily cocktail.
So fresh I could bite her,
this girl, twenty-one, still
smelling of grass and Kool-Aid,
is asking permission.
But I'm not her mother--
to care if she runs
with a pencil in one hand,
a fork in the other.
Let her keep her prize:
his glass-green eyes,
a gold-plated tongue
that ferrets out soft spots
where promises grow
wild as ivy, as fire
through parchment.
Searching her flat baby-blues
for ripples, the slight wave
that might suggest she stands a chance,
I see only a plain beauty,
hands in her pockets.

THE NEW LOVER

I’m sitting on him in my living room chair,
his lap like a table where my bills pile up,
his lap a glossy table I dance across,
and from it rises his big carpenter's hand,
then down and into my shirt, he’s asking
if I’d have his child. Fat fucking chance,
I’m thinking. "I know all I need to know,"
he soothes as we’re watching PBS on the widespread
use of antidepressants; I’d rather pay a shrink
the hundred-plus dollars to whine about
my father’s floating penis, about that straw
perched on the lip of that tall drink, that olive
trembling in the bottom of a glass, and zombie dreams
starring my dead sister, grave-tight until twilight
when she appears, post-autopsy, offering up
odd pieces of herself. Here’s what Big Guy Lover
doesn’t know: Alcoholics take hostages.
He pulls my face up to his, his eyes deep
as disco, says, "Sweetie, I know you could never
be depressed, you smile too much." I just grin
and shimmy over the hardwood, an unransomed
history aimed at his head.

SADIE

She doesn’t want to go to her father’s,
so she plants herself
like a Lenten rose in my flower bed,
braced against the cold.
Her sturdy body, like a household appliance,
is the only sign
she’s nine years old, and the tears
she’d cry into a lake
he couldn’t walk across
are not a child’s, but like my own,
and she knows I know.

I pretend it’s just a brat’s tantrum,
that she needs me to make this decision for her
because I’m her mother.
The truth is, both of us,
because I am older and tall as an adult,
have played these roles.
She trapped like a veal calf in her childhood,
and me, like a tulip
forced in winter and put out in the yard.

Somewhere in the part of her
that’s plugged into the stars,
she knows what really happened,
the way she knows Eve’s fall wasn’t about any apple,
and the lady with the black eye
didn’t run into a door,
the way she’s always known too much:
that I’m a coward,
childish, selfish, ever drawn
toward heat and my own appointments,
and I want her to go.

RAKING

Anna Bell and Lane, eighty,
make small leaf piles in the heat,
each pile a great joint effort,
like fifty years of marriage,
sharing chores a rusty dance.
In my own yard, the stacks
are big as children, who scatter them,
dodge and limbo the poke
of my rake. We’re lucky,
young and straight-boned.
And I feel sorry for the couple,
bent like parentheses
around their brittle little lawn.
I like feeling sorry for them,
the tenderness of it, but only
for a moment: John glides in
like a paper airplane, takes
the children for the weekend,
and I remember,
they’re the lucky ones—
shriveled Anna Bell, loving
her crooked Lane.

FEEDING THE WORMS
For Greg

You think this is going to be a poem about death,
but it's really about being hungry all the time.
It's about craving sweets, even though I don't eat sugar
because of my past history of killing off
pound-bags of candy corn and wedding cookies
so I could puke them up like childhood shame
before my daily descent into a bottle.
It's about having kids when I knew better--three,
with a man who vanished into his creole spices,
polished silver, jazz ringing the glassware,
and the slick smiles of young women ready to serve.
It's about a chafing cat-lick of a marriage
that eventually rubbed me raw, and the divorce,
a bad disease that started as a rash,
and later, a man who kisses me like I'm clean,
like there is nowhere else he wants to go.
It's about telling this man he needs to take Vermox
because at least one of my kids has pinworms,
and how, these days, I hang my head in the toilet
searching shit for signs of parasites
as if they were the threads of my life unraveling
and I could stitch them back together again.
The whole family has to be treated, and I can't
figure out a way to tell him this
without implying he's part of the family.
And that might scare him away, the very thought
of being part of a family with worms,
with an eight-year-old who plays Boxcar Children
barefoot in the dirt, baking cakes
of grass and sticks, who pretends her father's dead,
that she could bear to lose her mother too.
Or part of a woman who's spent so much of her life
in the bathroom, on her knees. See,
this is not a poem about death, not yet,
but a love poem, my first.