#poemses

[calamityjaz]

GENESIS 3:15

Let's say Adam            and Eve never eat the apple. Adam takes two stones            and smashes the snake's head between them,            and the Lord says, This is good. Eve remains naked,            and the Lord says, This, too, is good.

Let's say the snake was a man,            and Adam is a man,            and the Lord is not just a man but a man just the same,            and so Eve only knows herself different when she looks into the water and sees herself, naked.

Centuries later, you are the only woman in a room full of men. They are all your friends,            and so there is no fear today, only laughter, or maybe it's that the fear is too busy laughing to know itself any different. Regardless, they all love you.

You make a joke, you speak of sex            and forget that the sacrifice should stay silent on the altar,            and all your friends laugh except one.

You joke, If you did that, I would—            and he says, If you did that, I would kick you in the stomach,            and you are silent, he says, I would push you down the stairs,            and you are silent, you remember that your friend is not just a man but a man just the same. He keeps joking            and your body remains the joke, the joke is only as good as the people laughing,            and the room of men laughing says, This is good.

You saw this coming, though, didn't you? You've heard him laugh before the casket, heard him call the corpse a bitch like a eulogy, like a christening, like This is what I name you when no one can hear you name yourself.

You know this room of men loves you. Any one of them would take two stones            and smash a snake's head between them for you, but maybe the snake is not a man. Let's say the snake is a woman. Let's say the snake is a bitch, a beast that bites, whose head creates venom instead of swallowing it before a man, in all his laughing fear, reaches for a stone. Are you the laughter or the fear? Are you the snake or the stone? Or are you Eve, naked, watching Adam silence the only other voice that sounds like yours?

There are some men who want to love you, and some men who want to fuck you,     and some who want to bury their knife inside the meat of you,            and all of them call you the same name to your face. Good and evil existed before the apple; the taste only taught us how to name them. In this story, no one eats the apple,            and so no one knows the difference,            and so everyone goes hungry,            and only the Lord can name the uneaten,            and the Lord, in his man's voice, in all his laughing fear, says, This, too, is good.

[calamityjaz]

ISIS AND OSIRIS

isis brings her husband back from the dead by burying him in pieces. this is how we know her to be a goddess — not by his resurrection, but by how she could survive burying him again and again without burying her love with him. she collects his scattered parts, each with its own memory                     (the spine,                      the tongue,                      she holds his hand and imagines the warmth back into it) and then she swallows the memory like a stone.

in her dreams, he is whole again, then she touches him, and he is set alight, he catches fire, not a god but a burning man and screaming, and for all her tears, she has no water. only dirt. and so she does the only thing she knows how to do. she loves him, and she buries him.

[calamityjaz]

I was doing poems on demand at the SubZero Art Festival in San Jose, and someone requested a poem about their ex eating a box of dicks. So, here’s a poem about her ex eating a box of dicks.

DICK IN A BOX

not just a box, no — let the dicks spill over,                             overflow,                      fill the room like a broken dam.

a cornucopia of dicks. an endless river of cock.

let him eat and eat and eat until his stomach swells and bursts,        his ribs crack open,        his skin splits,                               and the dicks spill forth anew                               like newborns,                                                       bloody                               and      (him)    screaming.

watch it with your new love — film it, even, a cautionary tale.

let the next man who tries to starve you never go hungry again.

[calamityjaz]

PREFACE

It began before my brother was even born. My mother's collection, leather-bound and heavy like a felled beast on the book- shelf, books caged in their case, that which survived the fire that took so many others, written in Arabic, a script not even my father knows. Arabian Nights. She tried to find its value and failed — none of the appraisers had ever seen a full set, only a single volume, three, could not calculate the sum of so many parts and so she kept it in her bedroom like other incalculable things. When I was young, I knew death, but only its parts. Hercules the goldfish, Mikey the cat, Massoud my father's best friend who would wink at me as I played while the adults prayed and whose heart attack drew tears from my father, the stone. I knew one day my mother would die and I would be left with what she left behind. I have always been, before all, my mother's daughter, and so I coveted what we both valued most, which was books, has always been books, heir to the word and what survived the fire. And then my brother was born, that blue and screaming thing who I would grow to love even more than my mother or myself or books. He grew, too, both in body and in love, and he, too, loved books. Before all, my mother's son. I don't know when he learned death, only that one day he calculated my mother's and appraised its value as not a single volume, three, but a full set of Arabian Nights. No, I told him, and Yes, he replied. Not a fight, not between us, but we are, after all, my father's children, and as we two stones have grown, it has stayed unresolved. There are fires that burn out, like those that consume books, and mothers who die, and then there are those that do not — they smolder beneath the ground for decades, for generations and generations, under towns whose families are forced to leave everything behind in order to survive. We could split the set in two, divide it into parts, but what are they without their sum? Who would keep the case? Or we could bury them with her, let them keep their value.

[calamityjaz]

MARTYROLOGY (an erasure of the Wikipedia article on Valentine's Day)

Though the memorial is ancient, nothing is known except the feast.

Relics of the saint are claimed to be found throughout the world.

Honoured legends destroyed, perhaps by borrowing tortures

that happened to other saints. Martyrology in order to save

his life. Before his execution, he is reported to have performed

a miracle by healing the blind daughter of his jailer. The jailer and his

(family servants)

repeated the legend, built a church over donated land.

The legend was picked up as fact. The legend was

an additional embellishment. The legend was added

centuries later, and widely repeated. On the evening

before Valentine was to be executed, he would have

written the first "valentine" card himself, addressed

to the daughter of his jailer, who was no longer blind.

[calamityjaz]

SISTERS There have already been so many of you, and I'm sure there will be more still. I know the loudest —— the girl I watched him flood with whiskey until she was dragged by the current into his bedroom; the woman whose "no" he swallowed without tasting; my reflection, still, on the days I forget to forget him. You will be younger than me now, and older than me then. His attention has this strange way of aging you. First you grow, and then you shrink. I rang the bell, but it's not loud enough to warn all of you: I can't find every child lost in the woods before the sun sets. Please, do not hate me for this, for not knowing which direction to run. I am listening for your voice, but it keeps getting caught in my throat.

[calamityjaz]

URSA MINOR

I'm the only one still in the kitchen when the conversation turns to mothers. My friends are at the table, the dinner we made together abandoned on their plates as they talk, but I'm mixing a new batch of cookies and waiting for another to finish baking in the oven. This house is nothing like my parents', its kitchen set apart and isolated, its claustrophobia constantly complained of, less town hall than oubliette. I'm close enough to touch any one of them. I can hear everything they're saying. I'm talking, too, laughing, and then one of them says, "Growing up with a bipolar mom, man." It turns out that this is the connecting thread between all three of them at the table — a bipolar mother. A guillotine embrace. A rabid dog, foaming at the mouth as she devours her own young. Suddenly, their throats become bursting pipes, and it's all any of them can speak of. No one notices that I've stopped talking. One of them says, "You learn to de-escalate situations. The calm voice —" and another interrupts, "Yes! The calm voice!," and as the two of them echo it back and forth, laughing, I realize that everyone at this table has used it on me within the last month. Within the last week. I realize that I need to be handled, like a loaded gun, that the only people who give me what I need know how to do it because they have been given what they didn't deserve. "And you know when you're grown," one of them says, "and suddenly it gets physical, and everyone's freaking out and crying?," and I think, "Yes, I do," I remember the time my mother had to pin my wrists to the banisters to keep me from pushing her down the stairs, how she was screaming for me to stop and I was just screaming. The other one is the oldest of three sisters, talks about having to protect them from the knife drawer they were all born into. I remember that, too. That was the day I swore I hated my mother in a thousand different tongues. My brother was in the car, and when I hung up on her before I could hear her inevitable apology, he asked her what had happened, and all she said was that I have to deal with things neither of them have to, and that she was so proud of me. My mother, whose mother screamed the walls down unless lithium drugged her silent, who escaped the storm only to birth another one. She belongs at this table more than I do, but if she was here, all she would say is that she is still so proud of me. I'm the one who's here, though, and I have nothing to say. Any moment, one of my friends might realize that I am the monster crawled out from under their bed, I am swallowing my words like lithium, I am in the kitchen baking cookies like a mother. I wonder, what other parts of me would I smother to quiet their crying? Finally, they've drained all the pus from their wounds and the conversation moves forward. One of them wants to smoke. Asks for a lighter. I offer to get matches from the car, the first time I speak, because this, I know — burning things, holding fire in the hand. They find a lighter, though. One of my friends — and they are all my friends, but this is my best friend — comes into the kitchen. I realize that he's the only other person who never spoke. "Are you okay?" he asks me. Quietly. Calmly. I smile to show him the chamber is empty of bullets, and he smiles, too, and for the first time I realize that he has my eyes.