Secrets of the Young and Successful

And now you know their secrets,
a voyeur
at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting
every visit gathering your “one day” chip
as you and the others sit in folding chairs
around a circle
in the basement of a Methodist church
and list the banalities of your days
that cause you to fall off the wagon.

Some guy’s mother is sick.
A woman’s husband doesn’t sleep at home.
One man never feels good enough
for his wife or daughter or father or self.

You think about
how you’re someone’s mother,
and wonder how cold a bed has to be
before no one wants to sleep in it.

And you all know that ninety minutes
doesn’t change the fact
that some woman’s cat is dead, but
you can agree that at least
she’s not black out drunk
twice a month.

Every other Monday
from seven to eight-thirty at night
stories take the place
of liquor.

But unlike the soon-to-be orphan,
the cucquean, the disappointment,
the cat lady,
you’ve nothing to numb -
your liver is pristine.

Instead, you go to collect
their stories and your chip
every other Monday
just to imagine
what your life would be like
if everything always seemed to go your
way.

Thymus, When They Come for Me

When the come for me,
it is not by accident
nor emergency. They come,
with the same precision
they use when cutting diamonds
shoring imperfections
under microscope and steady hand.

When they come for me,
no dust remains to compress
into melee or loose gems;
chips of my lobulated tissue
will not fit neatly into prongs
or a gold metal mounting.

When they come for me
the lymphocytes,
once bursting from my tender seams,
find themselves freed
on scalpel impact, impartial in her scoring,
only careful not to nick the organ
thunderous in its beating, unphased
by my departure.


When they come for me,
I am necrotic and withered,
my poisons exhausted,
tissue cavity hollowed. They wait for,
defeated, my quiet surrender
under the spotlight
and hiss of machine.

Beast

“If I wanted to split you open, this
is where I’d land the ax,” he says,
tracing an invisible line
lengthwise down my skull
starting at the widow’s peak.

“It’s the perfect place to
cleave you in two.”

Like an almond, I think.

Noting the symbolism,
the mechanics.

What he doesn’t know
is that there is no nutmeat
to harvest. My innards
swept clean
like a doe
hanging from a tractor in winter,
ribs cracked open,
organs fed to the dogs
gravity pulling blood
from cold veins
into the hunter’s
wheel barrow.

Still, I let him imagine
the sound of bone
cracking, seductive
and sharp, like a hip
or the crook of an elbow
all the while wondering
what it’d be like
to satisfy the hunger
of the beast
tracing an invisible line
down my skull
starting
at the widow’s peak.

Swamps

Seventeen
the night I parked my hand-me-down
Chevy on the gravel road
miles from the closed signs
decorating the windows
of the shops in town

stripped naked in the headlights
and ran
until the rocks and frozen corn stalks
bloodied my feet.

A baptism of
gray breath and snow
on the plains that made me
a woman.

Twenty-
three years a woman
when the mountains made me a poet.

Bummed cigarettes
and narratives
from boys with long hair
and girls with big muscles

blunt bangs and a coolness
dissolving with the youth
’round the corners
of my eyes.

Just shy of thirty,
those poems
-feasting, rotting
on the river bottom-

unravel downstream,
arrive seconds, lifetimes
before the universe explodes
as a slow trickle
a Gulf-like rupture

in the swamp that makes me
a mother.

The Kingdom Stays in Heat

Oxytocin cannot
stop
the thirst of saber- toothed tigers
or keep millennia of ice at bay.

Wild animals and our ancestors alike
knew very little about
keeping their young alive.

The milk still lets down.

Antelope run the minute they’re born.
they have no choice, as tigers
learn soon after.

Our heads too large to hold,
there is no running from influenza
or plague-infested fleas.

The endorphins still collapse.

There is a reason wombs overflowed
the kingdom stayed in heat,
the tribes grew.

The promise of outliving our children
is three generations old
at best.

The belly still softens.

So we keep a few drops of bathwater
and the fingernail clippings
as insurance we won’t forget.

If we ever come to know
the heartache familiar
to the women who came before.

The fear still consumes.

Brakes

She tells anyone she knows
about the elevator special she once saw on PBS.

About how, if everyone selected their floors
before they got on, elevators could be thirty-three percent more efficient.

She shows them first hand, how the door close button
is a ruse to make riders feel more in control.

She abstains from sharing how the elevator structure
of the World Trade Centers contributed to hundreds of deaths.

The weight of the cables too much for one elevator.
Two, maybe three, stacked atop each other.
A lobby at the base of each, with the
panicked overflow of stairways, wall to wall.

Bone and blood into dust on impact.
Neither steel nor limb immune from the crippling.

No one wants to ponder their potential fates as one of the
twenty-seven elevator related deaths annually.

Especially as the doors are closing.

When they ask why she knows this amalgam of facts,
she mentions her fear of plummeting to death, and laughs.

Doubling back with some remark about insomnia and channel surfing.
All the while, she thinks of the difference between Otis Tufts and Elisha Otis.
About engines and brakes.
How, like her, one of them had something to lose.

They Don’t Keep

On the day you were born, we bought fruit

checked your breath
and measured time in the ripening,
the bruising.

The plums grew sour before
your eyes ever opened. The bananas softened.

You came to sleep on our chests and the apples went forgotten.

They don’t keep.
No, they don’t keep.

We bathed lengthy, foreboding baths
with water, lukewarm
and thighs,
barely pink
as the fruit soured in the cupboard.

The fermentation happened quietly.
As secret and surprising as the prayers,
on the day that you were born.

Your cry, my god, the wine.
No, they don’t keep.