The Sum of Calendars

I am trying to let go of something

–Tracy K. Smith

 

It feels like cold sore body gristle cracked molar memory of sixteen to nineteen

Misshapen elastic mourning its taut, its firm, its locked box casing

It feels like that time you learned Lucille Ball died while on the way to family Thanksgiving or Grandma’s grave or synagogue or some other place that triggered loneliness

You awake from a dream where all your teeth have been replaced with slurs. You try to sound out help or hungry or not now but all that comes out are four letter words bleeped out on the radio

Remember when your body was new. A gift-wrapped holiday. Upright and without all its springs popped. Yesterday, your veins started scratching their way out of each thigh. Morse code of aging. You want to call them beautiful; all that comes out is malnourished spider legs.

You are trying to let go of something. Of every organ which has grown slightly off-kilter. Of your misshapen brain, congealed due to improper adolescence. Of every time your welcome mat was set on fire.

One day, you will go on a bike ride. Your ears will be unplugged, just waiting to surf over wind and traffic. You will notice that your muscles can take you away but also bring you back home. You will lose your breath but something inside you will locate more. You will cry because every time your body moves, it remembers. It remembers. You may howl because sometimes you feel like a cone snail or a saltwater crocodile but you just can’t seem to commit to danger, so you keep pedaling. With every block, you let go. Back there, fingerprints from that time. Three pounds of hair, a partially lobotomized fingernail, some skin ready to flee, spit, all gone. You are something else; you are everything you were; you are nothing from before; you are all of it; the sum of calendars. You are still here. As you check your imaginary rearview window, you can see its blur miles behind you. You really wanted to let go. You were really hoping it wouldn’t follow. So you keep pedaling; you keep panting; you keep pushing your way out of __________ .

Advertisements

Loaded

dear gun,

every weapon that I’ve ever touched

grows on my body.

I think it’s time you put yourself away now.

 

Learning How to Jump

Every bridge I have ever jumped from has talked back to me.

The story of my body has seven alternate endings and a fold-out atlas stapled to the middle. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, but when I turn to the page I want, it is missing.

The first time I jumped, it was several hours past midnight. Somehow the sun had confused itself again with the stars. The sun fractured into neon confetti and fell from the sky. As I jumped, what appeared to be illuminated starfish stuck to my skin. I survived with two scraped knees and a cracked tooth.

Have you ever spent an afternoon weeping over the dismemberment of Pluto?            I have.

The story of my body can be unwrapped in chapters, but they are disordered, of course.

The second time I jumped, the cables and bolts from the Brooklyn Bridge came undone. I slid down, down into the water and climbed toward the ocean’s floor. I ate lunch with a mermaid with braided buildings in her hair. She begged me to stay forever; her voice sounded like smoke and hummingbirds in love. When I ran out of oxygen and conversation topics, I floated back up dripping a trail of salt and sandwich crumbs.

Thank you to Indolent Books for publishing my poem!

Thank you to Michael Broder and the great Indolent Books for publishing my poem:

nasty like janet or the way one feels after a seven day bath resistance but also like that moment when you figure out the perfect way to describe yourself

 

Below is an excerpt. For the whole poem, click HERE

I’m not sure if I’m nasty because my version of femalia is like Lombard Street, all zig-zagged and out-of-breath.

You want me to stuff my Feminist deep inside my pockets, and fix you supper. You want me shaved and simplified. You want me pink. Knees pressed. Porridgy girl.

On the other side of Woman is me. Buzzed tongue and vague.

A faint of genitals and unfinished and easily bothered and trying trying trying NOT to apologize.

What is the Diameter of your Mouth?

My mouth is having an affair. It has let a non-degreed dentist inside it, stretching it far past its ability and now I have the aftertaste of sore and bothered.

My father always knew when I relapsed because my nose would be cracked and red. Eventually, he stopped asking. Instead, we’d meet at our regular lunch spot, talk around addiction to remind each other there is more to life than pain.

When I go to the dentist, the other students gather to try and understand the trauma of my mouth. The professors ask questions; my teeth become a pop quiz for what happens when one flosses with stolen pill carcasses for too many years.

Once, my father asked me why I kept putting holes in my body (reference chapters eighteen through twenty-three: The Piercing Years). He’d wince at the hoops and studs and glare of jewelry distracting my skin. I never really knew how to answer. To let the screams out? 

My mouth is called child-sized. They need to make an impression of my teeth and no mold is small enough to fit inside me. They stretch and stretch and I wonder if this is what childbirth is like.

Eventually, I stopped taking drugs and cleared my body of jewelry. The addiction will always remain, but all the holes closed up.

I want to tell my dentist that I like the way his facial hair grows and that if I could wake up with a beard, I’d leave it alone. But one day, I woke to find a long, blond hair growing from my chin and it seemed too lonely, so I asked my spouse to take it away. Maybe I have a difficult time committing to the in-between of things.

The last time I consumed “the bad drugs”, I was watching a friend’s dog for a weekend. It was her way of thanking me. The calendar called it Valentine’s Day and I might have preferred chocolate, but it didn’t stop me from consuming.

I tell my father that I have been writing non-traditional love poems. He asks me what that means. I say: the kind of love that runs away from flowers and announces the beauty in mouth sores and cavities. It hurts when I laugh because my mouth is still healing. It hurts when I laugh because I am still learning how.

a dangerous shadow

She called everyone a misfit, wearing the city like a cloak. Fire eyes. Field of poppy lashes. “No one expects anything from us,” she said, “which makes us more dangerous like unidentified alphabets.” I started rummaging for what hides in my shadow, finding a grocery list for ends of times. “Nothing is quiet anymore,” she added. “Our wrists harmonize with the wind.” “Don’t forget our tongues!” someone shouted. “Yes,” she spoke quietly. “Our tongues are the synthesizers to our souls. And we’ve got entire albums hoarded behind our lungs. So, let’s turn up the volume and dance!”

An Assignment

for Adam (and always Rebel),

tell the world 1 thing you think they might never know because it is purely you and not an ounce another person         I’m so fearful of dying and yet I think about it everyday.

 

then tell of 2 reasons which your experiences have directly informed in your being unique to that thesis        That time when I was fifteen but also before that and then again at thirty-five but also the subway tracks and that rootftop no one knew about and the collection of stickers, rocks, postcards and pills, plus that time that time and when I hoarded so many secrets in my body everyone called it weight gain but I knew the truth.

 

then tell 3 fibs as to disguise again. they must directly abort your truth on purpose as a test to the reader       1. When I was eight or eleven, I ran over a small child with my bicycle which was somebody’s cousin in a well-groomed neighborhood in New Jersey where the adults competed with the size of their swimming pools and the children competed with the size of their fists. 2. I never really graduated from high school, but still sat beside my alphabetized best friend at the ceremony and when they didn’t call out my name, no one seemed to notice. I waited many years before trying out college and by then no one seemed to ask for proof of what came before. 3. I love myself.

 

finally, propose 4 items of intrigue. those can be from your process as you go along and find a need to vent about, or a nocturnal fog that leads us (the readers ) astray, or a picked-over analytical debut of what it all means, or even an offering of some sort, an out-of-the-way muse flicker, if you will.       1. In Colorado, I lit my secrets on fire. She stood beside me and I explained to her what that smell was all about; she loved me anyway. 2. I don’t know anything about truth; I’ve been lying for longer than I’ve been standing, but I know that it is so much easier to walk away and I’m interested in challenges right now. 3. I know that I am walking around with a crowd of voices inside me, and I can only speak one of their languages. 4. I know that mouths are like ashtrays, full of the rubble of smoke and ash of what is left behind. 5. I know a dirty word and it rhymes with everything that is difficult to pronounce. Like life. Like this.