hold your breath orange & orange & orange & orange-- each sconce: a fist through the train window. hands around the the throat, careful, the inevitable weight of water. the fingers, a rat-belly city. a handful of old hair to run through like reed. we don't hold our breath under the lincoln tunnel. ears turn inside out, snail shells inverting, wool sock-- where will you hide your tongues now? beneath the tracks a little girl sits in the back seat of a blue station wagon, swallowing her teeth. they taste like blue gumballs. instead, we breathe & the air has rusted ivy. i tell you about the old subway system, the one they built in the 1904, long since sealed to the surface. now it rests between stops, an ovary: pockmarked & black graffiti. the old clock telling stories of schedule & blood. i remember the squeal of rails-- the feet on tile. how could they all have known to arrive in the same body? i think of my body like this, like a place to hold your breath between, like orange & orange & orange & orange-- each light flickering behind your head, making halo, making sirius & vega. what does the sun think of these depths? has she relinquished all belief in caverns of flesh? given this over to dark? alone in my bed again i feel a train car hold their breath. i feel the water above thrush maroon & feather--each blood vessel a pigeon. each pigeon a stop to miss. C train, collect vertebrae & jax. we don't reach. i don't point to the old station out the window & it wears a cervix like a crown of thorns. again she returns, too small to open. a pocket knife for jaw-- slice through lip & gum. you put your hand again to the ceiling & down came the blood, it was only a matter of time before a necklace bead was devoured on the way in. i sit in the sealed station. collect the tampons & the tar. the rubble & the ribbed condoms, hear the train run by on thin shore bird legs. we inhaled like the air was a ball of orange.
Uncategorized
08/23
my grey nail polish comes off crouching down i dipped the brush into overcast afternoon, drew paint across each fingernail & held mannequin still at the dining room table while i waited to see you. & the front door laughed at me for being romantic, making a fist or a doorknob i replied let me have today the grey, the seabirds came to fly across my thumb & my index finger & i worried you would notice. the 3rd day we knew each other when our teeth were already made of wine glasses & your hands touched me as one would peel apart the lobes of an orange, on that day the juice ran down the shingles of the house, the woman on the sidewalk took plastic bags for a voice. you left & the seabirds followed you, the plovers & the gulls. i tell you another story about myself & as i do the first edges start to chip, my mother's cracked windshield, the sky leaving pieces of herself in my porch light. i want to walk you so far home that your front door is only a rib cage. a door knob is only a fist. the chickadees that were once all my freckles on the pavement outside scattered with me & i wash the ceramic bowl in the sink, more polish coming off under the hot water, clouds milky, i save them before they go down the drain, i find a jar to keep them in for you. in the court room waiting was when i noticed over two days most of my nails had come off, that's 4(?) 5(?) days tectonic body, oh what of the ache of earth as she has to contain us, oh, what of the segments of the orange & the first. today is the 6th day that i've know you & only 5 of my fingers have nail polish left on them. i harvest, the heaven free of it's own color. cool grey, where blue goes to sleep. i go to sleep in the rind of the orange, pull the trash bag around my body, in hale & speak plastic bags. now the shorebirds will find somewhere else, their foot prints in the driveway, on my forearms & other excuses for self harm. where did you sleep last night? in what color?
9:50pm
is this where the sand goes to send her apologies, where i go to ask if there are bodies that deserve each other? if the hands scoop earth to fill something else, the sun & the moon two vessels pouring the same 12oz of light between each other. who rolls the skulls of children in snow to give them skin? who paints the pupils on in the last seconds before the butterflies are tamed into eyelids? this poem is to tell you that eels are coming out of the kitchen sink, coiling in the yellow plastic cup your drank from. to tell you i like the shower water to come out dry & acidic. cower & cut the cowl from the towel wrack, the shroud of turin. the bleach in the well. ankles for mason-jar lids, i cut myself on your absence, oh, metal pillow, chew, taste bed sheets. aluminum heart beat.
08/22
the view out our hotel window across the parking lot; wendies red flushed cheeks. the gas station put on white 6inch heels. the buildings standing to amble home, the knots in their neck, that's where they hold the stress. i pushed myself from the window last night & fell upwards into lightning's teeth, yoyo string body. this is where my long hair went. this is where you took off your braces to make a bridge across staten island. the glass, an artery, open/shut/open/ shut & the rain is a shower head, steam becoming ghost over skin. where the neon signs made tattoo. looking out the window you hold me & i build a cottage in between the parking lot trees, their waists aching in the asphalt. i plant african violets & tell you a story about my mother. my mother is a parking space. park in my lines, white & parallel & the 6inch heel. when we leave we will take it down, the cottage i mean, we will load each burlap brick into the trunk & when we leave the window will account to herself the presence of our bodies, the humans with the urge to fall without existing as rain. on the drive here you read me two poems aloud & i saw the words become six-legged & moth wing. soft & dissolvable. you held my hand at 75mph, as fast as a window. i fall out again. the other hotel, a hampton, turns around to glare back at us. the cottage a box of matches now. this is a certain kind of home. i will leave an address here with you, if nothing more, postcards piled in a parking space. taking off the 6inch heels & hurling them. the spotlights ducked, a subway wrapper teaches itself to violet fold. i plucked it out for you & i'm pressing it in between the sill & the glass. can we open it? no, it's sealed shut. could have broke it with a 6inch white heel, instead, we lingered, pulled the blankets from the beg & slept again the cool glass, parallel, petrichor prism. red girl oh rain.
08/21
twin-size bed rainfall beneath a pillow & elbow & elbow & elbow. before we go to bed i pull off the covers to look for arrows. let's not hurt ourselves. i have slept the last 5 years in twin-sized beds, one arm beneath the pillow & one arm down by my side. that's just how is. & 3 times sophomore year i shared a bed with a boy who left the window open in january-- we woke up ice sculptures & now here's you. i fall luscious & un-asleep. we wake up in our separate childhood bedrooms where the rain pulls her fingers through our hair & we smooth stone sleep. you have eyes like smooth stones, like pillowcases turned inside out. i want to crawl into you like an attic, like a chandelier made of spoons. how cold do you like the world when you sleep? do you know what i mean when i say that i miss you & i'm holding you right here? i wrote this poem first on the ceiling & now with you sleeping a room away. i slept next to a boy in high school & he had a king size bed that somehow still felt a world too small, his skin turning gritty like wet sand. i didn't wash up on a shore, i broke. each ring you wear makes a planet when you sleep. i name them & forget. to show you i'd have to have waken you up, so i let you sleep. the rain falls beneath the pillow, i kiss your shoulder, your elbow, an arrow sticking out of the box spring. i sleep with a girl in a twin-size bed. are you rain? are you rain? are you rain?
08/20
peach pit I. bold bruised & soft sunburns: the peaches in the ceramic bowl on the dining room table are ready. no one is home, just the faucet dripping ghost. overripe, mouths full of orange sugar. i'm standing over the sink full of dishes, silver diet coke cans glaring beneath the crusted cast iron pan. the juice leaks down as i take the first bite, the orchard up the road where all the trees are named after dead family members & the kitchen floor sprouts wild grass. even the pit is loose, breaking off in shards. i pick them from my lips, the fingernails of long dead trees. inside the pit, a white seed like an ear lobe, a sprig of green, an ankle, an eye brow. II. guilt is a thing of growing, we must not waste food. we must never waste food. the peaches in my fridge are hard & bitter. i hold one by the dim corner light in my kitchen, barefoot. night making insect of the porch. the web worm moth on the door with her orange & white wings folded back. if i hold on long enough the peach will come back to life. i will put the fruit back inside the white drawer & in the morning when i open the fridge there will be a young tree-- my own earlobes falling off to return to the life of seeds. the tree will need to be taken care of as one would a child. picked up, carried on the hip, sat on the sofa in the living room. let me hold you until the peach pit in your chest reawakens-- until the web worm moth goes home. until everything is ripe & mush.
1,000
I’ve done the math.
884 is the number of masses I attended between when I was born & when I was 17. If you think about holy days that’s at least another 34, maybe 51. That totals us at approximately 935 masses give or take.
How many weeks did we skip mass?
I’m remembering the one time when we pulled up fifteen minutes late in mom’s blue station wagon, before it had the crack in the windshield, before we doodled in sharpie on the ceiling, before the panels feel off the doors & before no one sat in the backwards facing trunk-seat anymore. Mom scanned the parking lot & I played on my blue Nintendo DS. She decided we should go home because we’d be walking in so late.
That rest of that hour I wanted to make up for the church we’d missed. I paced the downstairs. I asked her if we were okay, if we were going to be okay.
It is quite possible that I attended 1,000 masses. Some weeks I served twice. Some years we went to more than one Christmas mass. The assumption of Mary. The feast of Saint Blaise.
In my life time Saint Mary has been assumed, again, into heaven only 22 times. Again & again so goes. Again & again she watches her son grown old & crucified over the course of the year. She doesn’t go to church now, how could she? She knows the story, yes?
I’ve avoided this. I’ve avoided writing this because I felt like it didn’t need to be written again.
Can I retrospectively claim my position as an altar boy?
The math, yes, give me the math. If I started starting when I was 11 then I probably served at least 200 times. Dad liked it when I served on Saturdays. When the sun was going down early the church lay, twilight dark when I’d light the candles. I had to light the candles. On Saturdays Mr. Costello, who would die before I graduated high school, would lead the rosary. On days when I wasn’t scheduled that other servers would show up & sister Katherine would make her way over to me, to ask me to serve.
She was a short woman with biscuit hands who died before I graduated high school. At least 50, at least 50 times she had to have asked me to serve. The sister they got to replace her never approached me. She wore dull sweaters instead of the nun’s habit & was somehow sterner.
I don’t know what I’m scared of, why my heart rages in my throat.
My first crush was on another altar boy. We held hands during the Our Father & I focused hard on trying to not have sweaty palms. His hands were dry & boney. His name was Noah or maybe it was Isaac or maybe it WAS Noah, having crawled out of the Old Testament to a small one-priest church outside a farm-town in Pennsylvania.
I was probably the bell acolyte more than half of the times. 70? Yes.
I told you I liked the bell because you got to ring the bell but really, I liked it because I didn’t like having to hold the book for Monsignor, I didn’t like pretending to be an inanimate object while he read from the read book in my hands.
What is the world read upside down?
As everyone gets older they eventually become the cross bearer. The oldest server bears the cross. They have no other role but to walk in front of the other two.
Our church has a cross made by a local artist, green & gold colored & gnarled with thorns.
The cross was clumsy & heavy.
I will not be & was not the only young queer human to bear the cross.
You were the one who told me about this before it was in the news. You said, a few months ago when I called you on the drive home from a hookup that I told you was a friend’s house, that there were accusations of priests & cardinals in our area.
I asked if Monsignor was one of them & you said that they hadn’t released the names. That they were keeping the names.
It reminded me of the construction-paper tree they put up in the gathering space each fall, the one where they’d write the letters of dead parish members on. Most of the time we didn’t know anyone, we’d linger in front of the image a few moments before going into church.
Keeping the names.
We always sat to the left of the altar, 3 rows back.
The 1st row was for the Moores & the 2nd for the Cormack’s & the Pirots scattered themselves in the back: 1, 2, 3, 4.
I had to have been alone with Monsignor in the sacristy 112 times. Green robe, green robe, purple robe, what is the red robe for again?
The 3rd week of advent he wears the pink robe, only once.
There were, of course, visiting priests.
The Cardinal came for confirmation once a year, his hat too holy to be touched by the hands of altar servers.
I wanted to interrogate you, I seethed, I throw all my hate at you as if you were the double church doors.
Sometimes when your mouth opens it bleeds like the jagged stained-glass windows of St. Mary’s. Sometimes you stand & I see you as a chalice. Sometimes you bring out all the shame in me because you still go to church. By now you’ve gone more than me even though you’re my younger brother by 3 years.
18 times, at least 18 times Monsignor spoke about sex in the homily. Masturbation. Homosexuality. Gender-breakers. The theology of the body. The question you slip away from when I plead with you to love me more than god.
I am not selfish for this. I am hurting.
& this year when they go to crucify him in front of me for the 22nd time since I have been alive, I will lay the cross down, use the back end of our father’s hammer & pry the 3 nails from his hands & feet as evidence.
I have heard faggot hurled at least 22 times but none have hurt like the promise that there is sin written into the flesh that binds me.
& when we held hands for the Our Father, I always managed to get us in trouble.
I wanted to ask if you see that sin on me. If it blares through the phone as I call you & you tell me about the reports of abuse from priests & cardinals & bishops who preached at us.
What disturbs me the most is that my impulse is to say, you see, you see now this is what they are. This means they have no authority, they are the perverts, the pedophiles, the shame.
Take my shame oh take my shame.
It doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t come off.
How many hail Marys have I said? How many, then, how many Our Fathers?
Is it a 1,000?
1,000 is the number, the number of child victims of assault by holy people. Holy people have violated bodies. Holy people have violated bodies at least a 1,000 times.
It took me till now. Till now 8 weeks after you told me one the phone. It took me till today on a Sunday. On the 7th day. & the Lord rested. How dare he rest. This is a fist on the door of your mouth, this is what I have left to pray.
“We believe that the real number of children whose records were lost or who were afraid ever to come forward is in the thousands,” the grand jury report says.
Tell me, brother, whose children were we?
For 8 weeks I have told myself that I don’t need to read the articles. That I know. That I already know what it will say. That I don’t have a right to feel trauma having never been one of the 1,000.
& they didn’t just hurt them, they hid it.
What makes a sin capable of being hidden?
Where was it then? Where do the voices live now?
In one of the 4 silver chalices where Jesus poured his vine-blood each week? Under the 2 gold plates?
Washed down back to the soil where all the pieces of god must again be planted?
I remember it was in my dwindling days with god that mom made me go to a mass in Allentown for Catholic teens. I remember little other than fading into myself after the opening precessions, lamb of god oh lamb of god.
Where is the wolf when the Shepard is a pile of stones?
In the Allentown diocese, a priest admitted sexually molesting a boy & pleaded for help, according to documents, but was left in ministry for several more years
In Allentown, a priest who had abused several boys, according to the grand jury, was given a recommendation to work at Disney World.
For these 8 weeks I have said I have no words.
These are my words. Let no one try to make them holy.
Alone in the sacristy together we put on the white robes. Yours was a size 10 on the tag & mine a size 13. My size never changed the 5 years I was the altar boy.
The 1 full length mirror in the sacristy where I watched my body change, grow older, grow short haired & bare skinned.
I have taken the body of Christ into my mouth more than the number of times I’ve been at mass. The numbers buckle in him.
He was there in the parking lot when we didn’t go, when we drove home & I was ashamed. He tasted like pancakes & wore pink. He wore purple in ordinary time, not just advent.
He’s there in the shadows of my body that hold pleasure—in the thumbs that tune my skin. In the collar bone of a lover where I sleep & still find the shame.
This body. This 1,000 body.
I want to go back to the mirror. An altar boy. I want go fishing in the reflection for their voices. Is this where they’ve gone to hide? What size robe? What acolyte? What cross?
These are 3 nails, one for each of us brothers.
I want you to go with me. I want you to tell me that you love the body of your brother more than god.
The headline read “Grave failings”
His hat too holy to be touched by the hands of altar servers.
I want to run my hands all over it, across the rim, the white cloth.
How many weeks did we skip mass?
The victims said this was “not a vendetta against the church” & that abusers have “to be accountable in the church for what they did.”
That is where we are different. I do not feel that there is enough accountability left for this.
Will you skip one more mass, this one?
Count with me, the 3 stoplights home. Our own rosary beads.
Pound the 1 nail into your bedroom wall & I will do the same.
08/19
all of the bus stops i wandered over the bridge today, the one that backwards bends over the train station. i am a person prone to feeling smaller & sometimes i seek out the denouement of my own body. beneath the bridge, the pit orchestra playing oboes & the flute that my mother sang with, still apart in pieces on the dresser in my childhood bedroom. the sun showers here come with the slightest change of the wind. i felt it coming too late, all the way in the center of the bridge with the whole universe on either side. i saw Nut the Egyptian goddess of the night sky, her body pockmarked with hot stars, making an arch over everything. the bridge another one of her spines. i felt the vertebrae at each side walk crack. the train pulled in. the people coming out were all birds-- all birds but me. isn't that how it goes? the rain looking at herself in a full length mirror a new dress to twirl in once. the rain drenching me as i stood still. i picked up my cell phone because i wanted to call someone & ask you, my grandmother, why this keeps happening to me, the rain barreling felicitous & feral, smacking her hair on the pavement & letting each drop of bruise sizzle where it once was too hot. this time when i called you, you didn't recognize my voice. you told me to hang up & bother someone else until i said, yes it's . i see my vocal chords like a bridge & with each blood shot of testosterone the bridge becomes more of a belt to be slapped with. hear me, hear me, is there not something left of us? not a timbre you knock, the cracks of the spine? the birds laughing on the stoop? is this mouth our reed? the oboe making a tunnel-throat for us to stand in. on the other side of the road i think they're building a hospital but i'd prefer not to know. Nut shifts to stretch, to feel the rain on her face. on breaks the men in white hard hats become pigeons & perch on the gum-stuck curb. you tell me that you once knew all the bus stops, all of them across the east coast. i tell you the name of my new city again, rain dripping down my face with the sun already out again, beaming as if she had not just professed raw words over us.
08/18
puzzle pieces
i'm going to dog ear all the beats last night where i wanted to kiss you-- where the roof of the car became aluminum foil & unrolled sheet by sheet. where the sidewalk outside buckled, each crack the back of a knee, my knees following into the violin bows-- my brother played violin for a few years before hanging the instrument on the wall on my uncle's side of our big soft yellow house. did i tell you my parent's have a big soft yellow house & if you put it into the palm of you hand it becomes play dough. this is where my bed room was, i tell you & a red beet drops from the ceiling onto an anthology of something. this is too purple to be blood. this is the mouth between the mangoes-- the hair washed in vinaigrette. the cranberries that all of of our scabs, just sweetened. alone at night in my bed after you left i took a sharpie to the wall & tried to draw the lines of a great puzzle, like one of the ones stacked in the rec room at the nursing home up the street. will this be a lighthouse from your poem? the shovel? the wall sconce flickering between us. i'm pulling the pieces out of the dry wall & they broke on the wooden floor: dust & celestial particles. tell what now about the moon. & the wall will not become a puzzle just because of lines. crouching, i opened every book on my shelf & each became, in that instant, a coffee table between us. a cast iron pot of dragon tea. a beet bleeding, now, only heavier. oh, purple us. a blue ceiling light.
08/17
handfuls of clay at Glen Cove the tide comes up like a strawberry field full of birds, they carry the distant boats on their backs. i turn to take a picture of the wooden stairs that lead down to the beach. i tell you, this is Gatsby's beach even though it could have been any on the north shores of long island. i think it was this one because it's so quiet & aching. the beach collecting dead branches to feel less vacant. sand turning to stone knuckles. naming her joint-bones mars & moon & venus. sea weed against my ankles, the shed green walls of a uterus. i imagine Gatsby here, pants rolled up to his knees, white button down shirt hanging on a tree branch. he walks past me a few feet further. i don't bother ghosts. it's best to let them work. kneeling i watch as he takes handfuls of clay & piles them on one of the great big rocks that peer out of the water like dulled irises. i sit on one & it blinks. i wonder if he was also a child of water, raising his hands up to the waves & telling his mother that he swayed them. a great mansion grew between the trees. it had old thick grey stones & a golden car to drive to the city in the afternoon. when i ambled closer, i touched the walls. they were slick & made of clay as well & Gatsby was still out there, waist deep now trying to build a man from the kaolin. the clay would never hold long enough, always tumbling back into the surf. the boats at a distance belong to no one, they're made of paper & held up by a string. if i'd taken a few more steps i'd have found the houses looking out at the bay are just railroad miniatures. i didn't want to look at their smallness so i stepped back, stayed in my place; water holding me with her spattering tongue. a blue bucket washed up close but i didn't pick it up. i'm a firm believer in leaving things as you find them. across the bay i could see no green lights to mold american dreams out of, i watched as the clay man reached himself into the water again, fingers melting & becoming small listless hunks of grey clay. Gatsby lit a cigarette & the smoke turned blue & then red, bursting with wings & beaks. he didn't notice me that whole time. he didn't notice anyone, just stared forward, intently. i'm not even sure if he came here before, this might be before the book & all, but he was here now. when done, he just put back on his shirt, unrolled his pants & sunk underwater. with handfuls of clay i too tried to make a man, only my man was smaller & wanted nothing at all. gently, i rubbed his face smooth & blank, i pinched his arms into place. i wiped my hands on my shorts, red dried blood stains. he didn't stand though, not all the care in the world could hold him together, first buckling at the knees & then scarring over. the waves broke him like a host. i took a piece in my mouth, chewing out of respect for the not-really dead. the boats shuttered & the tide rose, spitting feathers. water-plumage. i erased my thin avian foot prints from the thin gravel shore.
Robin Gow 