God took up a bamboo brush
Dipped it in the space between
his knuckles– drew lilac blood
in drying dew droplets of daffodils.
He said,
“Let me make something so beautiful
that they can almost forget death.”
Licked their foreheads to stick them on like stamps
in a cautious Sakura shrug
or the impending imperfection of
drying rose petals forming bushy mold.
God made the bride’s maids bouquet
of fingernails and bird bones.
My brother wakes up
in a Germany
he made in our attic.
The gun-fire mist of an encampment in Verdun–
The approximations of his leather straps, compasses,
bayonets, and black boots still scuffed from the
frantic somersaults of shovels are displayed
like a museum or a picnic.
His pocket watches hang themselves
like deserters by his digital alarm clock
that wakes him up in musket-fire.
I’m fascinated by a boy who is such a pacifist
to want to imagine himself at war everyday.
His voice trails off when he talks about a battle–
void of glory– like the hesitations of a veteran–
as if he’s seen death.
My brother is a corporal.
My brother is saint.
My brother is rusted bayonets and dead men’s
war medals.
My brother is a sixteen-year-old
scholar who reads the first chapter of
book from our attic.
I wish there was a splotch
the size of skipping stone
above my ear lobe for my phrenologist
take out and put in a mason jar
like blueberry sauce my
mother used to boil in early August.
Always too runny– dripped from toast
on the counter top to become
sticky like scabs for mandibles of the
ants that came when it was
disquietingly damp.
He would likely find me to be abnormal.
He would say I was a jigsaw puzzle
of senseless guilt
and hungry arm veins.
He would say that I think too much
about clouds and windowsill.
He would see that I was a torrent
between hope
the sublime, and the tiny corner
that a banished all sense of
self worth.
I wish he take his scalpel and cut out my OCD —
make the sticky spiral pacing always
under my fingers nails
on the counter
in the jaws of the ant colony
still dormant under
the kitchen sink.
I forget that I drive myself home from places now.
No– I don’t need a taxi driver
or a chauffeur.
I will never be too old to admit I sometimes
pick up my phone to pretend that I could
just call my mom to come get me.
I want the seamless travel, sleepy weaving of locations,
thumb print of static sifting on the radio
in my temples.
Rest my head against the door– breath only through a trickle
of wind.
I want a conversation that meanders back into
the hum of slave-hymns in the rubber wheels and
wincing of seat belts at stoplights.
I want to steer like my mother does.
like a tired swaying crucifix on a rosary.
I wait at the street corner of a strip mall for a blue station wagon
that’s not coming.
The car still has sharpie doodles of ghosts scribble on the
ceiling from when my brother and I were young
enough that if we called it art it could be framed.
I once tore plastic hunks out of the door frame
on one trip to Chingoteague Island
and the wholes are still there.
Car trip boredom makes anarchists of eight-year-olds.
The car that was frequently late to guitar lessons on Wednesdays
that cradles stray french fries from Wendies in its throat
and stroked my hair from the passenger seat
on the way home from orthodontists and therapists
both trying to piece together the remnants of
a fourteen-year-old girl
who rode in the passenger seat.
I have known each wrinkle of the ocean
bled salt water from my exumbrella. I have breathed with the haggard
lungs and arthritic fingers of the coral. The staghorn that opens their ribs like gallows.
I was pulled from the tangled hair of Medusa– dropped into the sea– a silken shower cap. I learned to eat with a hallow tongue and think about how everything that dies sinks to the bottom to die again in the mouths of crustaceans.
They will thrash their legs to resist me– tread water– tread drowning thighs. Men will
call me a bloom. Call me dead skin and milk foam. I will wait. I will see with the
eyes of the water.
It’s water
all that
I formed
ever my
was. her
stinging hands
My bunk bed is a gallery of girls of I have been.
a testament to the person I haven’t quite yet become.
There’s still a wad of gum lodged in one of the shoulders of the bunk bed’s steel frame from when I used to collect gum balls in a bag that I hid beneath my pillow. She didn’t have the ability to lie– only to serve as the sage to her brother.
Billy and her sat on the floor and laid out to the gumballs and she pointed to the blue one. Said that it stopped time. Pointed to the green one. Said it made you invisible. Pointed to the white one. Said it made you breath fire. Billy eat the gummy worms.
One the outside edge of the bunk bed there are rows of stick hearts from unfinished fifth-grade Valentines. Everyone got Valentines and no one knew what they meant.
She had short hair. She was annoyed most times about how her stomach folded over the waist band of her jeans. She didn’t like the lines that bra straps made beneath her shirts. She had short hair. She liked orchids. In blue pen she wrote her crush’s name on her knee cap after she finished his Valentine.
Strings tied to the beams are relics of afternoons during August after sixth grade when the bunk bed became a caravan without a destination– selling dragon eggs and crepes.
She made a fire from a nightlight. Traced shadow puppets on the make-shift walls of blankets that made the bottom bunk into a cloth room. Told Billy to move over. Woke him up when she got the feeling she was all alone. She could only hear her breath and the fan. She was old enough to know that it was silly to make a caravan out of blankets but young enough to let herself pretend for fading instances.
Yesterday they slept on the floor of the gallery and still thought of gumballs and crushes and caravans. Fell asleep like an art critique in the mattress-valley their body had deepened for almost a decade.
Tell me what you want but there is something the same about all pizza places. Marzella’s up the street smells just like Mama’s in Kutztown.
I don’t eat pizza anymore but my tongue and my nose tell me that it still tastes like cardboard boxes and white rooms without furniture in a house that would grow around my brother and I from my father’s primer coats and uncle hammered support beams.
I have seen the walls of our house bloom with bathroom mirrors and beam with blocks of color in the living room. I have seen a forest grow from my closet and an ocean emerge from behind the steel bunk bed in Billy’s room. I’ve seen a kitchen bleed yellow from where I used to sit and eat fruit snacks on my grandfather’s lap. I have a porch put on lipstick.
I always remember the same night and sometimes I wonder if it really happened or if it is the summation of an eight-year-old girl’s desires. My father and I with paint rolls in what would become a jungle in my room. We ate pizza from the box in the center of the floor. That was back when I ate the cheese separate from the pizza– rolling up the blanket of mozzarella to eat like string cheese. I poked the doughy– tomato sauce slick surface of the dismantled pizza.
“Why do you do that?” my father asked.
“It’s squishy,” I said.
“You could just get it without cheese.”
“It’s more fun this way.”
He passed me his crust which I swaddled in marinara.
I know that it’s weird but I remember my shower I took that night. I remember sitting in the tub– pretending I was in a rain forest– scraping tomato sauce and white primer paint from my fingernails.
Most days there are too many places to start a poem. I worry that I’m trying to be profound or transcendent when really all I have to do is be human and stop being a centipede or a raccoon or “a poet”. I am a poet. I think I’m more a poet most days than a ‘Sarah’ or a serpent or a saint.
I am poetry for waking up and thinking that I wanted to sleep in for twenty-two minutes. Exactly twenty-two. I am poetry for the way I always drink two cups of coffee and pause for just a moment to hold the mug under my nose and let the mist lick at my chin. I am poetry for loving waking up and not being able to sleep because it gives me a place to nestle alone with myself like a lover– caress my own hair and tell the girl with bird bones and lioness lips that it will be okay. That sleep always comes back.
I am poetry. I sigh in similes and anaphora my hours away. I love you like a synecdoche– your words for your body for your hands.
I made myself out of onomatopoeia, consonance, and dactlys
and I’m not sorry for meaning nothing and everything.
God likes to hold me like a caterpillar.
I’m amusing.
He lets me crawl on his smudged street soot elbows to the ledges of his shoulders.
I peer out at his necklaces city lights from my hotel window. He reminds me that this is just another terrarium. Another mesh-wire bug box precipice.
He said being lost is something people invented to describe discovery.
He said I couldn’t actually get lost because there is no where to go but all that is him.
I crawl to his neck on the cab cruise to Time Square where nothing surprises me anymore and go back to my hotel where I can count the windows in the adjacent building like I always do.
I can’t help but think of how many stacks of buildings there are and how many times I’ve tried to describe the feeling of looking at them.
Dwarfed.
Helpless.
Eternal.
Lost.
On the eve of his collar bone where I try to pray but it always comes out a poem.
Our father,
who cloaks us in heaven
siren sung be they name
they kingdom thrum
in saxophone hum
on 48th street as it is
in room
3567.
The Rift
Our God who looks like Osiris and a corn flake of sunset siren stretches out each day like the dry skin of a balloon to flick the surface like a turning fork.
We all hum with him in the collective crash of our cymbal snapped eyelids as we wake sprawled out and arid bleeding like a road kill lost in the headlights of yesterday’s moons– still breathing and waiting for cold tree knob ivy to seal over our black lips like weeds or decapitated dandy lions.
We pull over the blankets like the film around the yolk sack trying to be born quietly into the day break– a break– a slap– a bowl rim shell seizure– a dissonance– an erasure in the head of a snare drum calling to attention the hairs in corn stalks on our back and elbow pyramids temples.
We flinch.
We feel the ripples.
Robin Gow 