Two poems, Thursday
Apr. 15th, 2021 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricI continue to have Gendered-Salutation Crises in public on Twitter dot com. I think I'm getting to a revision of the email signature that I'm happy with, though. I'm NOT happy with how much of my brain has gone into this this week, but I suppose that is the very essence of Havin' A Gender: I don't know why I care, it's not logical, but I care, I don't like it, I want it to stop, and if I can't make it stop I want to at least make it not MY fault.
Instinction
Shey Marque
I was two days old when my mother left me in a pram outside Stammers & went home. She said she felt oddly lighter though it took a while to realise what was missing. Nobody noticed me. I might have been a window. For those twenty minutes the separation slipped by me. Mum was on her knees scrubbing floors in a convent by age seven. Her mother had been left in an orphanage & so it goes. Back to coda. You left a daughter with nuns & sailed away on your violin. So many women with habits that would never be broken. Minnie was the one who put my grandmother in an orphanage, ran around town with a gangster. He caught her fear by the hair, shot it through the temple. How carelessly/joyously she was losing her religion. I grew up with an irrational fear of nuns the way my dog always ran when I so much as reached for a violin. He saw right through me that morning as he watched me pack & leave my first husband. I know how I’m marked, how I can vanish.
Love Poem to the Son My Father Wished For
Jayme Ringleb
If I pause some nights when the sky seems
particularly simple, the air barely carrying
wafts of the neighbor’s constant bonfires,
the stars rubbed clean of their dull texture, if I
pause to name the stars, as if by naming them
I could love them more, I feel closer to you—
even if it’s too easy to love the stars, the way
telling me what you’ve done to roughen your hands
would be easy, or how you taught your daughters
to drag after you a workshop trolley
in the garage, naming all the pretty car parts—
caliper, strut dust, chassis. I don’t know
what there is between a woman and a man,
but you know how to make the body submissive
and brave: when your father’s God asks you
to heat something small and metal—a ball bearing, maybe
a fishhook or drywall nail—over a fire,
to keep it in the fire until it glows, and to then
swallow it, you do. I love your mouth for this,
its coarsenesses, scabbed edges, numb
little scars—your father’s God has demanded
so much of you, and now the burn-pocked tongue
tastes nothing, would taste nothing
even if the mouth bent down to kiss me, if only
to feel for a moment whether kisses could injure
better than gods. I have opened my mouth
to God, but only men enter. I imagine them
in their homes, milling, busying themselves
with cookware, working to assemble new,
oily-grated grills, standing worthlessly
in the drive, as I imagine you do some nights,
having of course bedded a wife, having set out
a glass of water and left a robe she loves
folded over the wardrobe door, finally
slipping out, in our grandfather’s mackinaw coat,
for a secret smoke, thinking sometimes of me
when you take in the simple sky
whose stars you name as if they were children.
Instinction
Shey Marque
I was two days old when my mother left me in a pram outside Stammers & went home. She said she felt oddly lighter though it took a while to realise what was missing. Nobody noticed me. I might have been a window. For those twenty minutes the separation slipped by me. Mum was on her knees scrubbing floors in a convent by age seven. Her mother had been left in an orphanage & so it goes. Back to coda. You left a daughter with nuns & sailed away on your violin. So many women with habits that would never be broken. Minnie was the one who put my grandmother in an orphanage, ran around town with a gangster. He caught her fear by the hair, shot it through the temple. How carelessly/joyously she was losing her religion. I grew up with an irrational fear of nuns the way my dog always ran when I so much as reached for a violin. He saw right through me that morning as he watched me pack & leave my first husband. I know how I’m marked, how I can vanish.
Love Poem to the Son My Father Wished For
Jayme Ringleb
If I pause some nights when the sky seems
particularly simple, the air barely carrying
wafts of the neighbor’s constant bonfires,
the stars rubbed clean of their dull texture, if I
pause to name the stars, as if by naming them
I could love them more, I feel closer to you—
even if it’s too easy to love the stars, the way
telling me what you’ve done to roughen your hands
would be easy, or how you taught your daughters
to drag after you a workshop trolley
in the garage, naming all the pretty car parts—
caliper, strut dust, chassis. I don’t know
what there is between a woman and a man,
but you know how to make the body submissive
and brave: when your father’s God asks you
to heat something small and metal—a ball bearing, maybe
a fishhook or drywall nail—over a fire,
to keep it in the fire until it glows, and to then
swallow it, you do. I love your mouth for this,
its coarsenesses, scabbed edges, numb
little scars—your father’s God has demanded
so much of you, and now the burn-pocked tongue
tastes nothing, would taste nothing
even if the mouth bent down to kiss me, if only
to feel for a moment whether kisses could injure
better than gods. I have opened my mouth
to God, but only men enter. I imagine them
in their homes, milling, busying themselves
with cookware, working to assemble new,
oily-grated grills, standing worthlessly
in the drive, as I imagine you do some nights,
having of course bedded a wife, having set out
a glass of water and left a robe she loves
folded over the wardrobe door, finally
slipping out, in our grandfather’s mackinaw coat,
for a secret smoke, thinking sometimes of me
when you take in the simple sky
whose stars you name as if they were children.