The body as a site of jealousy,
Of aesthetics,
Of “How do you see me? How can I make you look at me?”
The body inside a white tee shirt and a pair of flattering high waisted pleats.
The body as what holds up soft curly hair, cut like a mullet,
And those beady eyes that bring Geena Davis closer and closer.
The body as a flat chest against soft fabric,
As a thick arm, reaching to hold her.
If I peel off my skin, what is underneath?
Perhaps a flat chest,
Or a destructible and oozing,
Ripping at the seams
Body.
The body as a site of territory,
As a sight of terror
Of grasping, hot and eruptive,
Of owning and not owning.
I try to steal what is left of Jeff Goldblum’s melted body
And bring it to my own.
The body as something to forsake,
to burn,
Or to paint destruction upon.
Jeff Goldblum forged his own destruction, walking into that machine,
For no particular reason but to see what would become of his body.
We all make villains out of ourselves.
A body handcrafted that oozing skin and stuck it to his face,
Trying to create the thing that might make us believe that we don’t exist.
I rewind to the beginning, give in to the abjection.
The body as the boundary that keeps us from erupting –
What if I don’t want it – that piping hot mortality.
The body behind a locked door, bursting.
He will hurt her if she stays,
Simple as that.
Tear me apart, Jeff Goldblum, grab my hand and walk with me into that machine – like a baboon or a heartstruck man – and see what we become, you and I.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “The Body”
Begetting Death
The body as whatever holds the living.
How does the body react to a body?
Jeff was vibrant and dying
Ferociously,
Taking his lover with him,
But Joyce Summers emptied
And solidified, cement into the canvas of Buffy.
It’s so quiet in the Summers’ house.
I held my grandpa’s hand when he was dying –
I’d never felt anything so transparent.
He would sit and stare at the ceiling,
No TV, no birds,
As his body left him behind.
When there is only a body left, there is nothing to do but wait, burden after burden.
Buffy sees her mother’s body, breaks her rib, vomits on the carpet, then opens the back door of her house to hear the bird sounds.
Buffy becomes herself a memory. Buffy leaves her body.
The rest is mechanical.
The body as unfathomable,
The body as the site of negotiation,
Of personhood.
The body as existence.
My dad told me he would never want to live like that.
My grandma sits in my grandpa’s room, just looking at him.
Existence as something that fades –
The body as morbid,
As mortal,
As stupid.
Buffy can’t remember, can’t look the paramedics in the eye –
Joyce’s death is its own kind of body horror.
The body as victim of God.
The body as something that is sucked away by vampires, stabbed by lovers, or stopped – just like that.
My grandpa died, it was as simple as the dead wax of a vinyl.
The body as something you remove from the show in order to personify grief,
The body as something that never exits the narrative but never returns.
The bodies that you play hard and fast with as God,
Hoping that Buffy’s loss will remind you of your own.
The body as a container.
Look at the body – frail, pressing inward, engulfing someone you love –
Feel the body, cold.
You look at their fingers and knees and chests, heaving in and out,
and hope that they have received that one body that will warm itself up.
Dirty Dancing
Performed Becoming
The body, of course, as love,
To display,
To dirty,
To heat up,
To move.
Frances “Baby” Houseman moves to Johnny Castle, hoping to convince him that his body is worth something.
There is always a moment in the rom-com when the two bodies still,
Deadstruck at the feeling of touch.
The body as hungry,
Never enough filled
And never felt enough.
The body as yours –
At least in the dark –
To do what you will with it.
The body as the source of dance,
Dance as the source of embodiment – to become herself, Baby learns to dance.
The body as awkward,
As uncontrolled and confused,
Screaming a little
At what it wants or does not want.
A rare moment of two people,
Alone in a room,
With nothing but their bodies.
The warmth of that summer house, bodies hot and alive.
Love as memory,
The body as location.
Jeff Goldblum only entered the machine because of a girl.
The body as a source of fear,
Because the body knows about loss and once it learns this memory,
It fears the warmth will freeze.
The body of an actor – of fake love for the sake of God.
The body of the screen,
And the body that watches the screen.
Ordering and obeying,
Growing transparent, disappearing into their arms – I am asking you to touch me, Jennifer Grey.
The TV screen heats up,
radiating under skin.
The body as empty,
Watching,
trying to make your body into their own,
Bring their body to you,
Make the body something worth dancing for.
Fallen Angels
Whatever’s Left
What is a body left alone?
Baby holds Johnny,
Johnny responds.
Buffy reaches for her mom,
Baiting for a breath.
Geena loves Jeff,
Even so.
The body as a site of relation,
Of love and distance.
So what is a body left alone?
The girl sits alone in a diner the boy sits alone by her side.
The body as two endpoints
Or two dots.
The body as magnetic,
As forced to be magnetic.
Maybe humanity relies on connection.
Maybe they are flies.
The girl has always been alone,
Doesn’t remember what it feels like to dance with someone or lose someone.
She has become numb to these things – envy and humanity.
You hope that they will fall in love
Or fall off of that motorcycle,
Destroyed and alive.
You hope that their bodies will become made for something.
But they don’t like each other like that and bodies don’t always do what you want.
The bodies board the motorcycle, perhaps they say nothing.
Maybe God only exists within the body –
Getting you from one place to another.
These two bodies aren’t going to explode out of their humanity,
Or move with each other.
The girl and the boy will grow cold.
They will cease to be what they are – girl and boy –
And will become the monster or the freezer box.
Just for a moment, the body is warmed.
For a moment, it’s just a body.
Imagine being two
And not wanting to take
A bite of pudding
the hand the
grown-ups allow
you to use
struggles to bring
the spoon
to your lips
for the sake of recovery
deliciousness
temporarily denied
______________________
time. constraint.
Not many people plan
To wear a cast on their arm
for a month
intentionally
To heal the arm
That isn’t casted
Not many kids
would understand this
They sign a cast: get well soon
But the damage
Here is permanent
A month of
working towards improvement,
never perfection
_______________________
from her sister’s perspective
her life is consumed by
the daily struggles of being disabled
And the fight to overcome them
Sometimes I felt forgotten
Not much older
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t
also play with the new toys
and all the new people
The toys were a tool for healing
and the new people were there to help –
but to me it just seemed like
little sister got all the fun
little sister needs to focus
On rewiring her damaged
neuronal
connections
little sister faces the struggles of being disabled
But sometimes the struggles of being her sister
Are just as real
When disability sucks all the attention
away
________________________________________________
understanding what it’s like
We got on the wrong bus
A long day made even longer by
First year college students not used to
the local public transportation
A disabled girl’s worst nightmare
Every seat was taken
we rode on and on
My shaky balance
warning me to take
a seat marked for people
like me
whatever that means
It’s not often that I really need
disabled seating but
the jostling of the bus on the
bumpy roads
necessitated it
that day at least
A 60-something
Woman sat with a walker
A few seats over
“you don’t understand what it is like”
“you won’t understand until you’re old”
She assumed
I was able-bodied
I was speechless
Looking back
There is regret at what
could have been said, but wasn’t
little did she know
I have understood what it’s like
since I was born
Awareness could have been raised,
but ableism
Shocked me into silence
__________________________________________
electroencephalogram
dozens of electrodes
cover my scalp, forehead,
and chest
a wire rainbow
trails between
rows of braids
The smell of medical-
grade glue
is forever burned in my
brain–
Ten times stronger than
nail polish
________________________________
The sunflowers
A sunflower
Invisible to you
Sensed by me
Bewildering to everyone
I grow sunflowers
They come and go
Like the seasons
Each type unique
Terrifying beautiful
They bloom
at all hours
unrelenting, overpowering, persistent
even when they wilt, they are ever present
the thoughts of when they will bloom again
forever pierce my mind
blinding patches of yellow
fields that go on
for eternity
They consume the garden of my mind
Until it is overgrown
I hate my sunflowers
But I can’t cut them,
blow them away like dandelions,
or put them in a vase and force them to wilt
because they are a part of me
and I wouldn’t be myself without them
a love letter to the canter
Why walk, when you can run? Why run,
when you can fly?
There are some things in this starlit starkilling world
that I’ll never get over. That will never leave
the skittish neural pathways in my head alone.
And you are one, my darling girl, my once-dear love,
one of those crimson stains upon my heart. How dare
you choose that goddamn place to bury me and all
the spare I love yous I guess I will never say. How dare
you read a eulogy for us as if that Starbucks gave a shit.
The point of any gravestone? To remind the world
who lies there. Ours stands granite in my mind,
against which other thoughts collide to forever,
I guess–like putting more weight in my heel,
lengthen my calves, sink down
through the ache,
cause I’ve got to be sore to be good–
to forever remind me of that last farewell,
of those moments right after you left me behind,
when I watched you not look back as you walked away.
In that moment, you taught me my least favorite thing
was to sit and do nothing, not even protest,
and to hear you decide that we’re done.
I got up. Walked away. We’ll ignore that whole part
when I cried in the car far too long.
Let’s instead:
sit a stride, pick a lead, get a bend in the neck,
gentle squeeze with the calves,
and let’s fly.
From the saddle, there’s nothing on earth that can touch
me, but wind on my face and the leather of reins in my hands,
and nothing quite as wild as trust or the powerful heart
that drives these thundering hooves in the three-beat gait
that most call a canter
and that I call flight.
In the saddle, I can spread my arms,
claim wings of my own, and allow the world
to be a river, fast around me, passing me by,
and I can allow the world to not matter.
What matters is this moment: this brief instant of transition, right
as one beat turns to three, a rocking horse, a fluid wave
of forward motion. Walk to canter, that’s the aim, no lapse
for stylized up-down steps of trot. I hold my breath across the bridge,
let out the waiting exhale when I follow with
the withers’ forward tide. A steady upward change
is my main goal most lessons; and in shows, it’s all I ask;
at shows, we all rely on seamless shifts.
I ride in the pre-novice class at shows.
The walk to canter is the dominant test we get:
a smooth transition or halting walk to trot
to canter steps can make or break our round.
Like when Frankie–a horse that I drew at a show–
picked the canter right up, but wrong lead,
his momentum all targeted over his outside front foot.
In the instant, I didn’t pick up on the fault,
and he covered for us without pause, swapping leads
with one stride so I don’t think the judge even saw.
And this is what it means to dance, a moment I
will never get over, spun in a second of trust,
a suspension in air after I ask for a transition
and the response. (4) Not only a response, but a correction that
I did not see would need to happen then.
Each horse I ride, at lessons or at shows,
is a new teammate, exercise in trust, a dance
partner, and most of all a teacher. What I learn?
Sit, press my calves, and keep flying.
Bit off
I could give my teeth away, or paint them
a coat of fresh nail polish. “You shouldn’t
see fish swimming under the padded tan.”
“It’s not about the fish I see, really,
But I feel slithering in what’s vacant.”
Dr. Johnny with the white light asks what
I’m about, with this deep sea diving stunt,
When all he needs to concern himself with
Is the carbamide peroxide syringe
Approaching in slow motion my welcome
mat-tongue gape. Accommodating for what?
His hesitancy maybe? He’s got new
Adverts. Before is comically worse.
“How do you know they’re fish?” Touché, doc,
Touché.
Call Your Obstetrician
Call your obstetrician. These recipes of the childhood home don’t dilate but they fill, she says over her rump roast, the Turkey baster dripping grease from the counter to the tabby’s mouth, Martha Stewart shepards tentatively over the broil. Blond hair in the fish eyes. She says her eyes are fine, that six months is in two shanks of a lamb brought to 450° Fahrenheit, always fair in height. She realized just how short she was in 1981, Mexican sundaes with best friend Patty Laboone, feeling thighs touch together. “Mom you shouldn’t call them that, it’s just a sundae with nuts,” but that’s what they called them, and that’s what she knew then, and she can’t be expected to see now in then. The reading glasses slip off her nose and glide into the skillet. Call your obstetrician. She says she will. She’ll go when the roast is tender. Besides, that rusty mail slot of a man loves wings. She knows she’ll only go down there with what he’ll take. She doesn’t cook birds for a reason.
Blushing
Humiliation is faith forgotten and betrayed.
Faith is everything in a nothing.
Nothing is a woodpecker or a grecian urn or a warhol.
Nothing is humiliation, where we thought we’d find everything and did.
In the beams that peirce us from first opening,
That whole blankness before falling in,
The spider webbing on moorland streams,
The universal pinkening,
Is the dawning betrayal of our fingers
As they learn to bend towards themselves
And grasp.
Voyeur
If a pot simmers into the night, all the contents depart.
You do not put your mouth on that which does not belong to you, son,
And you do not eat what you are not served, if in the middle of the night,
While the shutters tilt themselves, and the crisp refreshing lowlight slides down bedroom walls,
You hear a whine before a break, the floorboards giving way below the stove,
don’t let the taste into your mouth, or the fragrance into your nose,
Both hands, be careful, both hands, while your lids fold
and in that fault, the yearn settles into the ducts.
Your eyes, reflecting smoothly, drip with desire to lick each other off,
To the sockets, and the red hot, to burst at the surface and evaporate.
Saturn Starts with the Eyes
I.
The sky is made of windows and it rains cigarettes,
Proving that the wind and rain,
were just God emptying out his pockets.
Deep inside a fluorescent street light socket,
Let an honest retch tell you of the ash,
About the whole person underneath a fog
that’ll settle within, how different it is
This steel beamed sepulcher
Doused in strychnine and rheum
Discovering with the montagues and capulets
how we lost the blue and were given what they begged for.
II.
The whole person fogging underneath
the sinew mold, walks into a midnight field of desiccated stumps
Ashen rings row by row as grave stones.
The sinew mold lays in front of a buzzy static box
Smacking like a caged baboon until the color comes on
A neon palate cleanser to bespeckle the cementing gray matter
As sidewalk chalk hazed in the rain.
Holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger,
A ring goes out of lips, trying tricks in a time like this.
Hoping for blue in a moonbeam.
III.
Every night taking that child of his,
From his bed sheets and tunic, covered in duckies,
ruminating on the reflection of pale eyes,
A lively blue, a wiggling rippling,
That did not buzz and fizz the same as his.
Saturn didn’t always drool pesticide,
He remembers monarchs and polar bears,
A boy king quite like this one,
But the memory is a distant parking lot
Behind the edifice of business.
IIII.
Goya’s Saturn devours his son head-first.
Rubens starts with the heart.
One centers the eyes of Saturn, the other the eyes of his son.
Neither is really the way of things.
Goya is technical, but Rubens has the spirit.
Saturn started with the eyes.
Known from the ash. From the streetlight.
From the retch, and God, and strychnine and rheum.
Recorded from the graveyard and the broadcast and the tunic.
Saturn knows how to drown.
Life lived thrashing at the surface,
While there is stretching, hopeful blue.
He knows that devouring and drowning
Are the same.
Saturn starts with the eyes.
Hometown Curses and Other Metalloids
I know a thing or two about curses. I have many curses myself, though only one has been formally diagnosed by an expert. Sometimes I try to understand where they come from, or why they’ve come to me. Lately, I’ve been wondering if toxic metals have something to do with it. Or maybe they inhabit a place, and eke farther out of the ground with each bizarre happenstance until they find someone susceptible to affliction.
I grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts, which used to be Salem Village— as in, “Salem Witch Trials” Salem Village. One of the biggest attractions we have is the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, where Rebecca Nurse lived before she was accused of witchcraft and executed by hanging. My friend swears that Rebecca Nurse was her however-many-times-great aunt. They brought us to her real, preserved house in first grade. They showed us old-timey chamber pots, dishware made of lead, and the hearth where the colonial housewife would sweat for nine hours a day cooking mush and stew for her family— before being executed.
They also brought us to the Salem Witch Museum. Imagine sixty children, each around eight years old, packed into this dark cavern of a room. Ten feet above our heads, the walls were set up like giant dioramas, with staged life sized models of real colonial people. Over the course of one thirty-five minute pre-recorded audio track, each model acted out their part in the witch trials under a blazing spotlight. One thing I’ll probably never forget is watching Giles Corey get crushed to death by rocks right there in front of us. He refused to plead guilty or not guilty, instead yelling “more weight!” until his tongue was pressed out of his mouth. You can hear it happen. Many people believe that the mass hysteria of the Witch Trials was brought on by some form of poisoning.
In the 1800s, there was the Danvers State Hospital, more colloquially known as the Danvers Insane Asylum. As you might imagine, this one is also heavily featured in online listicles today. Lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and overcrowding so bad that dead and dying patients were actually left to rot in the building before being thrown into mass unmarked graves. They turned the place into an apartment complex, where my high school girlfriend lived for a while. Over the summer, we’d kind of just wander the property, and gaze emptily at this big weedy field next to the building. I didn’t want to say anything weird, but I was definitely thinking about dead bodies the whole time.
Relatively recently, we had a big string of weird deaths. Before my freshman year of high school, they found this dead guy in the library pond. It’s a really shallow pond, where my brother would go to illegally fish with his friends— they wouldn’t even catch anything big. Now that I think about it, they were probably just there to smoke. They said the guy drowned. Then one summer two years ago, they found a body on the Rail Trail. The report said he was in his twenties, and we were all worried that we knew him. Nobody ever said who it was. Last year, this guy that my friend did know got hit by a car while he was on his motorcycle and died, right down the street from her house. It happened again last week— another motorcyclist just died.
The big thing, though, was the murder. It was national news; all the true crime people posted about it. I was in sixth grade, and they closed all the schools in town, and our parents wouldn’t let us turn on the TVs. A boy three years older than me had brutally murdered a teacher in the high school bathroom. We generally avoid talking about it.
Last year, we had a bone scandal. Technically, you’re allowed to sell human remains, as long as they’re obtained in a legal manner; like when a family donates a body to science, that science facility is allowed to sell the body afterwards and it’s legal for everyone involved. They lean into this more in Salem, where all the tourist traps are, but the neighboring towns sell remains too. I could tell you exactly which stores were selling body parts— there was a cheap antique store on the corner that sold human ribs for just 25 dollars, and at the Magic Parlour on Essex Street they had candles made of human tallow, and a human skull in a display case priced at over 7,000 dollars. But then the news came out about the Harvard Morgue Scandal, where someone was actually just stealing bones to sell at her creepy doll store. After that, none of the stores sold human remains anymore— even though they said they were legal at the time. Do you know how cursed a place has to be to have a human remains scandal?
Some people think that it’s in the soil. The whole town is contaminated with arsenic from the old tanneries. I’ve read that the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are similar to those of other heavy metal poisonings, like lead.
Here are the haikus from my final project with the songs I wrote them to!
1. mostly chimes – Adrienne Lenker
wind dries tear-stained cheeks
photosynthesize your bones
your key, my heart lock
2. Marginalia #65 – Masakatsu Takagi
ear to chest, we breathe
soak in a sunny day’s rain
oh, the sparrow’s song
3. Kaiten – Genfukei
sprinkled stars like salt
decorate pale blue, your moon
will not be lonely
4. A Dream – Flatsound
twilight song, your voice
& lightning bugs warm fingers
dew drops on my skin
5. Miroirs. III. Une barque sur l’océan – Maurice Ravel, André Laplante
green leaf, tumbling down
fall of a season – but wait!
evergreen survives
6. Out Getting Ribs (Slowed) – Feeling Blew
your words break like surf
against my skin, can i cling
like salt to your hair?
7. Purple Dreams no. 4 – Lunar Vacation
cat lies in the sun
petals in his fur, we wonder
what he dreams about
8. Hinoki Wood – Gia Margaret
dust specks on the wind
you are, figment of my mind
too real to be true
Hi here in the poem from my final presentation you can email me if you want the video I don’t have a link for it currently:)
“Birthday Prayer”
Princess
PumpkinPie
Ranny
Randy
Mirandy
Mandi
MeMe
DaDa
M
Miranda is her name.
Pastels drape to her knees
The ones that press against the tabletop
Starfish fingers suction to the mahogany boards that hold her strawberry shortcake
Princess-themed because after all, she is our Princess
PumpkinPie
Ranny
Randy
Mirandy
Mandi
MeMe
DaDa
M
She is our Miranda.
Eyelids catch her windows of imagination
Those big brown eyes that fill with delight
Cool air pushes in a thin stream to blow out a single candle
A blank wish because life is easy for this Princess
Pumpkin pie
Ranny
Randy
Mirandy
Mandi
MeMe
DaDa
M
There is still much to learn for Miranda.
Every cake is a celebration of passing 365 days of tribulation
A little one like falling off a bike or less little like falling out of lust
Wishes become no longer blank
Each year they become more thorough
More like prayers
For less stressors
Less heartache
Less pain
Less hate towards this Princess
Your PumpkinPie
Your Ranny
Your Randy
Your Mirandy
Your Mandi
Your MeMe
Your DaDa
Your M
God’s Miranda
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ25yPzK8bQMirpI6EMtGCSuhn1vY3nho&si=q68lAjdR0s6mQ2eu
The Fly
Becoming Insect
The body as a site of jealousy,
Of aesthetics,
Of “How do you see me? How can I make you look at me?”
The body inside a white tee shirt and a pair of flattering high waisted pleats.
The body as what holds up soft curly hair, cut like a mullet,
And those beady eyes that bring Geena Davis closer and closer.
The body as a flat chest against soft fabric,
As a thick arm, reaching to hold her.
If I peel off my skin, what is underneath?
Perhaps a flat chest,
Or a destructible and oozing,
Ripping at the seams
Body.
The body as a site of territory,
As a sight of terror
Of grasping, hot and eruptive,
Of owning and not owning.
I try to steal what is left of Jeff Goldblum’s melted body
And bring it to my own.
The body as something to forsake,
to burn,
Or to paint destruction upon.
Jeff Goldblum forged his own destruction, walking into that machine,
For no particular reason but to see what would become of his body.
We all make villains out of ourselves.
A body handcrafted that oozing skin and stuck it to his face,
Trying to create the thing that might make us believe that we don’t exist.
I rewind to the beginning, give in to the abjection.
The body as the boundary that keeps us from erupting –
What if I don’t want it – that piping hot mortality.
The body behind a locked door, bursting.
He will hurt her if she stays,
Simple as that.
Tear me apart, Jeff Goldblum, grab my hand and walk with me into that machine – like a baboon or a heartstruck man – and see what we become, you and I.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “The Body”
Begetting Death
The body as whatever holds the living.
How does the body react to a body?
Jeff was vibrant and dying
Ferociously,
Taking his lover with him,
But Joyce Summers emptied
And solidified, cement into the canvas of Buffy.
It’s so quiet in the Summers’ house.
I held my grandpa’s hand when he was dying –
I’d never felt anything so transparent.
He would sit and stare at the ceiling,
No TV, no birds,
As his body left him behind.
When there is only a body left, there is nothing to do but wait, burden after burden.
Buffy sees her mother’s body, breaks her rib, vomits on the carpet, then opens the back door of her house to hear the bird sounds.
Buffy becomes herself a memory. Buffy leaves her body.
The rest is mechanical.
The body as unfathomable,
The body as the site of negotiation,
Of personhood.
The body as existence.
My dad told me he would never want to live like that.
My grandma sits in my grandpa’s room, just looking at him.
Existence as something that fades –
The body as morbid,
As mortal,
As stupid.
Buffy can’t remember, can’t look the paramedics in the eye –
Joyce’s death is its own kind of body horror.
The body as victim of God.
The body as something that is sucked away by vampires, stabbed by lovers, or stopped – just like that.
My grandpa died, it was as simple as the dead wax of a vinyl.
The body as something you remove from the show in order to personify grief,
The body as something that never exits the narrative but never returns.
The bodies that you play hard and fast with as God,
Hoping that Buffy’s loss will remind you of your own.
The body as a container.
Look at the body – frail, pressing inward, engulfing someone you love –
Feel the body, cold.
You look at their fingers and knees and chests, heaving in and out,
and hope that they have received that one body that will warm itself up.
Dirty Dancing
Performed Becoming
The body, of course, as love,
To display,
To dirty,
To heat up,
To move.
Frances “Baby” Houseman moves to Johnny Castle, hoping to convince him that his body is worth something.
There is always a moment in the rom-com when the two bodies still,
Deadstruck at the feeling of touch.
The body as hungry,
Never enough filled
And never felt enough.
The body as yours –
At least in the dark –
To do what you will with it.
The body as the source of dance,
Dance as the source of embodiment – to become herself, Baby learns to dance.
The body as awkward,
As uncontrolled and confused,
Screaming a little
At what it wants or does not want.
A rare moment of two people,
Alone in a room,
With nothing but their bodies.
The warmth of that summer house, bodies hot and alive.
Love as memory,
The body as location.
Jeff Goldblum only entered the machine because of a girl.
The body as a source of fear,
Because the body knows about loss and once it learns this memory,
It fears the warmth will freeze.
The body of an actor – of fake love for the sake of God.
The body of the screen,
And the body that watches the screen.
Ordering and obeying,
Growing transparent, disappearing into their arms – I am asking you to touch me, Jennifer Grey.
The TV screen heats up,
radiating under skin.
The body as empty,
Watching,
trying to make your body into their own,
Bring their body to you,
Make the body something worth dancing for.
Fallen Angels
Whatever’s Left
What is a body left alone?
Baby holds Johnny,
Johnny responds.
Buffy reaches for her mom,
Baiting for a breath.
Geena loves Jeff,
Even so.
The body as a site of relation,
Of love and distance.
So what is a body left alone?
The girl sits alone in a diner the boy sits alone by her side.
The body as two endpoints
Or two dots.
The body as magnetic,
As forced to be magnetic.
Maybe humanity relies on connection.
Maybe they are flies.
The girl has always been alone,
Doesn’t remember what it feels like to dance with someone or lose someone.
She has become numb to these things – envy and humanity.
You hope that they will fall in love
Or fall off of that motorcycle,
Destroyed and alive.
You hope that their bodies will become made for something.
But they don’t like each other like that and bodies don’t always do what you want.
The bodies board the motorcycle, perhaps they say nothing.
Maybe God only exists within the body –
Getting you from one place to another.
These two bodies aren’t going to explode out of their humanity,
Or move with each other.
The girl and the boy will grow cold.
They will cease to be what they are – girl and boy –
And will become the monster or the freezer box.
Just for a moment, the body is warmed.
For a moment, it’s just a body.
Here’s the link to my poems: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vd-oNEvC3VSvG3Cuj4bw-T5gqHpoRb-Y/view?usp=sharing
deliciousness denied
Imagine being two
And not wanting to take
A bite of pudding
the hand the
grown-ups allow
you to use
struggles to bring
the spoon
to your lips
for the sake of recovery
deliciousness
temporarily denied
______________________
time. constraint.
Not many people plan
To wear a cast on their arm
for a month
intentionally
To heal the arm
That isn’t casted
Not many kids
would understand this
They sign a cast: get well soon
But the damage
Here is permanent
A month of
working towards improvement,
never perfection
_______________________
from her sister’s perspective
her life is consumed by
the daily struggles of being disabled
And the fight to overcome them
Sometimes I felt forgotten
Not much older
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t
also play with the new toys
and all the new people
The toys were a tool for healing
and the new people were there to help –
but to me it just seemed like
little sister got all the fun
little sister needs to focus
On rewiring her damaged
neuronal
connections
little sister faces the struggles of being disabled
But sometimes the struggles of being her sister
Are just as real
When disability sucks all the attention
away
________________________________________________
understanding what it’s like
We got on the wrong bus
A long day made even longer by
First year college students not used to
the local public transportation
A disabled girl’s worst nightmare
Every seat was taken
we rode on and on
My shaky balance
warning me to take
a seat marked for people
like me
whatever that means
It’s not often that I really need
disabled seating but
the jostling of the bus on the
bumpy roads
necessitated it
that day at least
A 60-something
Woman sat with a walker
A few seats over
“you don’t understand what it is like”
“you won’t understand until you’re old”
She assumed
I was able-bodied
I was speechless
Looking back
There is regret at what
could have been said, but wasn’t
little did she know
I have understood what it’s like
since I was born
Awareness could have been raised,
but ableism
Shocked me into silence
__________________________________________
electroencephalogram
dozens of electrodes
cover my scalp, forehead,
and chest
a wire rainbow
trails between
rows of braids
The smell of medical-
grade glue
is forever burned in my
brain–
Ten times stronger than
nail polish
________________________________
The sunflowers
A sunflower
Invisible to you
Sensed by me
Bewildering to everyone
I grow sunflowers
They come and go
Like the seasons
Each type unique
Terrifying beautiful
They bloom
at all hours
unrelenting, overpowering, persistent
even when they wilt, they are ever present
the thoughts of when they will bloom again
forever pierce my mind
blinding patches of yellow
fields that go on
for eternity
They consume the garden of my mind
Until it is overgrown
I hate my sunflowers
But I can’t cut them,
blow them away like dandelions,
or put them in a vase and force them to wilt
because they are a part of me
and I wouldn’t be myself without them
a love letter to the canter
Why walk, when you can run? Why run,
when you can fly?
There are some things in this starlit starkilling world
that I’ll never get over. That will never leave
the skittish neural pathways in my head alone.
And you are one, my darling girl, my once-dear love,
one of those crimson stains upon my heart. How dare
you choose that goddamn place to bury me and all
the spare I love yous I guess I will never say. How dare
you read a eulogy for us as if that Starbucks gave a shit.
The point of any gravestone? To remind the world
who lies there. Ours stands granite in my mind,
against which other thoughts collide to forever,
I guess–like putting more weight in my heel,
lengthen my calves, sink down
through the ache,
cause I’ve got to be sore to be good–
to forever remind me of that last farewell,
of those moments right after you left me behind,
when I watched you not look back as you walked away.
In that moment, you taught me my least favorite thing
was to sit and do nothing, not even protest,
and to hear you decide that we’re done.
I got up. Walked away. We’ll ignore that whole part
when I cried in the car far too long.
Let’s instead:
sit a stride, pick a lead, get a bend in the neck,
gentle squeeze with the calves,
and let’s fly.
From the saddle, there’s nothing on earth that can touch
me, but wind on my face and the leather of reins in my hands,
and nothing quite as wild as trust or the powerful heart
that drives these thundering hooves in the three-beat gait
that most call a canter
and that I call flight.
In the saddle, I can spread my arms,
claim wings of my own, and allow the world
to be a river, fast around me, passing me by,
and I can allow the world to not matter.
What matters is this moment: this brief instant of transition, right
as one beat turns to three, a rocking horse, a fluid wave
of forward motion. Walk to canter, that’s the aim, no lapse
for stylized up-down steps of trot. I hold my breath across the bridge,
let out the waiting exhale when I follow with
the withers’ forward tide. A steady upward change
is my main goal most lessons; and in shows, it’s all I ask;
at shows, we all rely on seamless shifts.
I ride in the pre-novice class at shows.
The walk to canter is the dominant test we get:
a smooth transition or halting walk to trot
to canter steps can make or break our round.
Like when Frankie–a horse that I drew at a show–
picked the canter right up, but wrong lead,
his momentum all targeted over his outside front foot.
In the instant, I didn’t pick up on the fault,
and he covered for us without pause, swapping leads
with one stride so I don’t think the judge even saw.
And this is what it means to dance, a moment I
will never get over, spun in a second of trust,
a suspension in air after I ask for a transition
and the response. (4) Not only a response, but a correction that
I did not see would need to happen then.
Each horse I ride, at lessons or at shows,
is a new teammate, exercise in trust, a dance
partner, and most of all a teacher. What I learn?
Sit, press my calves, and keep flying.
Bit off
I could give my teeth away, or paint them
a coat of fresh nail polish. “You shouldn’t
see fish swimming under the padded tan.”
“It’s not about the fish I see, really,
But I feel slithering in what’s vacant.”
Dr. Johnny with the white light asks what
I’m about, with this deep sea diving stunt,
When all he needs to concern himself with
Is the carbamide peroxide syringe
Approaching in slow motion my welcome
mat-tongue gape. Accommodating for what?
His hesitancy maybe? He’s got new
Adverts. Before is comically worse.
“How do you know they’re fish?” Touché, doc,
Touché.
Call Your Obstetrician
Call your obstetrician. These recipes of the childhood home don’t dilate but they fill, she says over her rump roast, the Turkey baster dripping grease from the counter to the tabby’s mouth, Martha Stewart shepards tentatively over the broil. Blond hair in the fish eyes. She says her eyes are fine, that six months is in two shanks of a lamb brought to 450° Fahrenheit, always fair in height. She realized just how short she was in 1981, Mexican sundaes with best friend Patty Laboone, feeling thighs touch together. “Mom you shouldn’t call them that, it’s just a sundae with nuts,” but that’s what they called them, and that’s what she knew then, and she can’t be expected to see now in then. The reading glasses slip off her nose and glide into the skillet. Call your obstetrician. She says she will. She’ll go when the roast is tender. Besides, that rusty mail slot of a man loves wings. She knows she’ll only go down there with what he’ll take. She doesn’t cook birds for a reason.
Blushing
Humiliation is faith forgotten and betrayed.
Faith is everything in a nothing.
Nothing is a woodpecker or a grecian urn or a warhol.
Nothing is humiliation, where we thought we’d find everything and did.
In the beams that peirce us from first opening,
That whole blankness before falling in,
The spider webbing on moorland streams,
The universal pinkening,
Is the dawning betrayal of our fingers
As they learn to bend towards themselves
And grasp.
Voyeur
If a pot simmers into the night, all the contents depart.
You do not put your mouth on that which does not belong to you, son,
And you do not eat what you are not served, if in the middle of the night,
While the shutters tilt themselves, and the crisp refreshing lowlight slides down bedroom walls,
You hear a whine before a break, the floorboards giving way below the stove,
don’t let the taste into your mouth, or the fragrance into your nose,
Both hands, be careful, both hands, while your lids fold
and in that fault, the yearn settles into the ducts.
Your eyes, reflecting smoothly, drip with desire to lick each other off,
To the sockets, and the red hot, to burst at the surface and evaporate.
Saturn Starts with the Eyes
I.
The sky is made of windows and it rains cigarettes,
Proving that the wind and rain,
were just God emptying out his pockets.
Deep inside a fluorescent street light socket,
Let an honest retch tell you of the ash,
About the whole person underneath a fog
that’ll settle within, how different it is
This steel beamed sepulcher
Doused in strychnine and rheum
Discovering with the montagues and capulets
how we lost the blue and were given what they begged for.
II.
The whole person fogging underneath
the sinew mold, walks into a midnight field of desiccated stumps
Ashen rings row by row as grave stones.
The sinew mold lays in front of a buzzy static box
Smacking like a caged baboon until the color comes on
A neon palate cleanser to bespeckle the cementing gray matter
As sidewalk chalk hazed in the rain.
Holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger,
A ring goes out of lips, trying tricks in a time like this.
Hoping for blue in a moonbeam.
III.
Every night taking that child of his,
From his bed sheets and tunic, covered in duckies,
ruminating on the reflection of pale eyes,
A lively blue, a wiggling rippling,
That did not buzz and fizz the same as his.
Saturn didn’t always drool pesticide,
He remembers monarchs and polar bears,
A boy king quite like this one,
But the memory is a distant parking lot
Behind the edifice of business.
IIII.
Goya’s Saturn devours his son head-first.
Rubens starts with the heart.
One centers the eyes of Saturn, the other the eyes of his son.
Neither is really the way of things.
Goya is technical, but Rubens has the spirit.
Saturn started with the eyes.
Known from the ash. From the streetlight.
From the retch, and God, and strychnine and rheum.
Recorded from the graveyard and the broadcast and the tunic.
Saturn knows how to drown.
Life lived thrashing at the surface,
While there is stretching, hopeful blue.
He knows that devouring and drowning
Are the same.
Saturn starts with the eyes.
Link to the my final project (text only): https://docs.google.com/document/d/14qUF-aJD8UOs9rl1NnJywAh5mJEUnnYsy_kqXoZPEpU/edit?usp=sharing
Link to my final project (text and photos): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ep5e0ANjtej6HO98gYUE7gUPsvFAE19oT52sDuQ428I/edit?usp=sharing
Hometown Curses and Other Metalloids
I know a thing or two about curses. I have many curses myself, though only one has been formally diagnosed by an expert. Sometimes I try to understand where they come from, or why they’ve come to me. Lately, I’ve been wondering if toxic metals have something to do with it. Or maybe they inhabit a place, and eke farther out of the ground with each bizarre happenstance until they find someone susceptible to affliction.
I grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts, which used to be Salem Village— as in, “Salem Witch Trials” Salem Village. One of the biggest attractions we have is the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, where Rebecca Nurse lived before she was accused of witchcraft and executed by hanging. My friend swears that Rebecca Nurse was her however-many-times-great aunt. They brought us to her real, preserved house in first grade. They showed us old-timey chamber pots, dishware made of lead, and the hearth where the colonial housewife would sweat for nine hours a day cooking mush and stew for her family— before being executed.
They also brought us to the Salem Witch Museum. Imagine sixty children, each around eight years old, packed into this dark cavern of a room. Ten feet above our heads, the walls were set up like giant dioramas, with staged life sized models of real colonial people. Over the course of one thirty-five minute pre-recorded audio track, each model acted out their part in the witch trials under a blazing spotlight. One thing I’ll probably never forget is watching Giles Corey get crushed to death by rocks right there in front of us. He refused to plead guilty or not guilty, instead yelling “more weight!” until his tongue was pressed out of his mouth. You can hear it happen. Many people believe that the mass hysteria of the Witch Trials was brought on by some form of poisoning.
In the 1800s, there was the Danvers State Hospital, more colloquially known as the Danvers Insane Asylum. As you might imagine, this one is also heavily featured in online listicles today. Lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and overcrowding so bad that dead and dying patients were actually left to rot in the building before being thrown into mass unmarked graves. They turned the place into an apartment complex, where my high school girlfriend lived for a while. Over the summer, we’d kind of just wander the property, and gaze emptily at this big weedy field next to the building. I didn’t want to say anything weird, but I was definitely thinking about dead bodies the whole time.
Relatively recently, we had a big string of weird deaths. Before my freshman year of high school, they found this dead guy in the library pond. It’s a really shallow pond, where my brother would go to illegally fish with his friends— they wouldn’t even catch anything big. Now that I think about it, they were probably just there to smoke. They said the guy drowned. Then one summer two years ago, they found a body on the Rail Trail. The report said he was in his twenties, and we were all worried that we knew him. Nobody ever said who it was. Last year, this guy that my friend did know got hit by a car while he was on his motorcycle and died, right down the street from her house. It happened again last week— another motorcyclist just died.
The big thing, though, was the murder. It was national news; all the true crime people posted about it. I was in sixth grade, and they closed all the schools in town, and our parents wouldn’t let us turn on the TVs. A boy three years older than me had brutally murdered a teacher in the high school bathroom. We generally avoid talking about it.
Last year, we had a bone scandal. Technically, you’re allowed to sell human remains, as long as they’re obtained in a legal manner; like when a family donates a body to science, that science facility is allowed to sell the body afterwards and it’s legal for everyone involved. They lean into this more in Salem, where all the tourist traps are, but the neighboring towns sell remains too. I could tell you exactly which stores were selling body parts— there was a cheap antique store on the corner that sold human ribs for just 25 dollars, and at the Magic Parlour on Essex Street they had candles made of human tallow, and a human skull in a display case priced at over 7,000 dollars. But then the news came out about the Harvard Morgue Scandal, where someone was actually just stealing bones to sell at her creepy doll store. After that, none of the stores sold human remains anymore— even though they said they were legal at the time. Do you know how cursed a place has to be to have a human remains scandal?
Some people think that it’s in the soil. The whole town is contaminated with arsenic from the old tanneries. I’ve read that the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are similar to those of other heavy metal poisonings, like lead.
Here are the haikus from my final project with the songs I wrote them to!
1. mostly chimes – Adrienne Lenker
wind dries tear-stained cheeks
photosynthesize your bones
your key, my heart lock
2. Marginalia #65 – Masakatsu Takagi
ear to chest, we breathe
soak in a sunny day’s rain
oh, the sparrow’s song
3. Kaiten – Genfukei
sprinkled stars like salt
decorate pale blue, your moon
will not be lonely
4. A Dream – Flatsound
twilight song, your voice
& lightning bugs warm fingers
dew drops on my skin
5. Miroirs. III. Une barque sur l’océan – Maurice Ravel, André Laplante
green leaf, tumbling down
fall of a season – but wait!
evergreen survives
6. Out Getting Ribs (Slowed) – Feeling Blew
your words break like surf
against my skin, can i cling
like salt to your hair?
7. Purple Dreams no. 4 – Lunar Vacation
cat lies in the sun
petals in his fur, we wonder
what he dreams about
8. Hinoki Wood – Gia Margaret
dust specks on the wind
you are, figment of my mind
too real to be true
Hiya, here’s a link to a pdf of all my poems. Enjoy!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z2kO9UsNEPWIiGNGRYg_BwL1pAqqe_k2/view
Hi here in the poem from my final presentation you can email me if you want the video I don’t have a link for it currently:)
“Birthday Prayer”
Princess
PumpkinPie
Ranny
Randy
Mirandy
Mandi
MeMe
DaDa
M
Miranda is her name.
Pastels drape to her knees
The ones that press against the tabletop
Starfish fingers suction to the mahogany boards that hold her strawberry shortcake
Princess-themed because after all, she is our Princess
PumpkinPie
Ranny
Randy
Mirandy
Mandi
MeMe
DaDa
M
She is our Miranda.
Eyelids catch her windows of imagination
Those big brown eyes that fill with delight
Cool air pushes in a thin stream to blow out a single candle
A blank wish because life is easy for this Princess
Pumpkin pie
Ranny
Randy
Mirandy
Mandi
MeMe
DaDa
M
There is still much to learn for Miranda.
Every cake is a celebration of passing 365 days of tribulation
A little one like falling off a bike or less little like falling out of lust
Wishes become no longer blank
Each year they become more thorough
More like prayers
For less stressors
Less heartache
Less pain
Less hate towards this Princess
Your PumpkinPie
Your Ranny
Your Randy
Your Mirandy
Your Mandi
Your MeMe
Your DaDa
Your M
God’s Miranda