In the Valley of Oaxaca
You need to tell your story
to a stranger at a wedding.
You need another mezcal cocktail.
To take your medicine. To go home
and take to the streets with a sign:
Take Your Fucking Hands Off My Body.
Why are you always
shaking with cold? So many layers
and the wind still gets in,
and the enormous skeleton
on top of the roof, on the corner
building, presides over the street
as they pass below, abuelas
and screeching little children—
so many reasons not to have them—
You need to kill the worm in you.
You’re so sick of eating and eating it
and still feeling it writhe in your gut.
You need to wash the shame
from the stones and understand
the voracious bodies fingering weavings
in the stores, buying the fantastical
bright wooden creatures, and the ones
pushing their carts of tlayudas and tamales,
sitting in the market with their baskets—
flowers and soap, pomegranates
and the piled bodies of fried grasshoppers.
The waiter bringing to the table
a mortar and pestle to grind
to powder the dark shining abdomens
and add salt and chiles—don’t all
women’s bodies shine, are they all delicious
or horrifying. The fireworks go off
and the celebratory rockets thud all night
to celebrate another virgin and rattle
the frames and casings in your head.
This bloody dress has a face in it
if you look hard enough.
In the museum there is a set of teeth,
are they petrified,
they are what’s left, teeth
and the precious, dirty jewelry
of a wealthy someone in a tomb
preserved behind glass, in such
tender light.
Target Audience
Everyone’s aspiring to something, it’s exhausting . . .
A flurry of tiny birds comes to the tree outside, in gray rain
as I begin another day, hating the things I hate about myself
A woman is mythologizing the body of her lover in poem after poem & it bores me . . .
Death is the only interesting subject but we should all shut up about it . . .
Now the birds swirl up from the tree, the view out the window partially blocked
by my TV . . . .The TV detectives are solving gruesome crimes, the TV diplomats are trying
to hold someone accountable and failing . . .
The rain implacably falling . . . like volleys of English arrows in the battle of Agincourt
or little vitreous bombs from the clouds . . . plummeting toward miniature cities
Another cloud drops its load and heads out to sea . . . Tiny people cower on the beach
so their houses can’t collapse and crush them . . . So many things can crush
a life, & countries like to show them all off . . .
It’s too easy to say this, you’re thinking, and I agree . . . I have always been too easy . . .
I hate watching people die on TV . . . It makes me cry like a drunken little bitch . . .
& I’m no one’s target audience for a Lamborghini . . .
I stamp my foot and say “ENOUGH!” to drown the sound of tiny bones
cracking underneath me, as another log is put on the fire and everything burns . . .
Shame
Once in a duck blind, standing up, after paddling a rented canoe through salt marshes,
once against a telephone pole outside a bar, against a bathroom wall inside a different bar,
once on the stairs because the bedroom was too far, more than once in a bedroom
or on blankets laid on a rug before a fire, or under stars trembling like wet dogs
but they burned, shedding sparks on the humans below. Once in a field,
bare-assed and tormented by mosquitoes. Once near a guard shack
outside a stadium, caught in the act and shamed by the guard, the act made shameful,
the simple, animal act girls were warned against until it was everything we wanted,
to be dragged down into the dangerous core of it, green apple, wrinkled pit
of the ripe peach—bella fica, the Italians say, and in Women in Love Rupert opens a fig
with his thumbs to take it in one bite, leaning toward Gudrun to say the fig
is a very secretive fruit. In cars, in vans, sometimes with one foot jammed
against a steering wheel, head against a door handle. Sprawled on a kitchen floor
or table, once in a tent after floating down a river in an old innertube
high on new love and psilocybin. Sometimes drunk, sometimes on acid
or Ecstasy, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes crushed by grief or longing,
the way I was, the way so many of us were, this is not a confession, or a litany,
don’t bless us, priest, we haven’t sinned, we’re not sorry, we asked for it
and it was given. The guard’s face when he found us was furious with hate and disgust,
he made me feel small, and dirty, it took me years to feel pity for him, but finally, I did.
