Beds are for living! Beds are for life . . .
& for memory, as you lie between cork-lined walls
writing very long sentences in French
Sometimes I’m so happy
I want to kill myself first thing in the morning to make sure I die . . .
under my white organic ruched duvet cover
like a marmot burrowed deep under the snow
who can’t wake up from hibernation
while others crawl out, ravenous for spring
II
SONGS FOR SAD GIRLS
WOLF SONG
At the party they’re all wearing swan suits.
The fur on your back thickens. You’re slicked
against the wall of the flow-through kitchen
between your ex and his girlfriend.
You’d still like to devour him as you once did,
but you are trying to become human.
Though also you are starving,
sick of scavenging nuts and berries,
gnawing the occasional biscuit.
You want to take down a caribou!
You want to tackle a moose and rip open
the flap of skin swaying beneath its throat
and share it with the next wolf
to trot by. But here there are no wolves.
Through the kitchen window fangs the moon
to fuck you up even more, to send you slathering
away, past the condo community,
past the lit houses, into the deep woods;
where there’s a moon,
there’s always a deep woods.
SONG FOR SAD GIRLS
Right now I feel like a self-cleaning microwave about to malfunction.
My friend texts from the east coast, I smoked so many cigarettes in this chair.
She’s in some bar. Do people still even say, old haunts? She’s sitting there with a second beer,
haunted by a sad girl. Now I feel more like a burn hole in a cushion,
still smoldering. A set of plastic curtains. Whoosh, I could go up any minute.
Sad girls, sad girls, you’re everywhere. Sick on the snake oil
of romance. Blundering in and out of beds
and squabbles with roommates. Scalded by raindrops.
Hating yourselves with such a pure hatred.
Loving the music that makes it worse. This is that music.
There’s a low piano part in here somewhere, sinking under a wave
of minor thirds. There’s a plastic guitar with shitty strings and you think
you’re that guitar nobody wants even for a weird art project. You don’t know
that your trash and dead birds can cast beautiful shadows. You don’t know
anything and I love you for that.
Right now I feel like a menthol filter. I float face-up in the toilet,
my lipstick dissolving, as crowds of girls swirl by. I creak like a rusted-out insect
trying to fly. I spin around and around
for you and you only, scraping out this old, sad song.
RÉSUMÉ
—after Dorothy Parker
Families shame you;
Rehab’s a scam;
Lovers drain you
And don’t give a damn.
Friends are distracted;
Aging stinks;
You’ll soon be subtracted;
You might as well drink.
TELEPATHY
I don’t know if telepathy has ever been proved or disproved
but when I go out with a friend & there’s a man by himself . . . I feel . . . him . . .
Something goes out from me, little threads of energy, my invisible feelers begin waving,
my third eye on its stalk turns slowly . . . & if I’ve entered the circle of his awareness
where his pancakes are shrinking from his bacon . . . or his beer is wetting itself . . .
what messages are drifting into his hair . . . like cat dander . . .
like oversharing fortunes from insecure fortune cookies . . .
I am not a strong, independent person experiencing life to the full . . .
I never learn from my mistakes . . . Maybe you could be one of them . . .
Men like to say they’re not mind readers, but the ones I’m drawn to aren’t readers at all . . .
Their thought-balloons are full of dick pics . . . floating toward the ceiling
& slowly deflating, like their interest in me . . . Maybe telepathy is bunk, but magic sure isn’t . . .
I remember a man who liked to dress me up . . . then saw me in half
& I stood up smiling & bowing . . .
SMALL TALK
Let’s skip it and get straight to the rabid dog at hand.
This is some weather we’re cowering from.
Would you please touch my face like a blind person?
I feel like a giraffe in a parking garage.
Let’s skip it and get straight to the death smell
coming from behind the refrigerator.
Can I offer you something more subtly evocative
of the underlying theme of your life story?
How many self-important wounds do you have?
Everything you say is tiresome.
I’m going to walk away slowly and not look back.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
GHOSTED
I guess you realized how worthless I am
I myself am just beginning to discover it . . .
Nothing is being named after me
A planet would be nice . . . or a star system
But I don’t want to be anyone’s sunbeam
Maybe a black hole . . . I just saw a picture of one
& oddly you weren’t in it . . .
I don’t care what you’re wearing right now
as you don’t think of me at all . . . I’ve already disappeared
like a dead girl in a police procedural
but you’re not the detective . . . & I’m not dead . . .
Darling, there are plenty of nameless alleys
& I intend to walk down one late at night
howling at the trash bins until a light blinks on
& someone sets out a nice dish of gin . . .
AUGUST
What I want is to slice open its stomach and watch
its toxic sun uncoil into the sea.
Cicadas seething in their asylum in the trees.
All this frenzy and scorch
and at night music hammering from the outdoor bar
where the dancers blindside each other
with longing, and the long tide slopping
in and away, barnacles on the piers clinging
in the littoral drift. Whatever it is in me
that crawls like a wasp over the remains
of a picnic, used napkins blown
over the senseless grass—tell me
how to kill it. How to let it go out like the last
disaster of love, last boat guttering in the wave-swell.
WINTER SOLSTICE
I can’t think about the black slick on the river or the deer
corpse at the base of the tree or how one lover is
too young & sometimes indifferent & another is
lighting candles with someone else neither
ever mine for more than a rare evening the days will
lengthen now but so slowly it will still
feel like darkness is winning the battle between
it & what people call good or God a few fallen trees
are always there in the woods turning back
to earth rump torn open a kind of caul
over the
