Gargoyle Psalm
Your High School
It must have looked like a bottling factory,
the kind that uses brown glass
so you can’t even see
what you’re bottling up
or drinking down. You always drink
to get drunk. Once, you were sweating
and buzzed so you took off
your shirt, but you asked first
if it was okay. You looked shy
of your tattoos, but read me the story
of all that ink anyway.
Sometimes I could imagine
the hallways and lockers
rolling, lush and romantic
as the valley of Wheeling,
West Virginia where I once tasted
the river air’s Southern twang.
But your West Virginia keeps peeling in,
covering everything
in that pukey pea-soup color
of your bile or snot
or whatever you spit out
after they beat you so bad
against the cold metal doors.
Then comes your blood
sweating brown through the paint.
I’d liken this to Jesus
giving up in the garden, except
you’re no savior.
And I’m no savior,
but I could take you
to the staircase where I fell
and bled inside,
my muscles bruising
so bad I could only crawl
away and lie
on my stomach, waiting.
I could force
cold plastic oxygen
up your nostrils, or
show you the last picture
of my father before he
breathed in too much
carbon monoxide.
I could write your name
in Hebrew, fax it
into the anonymous
hotel-room mess
of your sheets and stale food.
Because everything is
sacred in Hebrew.
Even our scars.
Last Chance Riversong III for Virginia Woolf
When I laid my temple down on my watch and rose
imprinted with time, I thought of your pockets,
their stones always intent on etching their way into you.
Here it’s the rain that sinks deep.
The worms rise up to keep from drowning,
and I start fearing the things that my skin has soaked up:
your stones, your sadness, and all the whale songs
haunting my blood. I’ve heard whales
can’t survive without those ethereal currents
of music passing between them. When they sing,
they tell me it was the silence that pulled you under,
not the sorrow of the water. If these stones
begin to deafen me, I’ll bring a cello to your river and wade in.
I’ll make it hum underwater, and let your echoes settle on my skin.
From the Last Ice Age
Someday you’ll find me, you said, like an elephant in the snow.
You were always mysterious like that, saying things I never understood.
It never snows here, but I still look for you. Last week I held my breath when
I heard they unearthed a baby woolly mammoth from the tundra and named her
Lyuba. It means ‘love’ in Russian, although the man who found her didn’t love
her right away. He accused her of bringing an omen of death. Of course,
later he felt protective of her delicately frozen body. Just a baby after all.
He decided a museum would be a good home for her, but she never got there,
because the scientists loved the idea of her too much to let her go. They came
for her with probes. Frightened by such possessive love, Lyuba disappeared.
Let herself be stolen away by a villager hoping to make a profit. But the scientists
bartered for her and drilled holes through her fur, probing inside her. Blue crystals
in her lung cavities. And mud. She suffocated in it, they decided,
trying to cross a stream. The silt and clay swallowed her up and pickled her,
so her body remained whole for millennia, though gnawed at by time and wild dogs.
The scientists said this was important, knowing the means of her death and preservation,
though as far as I can see none of this will ever revive anyone—especially not Lyuba.
I hope when I find you someday and dig you up from the snow, I won’t make
such a fuss about deciding how you stayed intact all these years. I hope I’ll remember
just to scoop you up in my arms and give you the home you’ve been waiting for
while caked in mud and endlessly passed from hand to hand.
Alright folks, that's all I have for you right now. More to come soon though...
-Liz
You’re wearing that sweater I hate again,
the one that looks like it should be out to sea, the brackish air
rushing against its cotton fibers until the salt
wears rough holes in the shoulders. You’re breathing heavy too,
like you can smell the canvas sails five hundred miles away
and you’re aching to sing like a sailor again,
leaving me with only a knotted bracelet made of rope
too softened by the ocean to hold anything of substance.
On days like this, you stare out the window for hours
until you finally look up and ask for a glass of water.
I open the window and cup my hands in the rain
until I have enough in my palms to wet your mouth
or pour over the curls of your hair. I know
one of these days you’re going to drown, because
it’s always what we love the most that kills us
slowly and softly, like Madame Curie cradling a vile
of toxic radium. For Houdini it was escape,
the sheer thrill of drowning himself and living
to brag about how many punches he could take.
A college kid took him out with three, while Houdini
reclined on a couch modeling for an art student.
Too surprised to flex, he took the blows to his appendix
which oozed around inside him a while
before knocking him out during his last disappearing act.
I don’t know how the sea will take you out,
only that this storm sewer looks like it has a temper.
I wouldn’t walk over its rusted grate or stomp
any puddles with those shined-up boots of yours, dear.
It’s the same for me, the way I shouldn’t speak
any more, lest the words turn against me and swallow me up.
At least I know how dangerous it is,
while you walk around or stare out as if that expanse
won’t suck you in one day, turning your molecules
into blankness so you become the sky, become the waves.
I know someday every inch of you I was never allowed
There’s a boy on a bicycle holding a hamster cage.
I can see the hamster panicking with each sway,
trying to move to one side to balance out the deadly tilt.
His weight doesn’t shift the cage and this terrifies him,
makes him claw at the glass like a sad little mime.
I’ve cut my fingernails too short to claw, so I can’t
tear at my life like I think you’d like me to.
They say you have to be strong
to drown yourself when you can swim. They say
you were brave to walk into the river, the world swaying
so dizzily around you. But didn’t a thrush sing that morning
and remind you how warm a voice can be? How do you know
what can be recovered and what can only be clawed out
like a crow’s nest in the heart.
Illinois Ache
Before planting an apple tree,
sleep seven days in a stranger’s orchard,
then roll over and lick the ground.
The stranger will become your lover.
Peel a lifetime
of apples and let the seeds
fall on the kitchen table.
When you scoop them up
notice how your hands look older.
When you touch your hands,
notice how some apple peel drops
from under your fingernails.
Place this skin under your lover’s bed,
and the wood will speak
in its usual creaky voice:
A husband stands on the same dirt
for sixty-three years, holding an apple
in his outstretched palm.
Throw away the apple seeds and leave
the knife on your stranger’s kitchen counter.
Wander thirty days, then return
to the orchard and curl up in the dirt.
You’ll be craving something sweet
Love Is The Rope That Lassos Tight
My love wakes up thirsty,
his eyes dried and caved like he’s lost
something, and I can’t find it.
I fill a glass with water
and pour it over our heads.
I dream we’re hungry,
eating up the Oregon trail and pressing our bodies
against the hot canvas of our covered wagon
just for the sting. The sting is like love,
and my love is so golden, tangled up
in my hair, reading to me.
I see a papercut on his thumb,
and I want to kiss it,
but when I look back he’s gone,
sucked inside a pillar of dust.
I have no lasso to pull him back,
and my hands are empty
except for my hair,
so I start to braid.
I cut the ropes from my scalp
with a pocketknife
and throw them into the void.
* * *
When I wake up again
two hours later
he’s on the floor,
vomiting into a baseball cap.
I never liked the Yankees,
I joke, but he’s silent, closing
his eyes slow and heavy
like plaster’s being sealed over them.
I’d circle my arms around his torso,
but I’m a worn-out lasso
with all this silence and excavation
inside us. Instead I curl up
on his side of the bed
to keep the sheets warm
for when he crawls back.
I don’t believe in satellites,
that they connect us
alone to alone to alone.
So when you send me a text message
asking if I’m home safe, I pretend
it’s a crumpled telegram from the home front:
Since you went away, I sit every morning
on the whitewashed porch, looking
for you. Stop. The dog chews on the wood
and the children keep getting taller.
Stop. I listen to the radio, but I never hear
if you’ll ever come home. Stop.
But there was no stop at the end,
and no paper to pass between us,
scented with perfume or gunpowder,
just a waiting space on the screen
for my response. If I were a man at war
you’d have to forgive my silence.
I’m not home safe. Where
home might be and what color safe is
dissolve into this black sky full of satellites
as I travel from where
I have nested, listening
to the ocean sound of my own
ear pressed against you.
Red Meat, Bled Out Slow
When my lover left me in Michigan
I ate fifteen cherries from the festival, sucked the pits raw
and held them tight in my juice-stained palms.
Then I bathed in whale blood, which might have been left over
from the stories he harpooned into my stomach,
or from my uncle’s freak diving accident.
Or I might have drained the blood
from my lover’s favorite whale
whom he named Oliver and whistled for
every morning because he was a sailor in love.
One can never be sure.
I never know whose blood I’ve stolen,
and I’m afraid to ask
because it’s going to happen again.
Every time I slip into the bathtub,
I tell myself his fingers will stay
in the Bering Strait where they belong,
but they always seep in and stain everything red.
I can’t even see my body any more.
I can’t tell if I’ve cut myself shaving,
little volcanoes erupting from my legs.
I can’t tell how all this porcelain got lost
in the middle of the cold green sea.
or why there’s no wooden plank to float me homeward.
Send a whale to save me. I’ll cut it open and crawl inside.
If I find myself knifeless, I’ll use my own splintered ribs.
Flood
Inside this church, the wooden beams
that make up the walls and ceiling are curved
the way I pictured Noah’s ark, a fortress smoothed
into compassion. Up front the pastor sings for God
to anoint our souls with holy water.
Noah sang to the animals too, playing a lyre
and strolling through the aisles of gazelles
with toucans fluttering about his shoulders.
But did he sing of water or of land? I trace my fingers
along the pew and re-anchor your body to mine.
You cried for the first time with my hands cupped over your ears
begging for you to flood the room. But the moment ended
with moaning, your voice drowned
out by a fire alarm. I grabbed the essentials. You
scoured your salty face against your sleeve, and we set out
into the darkness, slouching onto the sunburned
ground. I watched as you hollowed out
the earth by handfuls, your forehead lifted to the sky
like a farmer looking for signs of rain,
and all I wanted to do was plant you
in something solid.
Chloe was never meant to be a symbol,
but her songs came to me by way of cruelty
so I guess I can call her whatever I want. Your mandolin
is hateful, Chloe. Put it down in the mud. Let it sink in.
I never wanted her face or the way she slung
that wooden mess over her shoulder, over the bridge.
You make me want to sling stones around my ankles
and throw myself down, Chloe. Stop that.
She arrived all the same, like a letter
addressed to the stranger next door. Why would I keep
you, Chloe? You strip away so much of my skin.
If she had glued herself to your doorstep
and played an endless elegy, you’d have run away too.
I gave you my last bluebird song, Chloe. Why
is your face still so pale in the sunlight?
What else could I do but burn her paper face
with a lighter, and tuck her lips into my shoes?
Chloe, smile for me again. Play me a jig, something
light and forgiving. She told me I was rotting,
her lips still moving inside my sneakers. Chloe,
I’m desperate for silence. Put your face down
in the mud. Let it sink in.
Last Chance Riversong
A river you’ve known all your life sounds different
when you lie on it’s banks alone—
suddenly more like sinking than carrying,
more like my voice than yours.
I’d tell you now that I’ve never really known
how to dip my hand into this water
but I still don’t know what to call
what happened to us.
We once shared a fish you’d caught for lunch
and left its bones in the grass.
I find them half-buried in dirt
and smooth my finger over the ribs
before snapping them like matchsticks.
I cannot bear to wade in alone this time,
so I herd ants onto catalpa leaves
and ferry them from bank to bank.
I turn a leaf over, and I’m surprised by the silence
even though I know death
can be muffled by water and woods.
They’ve dragged teenaged boys
from this river with mud in their hair.
We don’t speak of them anymore,
but when the first one went under,
I wrote him a love letter
and fed it to a bluegill in torn-up pieces.
If I sink myself down into the river
maybe I could get it back.
Skin & Lace
Stingray takes the knife in his mouth
And cuts into the flatlands
Where my skin levels out
The rounder bones beneath.
My blade descends to wrist,
Blood undone first
In the flattest landscape.
In the sweetest stump.
When we had our arms,
My white-laced fingers would curve
Around his crooked elbow.
I soon realized I couldn’t feel
His pulse for the lace,
So I cut it open.
After the first incision,
There was always more in the way:
Silk, skin, tendon, bone.
Now we’re just paper dolls
Hitchhiking down the Kansas highways.
Curled up in a ditch,
I dream that our bodies barter
For space in the blue wheat night.
I dream a cardinal lands on my shoulder
And doesn’t lose balance.
But I’m thinner than a blade now
And still being hacked.
Stringray’s looking for my heart.
So I give him the flashlight
From my mouth.
It’ll only show my skin
And the crude work of our knives
Digging beneath.
Though I’m trying to push my heart
Out of my mouth
Into his,
It’s no use willing my organs around.
So I bend my face down into the dust
On the highway’s shoulder
And write with my nose.
Love, your leaves are curling up.
And I’m the penny
You’ve left on the train tracks.
Wrap me up in lace
And slip me in your pocket
Before the train whistle blows.
