Spoken Word
My name is Mary,
And I am not a Virgin
And I like to steal.
I'm far from the Mother of God,
I'd say, though the appeal
Of such origins has never quite Settled.
Maybe if I'd meddled
With my Christianity
Instead of burgling
I'd have ended up with more
Than broken questions
To nestle in.
Where was I? Right,
Kleptomania. That.
The habit has never sat
Well with me either.
I read somewhere that all crimes are a form a theft.
That murder is robbery of a life.
Cheating? The thievery of a wife.
To litter is to rob the world of its beauty.
What then, is my life?
Are all my footfalls just crushed flowers?
Is my living just slow showers
dripping down fast drains?
I like to peel flyers off
The inside of bathroom stalls
And fold them up, stuff them
In my pockets, lining my own walls with
Upcoming plays and
Lost Cats and Want Ads for Babysitters.
And maybe you'd scoff
And say such little things don't gather
Into something larger.
And to that I say, rather,
Every ocean started with raindrops, didn’t it?
Experiment for me.
Collect coins off the street for a while and you'll see.
Walk one step a million times and feel its toll on your feet.
You know what dust bunnies are, right?
Or tumbleweeds?
Eighteen years ago my mother sat
With me in her stomach—a small
Glob of fertile cells.
In a church, she sat there,
Listening to the bells
At communion, listening, praying—
And what was the minister saying?
"God said," he said, "name your children Mary."
Did Mother sit there, knowing
That "Mary" also means bitter?
Perhaps she did—after all,
No name could be fitter.
Not for me. Did she think?
Did she foresee
Her baby through various hells?
Immaculate conception? No.
She put her ear to the bible and bred
This lying, conniving thief.
I take your attention,
I break it over one knee
and I smile.
Would you like to stay a while
Inside this preposterous mind?
Maybe then you'll see my wild
And aching capacity for
Invention
And some pretension
In thinking what I'm thinking
Is worth minutes or miles
Or posters in bathrooms
Or something, somewhere
That some eye but God’s can see.
Perhaps faintly you can hear
this little fluttering heart
Like a lost bird in her
Shiny, pokey nest
Her work of art
With the dearest hugging nearest
And the rest
Left out of fear.
My name is Mary,
And I am Bitter
I am all of creation in one body
And I feel.
Devil's Advocate
It's as though you were
Undressing me with your ears,
Picking and paring me down
And peeling my words to their
Core. Off-centered, seeds spitted—
How could you hear it all
But nothing true?—That I,
If shined on your shirt, or
Tossed to the ceiling, would land
In your misplaced palms.
Go, hold blame by your
Half-wicked candlelight;
Burn out that girl painted
Naked and cast evil
Out of your garden. What a
World you've built where your
Own misshapen creatures romp
Among reality and can
Pin sins to a ghost—
Strip me to Shame, then, if you'll listen
Beyond God-given skin.
The Thaw
This is the story of the day I helped my father
dig a hole for our Christmas tree.
It was December, obviously Cold, but not quite freezing
A misfitting sort of day, easing
From one season to the next.
I bundled deep in the scarf before remembering
The thaw—it was the scarf Eric gave me for my birthday, the one with pretty patterns of
purple
and pink and a year ago I would have cast aside the garment as too girly
But I'm slowly starting to get used to this boy’s fingertips—
That day it was sixty-eight degrees
The kind of thaw that only comes about in centuries Where winter has set in too early.
December
And already, a foot's worth of snow?
The thaw was something you could expect
It was something you could just
Know.
I always say I just knew about Eric.
And I did. I just
Knew.
We met at college orientation
Him, sitting on the booth side of a table
In a place where we now, sometimes, each lunch
I remember noticing him, though only as
Part of a little loud nerdy bunch
Playing Apples to Apples
While the rest of the crowd honed in
On Smirnoffs and upperclassmen's closets.
A shuffle of chairs later they'd dealt me in
And there were far too many people making the sort of introductions you always have to
make at
these things like: "Hi-my-name's-Matt-I'm-an-IMC-major-from-Long-Island-I-lovewatching-tvandplaying- video-games-I'm-so-excited-to-be-here-this-was-my-top-choice-school-you?!!!"
Now, when it comes to this game I always win,
By saying nothing. Eric seemed to play the same way, cards
Close to his chest, as though he was good but saving his best
For someone who knew how to read.
Anyway, I saw him. Saw straight through, in fact,
Saw his playing cards, too—he wasn't careful with these ones, these words
Lost in the chaos of the noisy pair across the way
And in the slough of other little red apples on the table.
I remember texting someone, I remember saying
"I've got to get away from these nerds—lol"
And receiving the reply "haha go then"
I did
Unattached
Fluid and free to do what I wanted to do
To go where I wanted to go
But with the face of this boy sticking warm in my head.
Fast forward: December
This day with my dad
I laced up my too-big boots
Tightened by bright red socks
Selected a shovel from my garden shed
Gathered wheelbarrow with plank and board and pulled the whole assembly across my
puddled
yard...Thought of the time my sister and I found a hole in the January snow
And disrobed down to our shortest shorts and barest-threaded tanks and rambled through the
slick mud and tangled grass till there was nothing left to disturb
No stone left unturned
Our boots sucking deeper and deeper into the earth
Until the dirt had washed away our maturity
Shrieks ringing through saturated air
Echoes of innocence.
And as my arms strained to carry it all
I thought about how then
Everything was action
Swoop sweep dive dart dance cry crowd sing shoot stare pool park sweat kiss pick kick laugh
sing speak
How when we were little
We didn't need words to describe what we could feel
Didn't need to slow the soft imaginings of our muddy minds with the piled sticks of letters,
numbers, punctuation
You could see truths in a look
In a single glance.
They say that falling in love is a part of growing up
But really, it's childhood all over again:
It’s called unadulterated for a reason
Where the pretensions of society suddenly solidify
And our true selves can melt through the cracks.
We’re no longer amassed and matted words
No longer collections of thoughts or doubts
We are people
We are skin touching
We are lips colliding like the fated gravity that pulled us together
The mathematical forces that we don’t need to see or understand
But that bent our parallel universes nonetheless
In a burst of heat
A bright summer day
In a lifetime of winter.
So It’s almost Christmas.
I'm scooping spreading straining pulling prying wiping wicking flinging fixing
I’m thinking about how easy it was to read where there were no letters
And how similar these feelings are
Meeting Eric’s gaze for the first time
Jumping off a swing in the mid-January
They’re feelings of suddenly knowing the whole world
Of suddenly being twelve years old again and wide-eyed
Just knowing.
Just
knowing
When, abruptly, my father interrupts this hard-earned melt
With words I never thought I'd hear
Words my dad has never said to anyone
Except when he was angry
Or speaking to my dead sister at her memorial services
He says, "I'm sorry".
And I know what he’s talking about. I just
Know.
It is an apology for the alcohol between us
That had iced and broken
Until I lived in a world where bleary eyes wandered during holiday dinners
Where people who
said the most words were always the winners
Where the cold would carry on inside forever.
And in knowing this, I am certain
That my Thaw is more complete than I can see.
I know this is no temporary fix
Because I remember things in This
Thaw that I couldn't before
I remember the way my sister is beautiful in sleep
Remember how a single flower on a spring day could make me weep
And the times when my conversations read like poetry
Silent—in the eyes only
Every thing that I remember, I want to remember more
Because best of all
I remember
This.
I remember being a child because I still am one.
There are place inside, places unaffected by the slow slow poisons of estrogen and caffeine
and alcohol,
places still soft and malleable and believing,
places that still cry when touched
And before, when I would have buried them
Would have attributed this wretched softness
To necessary, nuisance roots
Taken down in some freakish, unnatural weather,
Now I look into Eric’s eyes
And see, every time, for the first time.
And I want to keep it
I just want to keep it all
Frozen.