Half-Hazard Read online

  on the lip of a moral cup.

  I looked at the coffee bean and said,

  you’re not evil. Not believing in eternity should have

  broken me, but I understood the saw blade’s job.

  I unsnapped God like a clip-on tie.

  Satan never brought his fantastic army.

  For twenty-five years I cried out of hot windows,

  not sure if I knew what the shape of the world

  would be at my death. A simple ball?

  I sat on a hill and knew the story had its start and end.

  One day, I hated my own girl heart;

  it was a stone inside of me. The next day,

  this was not so and never would be again.

  I had no say. I began life,

  heaven or not, ten steps away

  from a brick church as a half-blonde anyone.

  What I am, my soft shoreline, my need

  to unlock doors and move

  from one train seat to the next,

  has saved me.

  Vampires Today

  Once, there was a year where every romance

  had fangs. It was hard to open up a novel

  without a vampire bearing down on a young, virgin neck.

  Soon, they were on the television. Later, the sidewalks.

  Teenagers. They owned us with their hackneyed plots.

  Platinum fleurs-de-lis emblazoned on their jeans.

  How do they wash them? I asked. They don’t,

  my friend said. It’s part of what keeps them so dark and stiff.

  An entire generation has arrived dark and stiff. Unlike

  my pliable, light, pubescent years. I grew up reading

  Little House on the Prairie. Sweet, blind Mary

  stole my heart. Turn the page. Oklahoma. Wild mustangs.

  Malaria. And Pa. Talk about a hero. Now they have boys

  so angry they transform into wild, shirtless dogs.

  They are maniacs, these fans. They beg their mothers

  to drive them to the theater where they burst

  into dollars and popcorn in their seats. They want the car

  tossed off their withering girl bodies. Lured off

  their couches, they are eager to be taken from their lives

  and placed directly in the vampire’s mouth. Younger

  and younger. Cha-ching. Is there nothing anyone can do?

  Vermont Collision

  If you want to see a boy lose his dream,

  kill his mother with a train. It happened.

  I was in Vermont serving

  a baked whitefish. Her son

  was busing a table. She was on her way

  to buy an ice-cream cone. A whistle blew.

  She got off of the tracks,

  but the side of the train still clipped

  her soft body, took it hundreds of feet

  until she fell into a meadow.

  There were so many warnings.

  That night he dropped half the things

  I asked him to hold. There was no moon.

  It was too dark. We were too happy.

  We might have been laughing

  as she was being hit.

  Urban Animals

  I learned about Chara, an Asian elephant,

  wandering the streets of Bangkok

  hungry for bananas, then about

  Barbara, pulling the big tent up,

  wearing a headdress with her name spelled

  in sequins, held in place by her big ears.

  I learned this because PBS wanted me

  to know about misery and Shirley,

  alone in Louisiana, tucked in a zoo.

  Twenty-two years of foot chains

  and hose baths. Elephants need other elephants,

  said the expert, her lab coat buttoned tight,

  her purple collar crushed against her skin.

  What was the point? my new love asked me

  as I recounted the documentary and cried.

  He felt that TV ate my sensitive heart

  the way boric acid eats through the beetle’s thorax.

  This was an unexpected example because my love

  knew nothing about bugs; rather, he loved Badiou.

  Nights like this I sometimes wish I had

  an entomologist to curl up with, to ask about

  the dangers I myself might pose to exoskeletons.

  But tonight I just want to forget the urban elephants

  and arrive at something that makes me feel good.

  I think I can take my conscience out for waffles

  and sit in a comfortable booth

  and not feel the universe pinch me

  with its guilt. The women will bring them

  on brown trays and move perfectly through the air,

  their hips, extraordinary, the kind that children

  slide out of merrily and go to school. Full grown,

  I go to school, stepping down stairs

  to open my classroom door and teach

  from behind a plastic desk.

  I talk about words and get away

  from every animal floundering. Where I walk

  is not the henhouse floor, chicken wire

  holding me in my basket. How I travel

  is not through water, hook and net

  sweeping the deep sea.

  Where happiness arrives, the universe and I

  have a mutual understanding, I get to live

  my life with this brain and thousands of one

  dollar bills, which I can use however—

  I can toss peanuts to the elephants or just

  get into my car, my long arms steering, and drive

  and, choice after choice, feel the skin

  wall of my body, or not.

  Unofficial Lady Bible

  So many minds dwell on

  what happens between the sheets.

  I wish I’d been prepared.

  Dough rising in bread pans. The fry cook

  busy in the walk-in, pants down,

  hips furiously pumping against

  the pastry chef, pressed against

  a mayonnaise barrel. Didn’t they have

  spouses? Children? Shame? The real shock.

  It wasn’t just them. They only began

  the parade. Adulterers. Wrongdoers. Creeps.

  How long could a girl like me work

  in a place like that and keep her eyes closed?

  My role models had been delivered

  from the Bible. I was handed a child’s oven.

  An apron. Lipstick. At seven, I could press

  a perfect piecrust with my thumb. Ta da!

  Decades passed before I would open

  the door to that walk-in and arrive

  as somebody other than myself. Yes.

  My busy mind opened it all the time,

  adding variety. I mean, how could Tina

  commit so much betrayal? Her body

  its own Bible. Tight-assed and aging. Beholden

  only to her own climb and joy. It took me years

  to admire exactly what she’d done.

  Undressed

  The woman in me pulls off a pink sweater

  and places it in a drawer, lights

  her candles, apricots spicing the air.

  Part of me wants to throw this ring back,

  but part of me is happy to have a diamond.

  Is love sad? Part of me wants to chew the ring up

  and die. Part of me always wants to die. I pick

  this piece of myself up all the time, mend its mittens

  and kiss it on the mouth. I love its mouth—

  the little beast. A doctor on the radio

  said that a woman should never split herself

  into halves, division has consequences.

  But I’ve quit believing the radio waves,

  even though the little beast has failed to join me,

  tuning in news stations for more details on every


  kidnapped girl’s life. Part of me is ready

  to stand at the altar. Part of me cannot

  imagine the closet always shared. One time

  I thought I was pinned—in a car—metal snapped

  through metal to get me out. After I knew

  I was going to live, I dedicated my life to me.

  Here come footsteps. The clamor of my lover’s

  shoes travels across the floor. From the sidewalk,

  through the front door, down the hallway to my study.

  They vibrate in my ring. A physicist might claim

  this is impossible, unless my lover travels like

  King Kong, his energy swinging every object

  in the house. I’m home, I’m home, I hear him call.

  (I think I love this ring!) The little beast rolling

  in her new grave as he moves through rooms to find me.

  Circus Youth

  My life was going by. Year. Cake. Year. Cake.

  And no circus. No clowns. Only that rotten dress,

  blue and tumbling. I wanted to eat the buttons.

  I wanted to feed the rest—cuffs and collar—

  to the dogs. Let it be dung. Let it be

  that common. I craved a ship. I desired

  a texture wholly unlike my life. Clowns.

  Funny rubber balls. Who handed me these knives

  to juggle? Who said everything was going to be fine?

  I know. I know. Childhood shows no mercy.

  Others have had to catch much trickier knives—

  all blade, no handle. No one meets our demands

  for better maps or parents or more robust

  Saint Bernards. The worst day of my life.

  The circus. The tragic reality that it was a show.

  Lions reduced to cats. Leather-clad men riding motorcycles

  inside metal balls. The terror of the ringmaster,

  so much like my grandfather, folding in a bow.

  We took you, my parents said. And it wasn’t

  a lie. Elephants in chains. Painted faces blistering

  under the makeup’s grease. Afterward,

  I ached on my sandbag pillow. Pots clattering

  to the kitchen floor. A heap of a dead horse

  melting in the field beyond my window.

  Couldn’t there be a different circus? Music

  piped at the happiest pitch? Children so thrilled

  they shit themselves in the stands and smile on?

  And clown hands, clown necks, clown thighs put together

  to assemble a truly hilarious thing? Futile, I know,

  I prayed for years. Slowly flowering in my bed.

  Certain of something. Wanting what I wanted.

  Clown in my doorway. Clown on my floor.

  A clown on my very own thumb.

  II

  Good-Bye, Idaho

  The dieseled fields. The lava hardened

  into unlovable craters. The buds on my raspberries

  covered in frost. Idaho. Idaho. Look at yourself.

  Dotted with zealots. Spotted with cows. Luckily

  this won’t be like leaving a man. No scene.

  Nobody will be calling anybody a whore.

  Not now. How else to say it? It’s time.

  It’s as if you can’t see that. It’s as if you can’t see

  a lot of things. Maybe this will be like leaving a man.

  Plopped down on a couch. And I’ve had to live on you.

  Covered in crumbs. Look at yourself. Plaid-covered

  and mustard-stained. How could anyone take more?

  Do not say that I’ve failed. There is a polished gun

  in every room. I dream of metal. I dream of the arrow

  piercing the songbird’s heart. No. I’m not saying

  that I’m the songbird. I’m saying that I can’t sleep.

  Not on top of you. I didn’t want this to be funny.

  I’m tired of making everyone laugh. Idaho, look at me.

  I’m being serious. Your trick roads, I’m done with them.

  The face they gave me. What they’ve claimed as theirs.

  It’s no longer beautiful, the sharp ways they fall.

  I am wood. When I see them, nothing inside me curls.

  You think you can haunt me? You think I feel

  the same way about you? No. Everything has changed.

  It had to. So, deer, shed your fur. Mate recklessly

  behind the snapping trees. Throw your brown bodies

  onto the road. I said I was leaving. I said good-bye. Watch me.

  Now. My hand is on the door.

  Stamps

  Back when I was nearly blameless and could visit the zoo

  and admire the tigers not for what they actually were,

  but as monstrous man-eaters that deserved to be caught.

  Back when I thought I had already tasted life’s worst

  disappointment, because I’d fallen in love right after college

  and it hadn’t worked out. Back when every attractive man—

  gay or straight, it didn’t matter yet—getting off the bus

  caught my eye, I was a Republican. And I went to work

  in Washington, DC, and met all the suited villains

  I’d been warned about. Still reading about Goldwater’s

  conscience. Thrilled by the idea of bombs. Strangling

  themselves in Limbaugh’s neckties. Certain our own

  country needed to stage a coup. (Clinton in the White House

  doing what Clinton did.) One day, I set off to buy

  a thousand dollars worth of stamps. The stuffing

  of envelopes would soon follow. The best way to get

  money is to send a letter and ask for it, they said. Halfway

  to the post office, a breathless boy chased me down.

  Red-faced. Panicked. His dizzying tie slung over his shoulder.

  He told me what my boss had forgotten to say. We can’t

  use stamps with women or black people on them. The world

  toppled me that day in a business park—so young

  and dumb—I left in an instant to become who I really am.

  Half-Hatched

  A boy didn’t want to be locked in.

  He wanted to blow with the prairie grass,

  to feel deep and green. He was off to Alaska,

  crossing a half-frozen river. The temperature was unusual,

  the rain half snow. Not quite spring

  and he went stuttering up the mountain in the cold,

  lived in a bus. He wanted to live

  like his ancestors, but he refused to spear,

  stained his fingers green picking tough berries.

  He waited. He thought the wet grass

  would be a marvelous sight in the wild.

  He waited to rush the fields,

  waited for the grass tips to turn green

  and whip around him when he moved.

  It was never green enough and he started back.

  He was writing these things down.

  But he was talking to himself too,

  delusional from eating the wrong berries.

  And he’d noted page numbers as well, as if

  it mattered in keeping things straight.

  The water exploded like clockwork

  out of melting snow. The streams

  carried along large chunks of ice.

  Standing at the river’s edge,

  he wanted to cross. It was too big.

  His boots were soaked. When it grew dark,

  he lit a candle, looked to see beyond what he could see—

  and in his mind he went ahead anyway.

  Crossed the river, armed with irresistible secrets

  he hadn’t intended to carry this far.

  An Analogy

  I’m saying I was wrong

  and he was wrong

  and that our two wrongs together

  we
re like a river hitting

  the first of the big rocks.

  His tit for my tat didn’t improve anything

  for anyone. Except for the hikers

  who looked at the rapids

  from a huge distance in their dry shoes.

  They saw water leaping,

  something beautiful happening.

  And maybe it benefited a black bear

  who managed to paw an extra fish

  out of the equation. Soon it was no longer

  about us. The hikers kept gawking

  through binoculars down into the canyon,

  and the bear continued to eat.

  Fish were never intended to be immortal.

  Surprisingly, I had thought of none of this.

  I’m saying I was wrong.

  I didn’t expect the wilderness of love

  to be something you had to pack for.

  Local Hazards

  Outside Yellowstone, I see them—these bears.

  Lumbering like fathers through backyards,

  ravenous for whatever we seal inside our trash.

  DO NOT FEED THE BEARS the signs say.

  Even this big, they are animals, my mother warns,

  holding her hands out the distance

  of a loaf of bread. Beneath that fluff they are

  killing machines, adds my father, raising his arms,

  curving his fingers to produce mock paws.

  Season after season, they carry on. Moist snouts.

  Sharp claws. Hind flanks glistening under moon and sun.

  I am too young to deal with them. Led by hunger

  to my doorstep, to my dreams, they wildly arrive

  almost every day. And I close my eyes, starving

  in my own ways. Bread crumbs in my pockets.

  Trout in the refrigerator. The deep smell of myself

  on my fingertips. Unwitting hazards, do not come close.