(poems)
the new yorker / the king of fire
best american poetry / sleeping beauty
the new yorker / unbroken
perihelion / unfamiliar
poetry foundation / belly of the beast
academy of american poets / father outside
the new yorker / the day lou reed died
(essays)
bomb / the extreme & the elemental
esquire / the ticking is the bomb
(excerpts)
from this is the night our house will catch fire:
One can feel known inside an affair because, in some ways, it is a shared secret. Yet, by definition, an affair is based on a lie. Otherwise it has another name, otherwise it is called something else—an arrangement, an understanding, a compromise. It is a lie only the other is allowed access to. If you are willing to share this lie with me then you will know me in a way others cannot. It does beg the question of whether one really wants to be known at all, or if one is merely seeking to hide.
~
from stay:
ON GHOSTS
Q: Can you talk a bit about your mother, place her in the frame of your story? Do you recognize her in yourself?
A: My mother is a ghost presence in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, simply because that book focuses on how the trajectory of my life and the trajectory of my father’s life led us both into a homeless shelter for a few overlapping years. Yet my mother is the question behind everything we both do, hovering, both in her presence and in her absence, over us. Maybe there was no other place my father and I could have wrestled with the ghost of her but in that shelter, on those streets. And the question of how much of my mother I see in myself, I imagine we all hope that only the positive genes are passed on, but I don’t think it works that way.
~
from I will destroy you:
THE CHILD
The month my father is dying
I buy clothes too small for me
small pants, small t-shirt, small coat
& never bother to return them.
~
from my feelings:
MY JOKE
As I put the pipe to my lips
As I lift the flame to the glass
My joke
As the smoke fills me: Say goodbye to
Nick, even if
I am the only one in the room
& by the end I was always
The only one in the room.
~
from the reenactments:
(2011) All hushed, seven of us huddle in a kitchen, stare into a monitor. It’s about to start. The actress playing my mother (Julianne Moore) stares back at us—she’s in the middle of a living room, the room is just behind this wall, but I haven’t gone into the living room, not yet. A set of headphones hangs from an empty chair with my name on them—Dan points to them, points to my head. It’s only the sixth day of shooting, we are in a house in Queens, the owner rents it out at times for films like this, films that contain flashbacks to 1970s smalltown America. This kitchen—paneling stamped to look like wood, avocado-green refrigerator, seamless linoleum floor that looks like tiny bricks—is perfect. It’s supposed to be my childhood home, but we will never step outside this house. Today and tomorrow are all interiors—-after that we will be gone. Julianne is soaking wet, having just failed to throw herself into the ocean. Or, rather, having failed to keep herself under the waves after she did. You will know this by the next scene, from the note she will write—I know it already, having read the script, having written the book, having been there the first time around. We are meant to imagine that the ocean is near—walking distance—near enough for her to still be wet, which it was. Julianne stands there, waits, eyes downcast, looking toward the familiar carpet, a version of the wall-to-wall we once had (textured, harvest gold). At ACTION she begins to sob, or wail. I think of Saramago’s Blindness, how no one was there, at the beginning of the universe, God’s hands (hands?) working the nothingness into the somethingness, yet everyone knows what happened.
~
from the captain asks for a show of hands:
FIRE (excerpt)
more the idea of the flame than the flame,
as in: the flame
of the rose petal, the flame of the thorn
the sun is a flame, the dog’s teeth
flames
::
to be clear: with the body,
captain, we can do as we wish, we can do
as we wish with the body
but we cannot leave marks-capt’n I’m
trying to get this right
::
the world’s so small, the sky’s so high
we pray for rain it rains, we pray for sun it suns
we pray on our knees, we move our lips
we pray in our minds, we clasp our hands
our hands look tied before us
~
from the ticking is the bomb:
Here’s a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else—an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood—or it may be easier to blame the map you were given—folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print—but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.
One day I’ll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way.
~
from alice invents a little game & alice always wins:
ALICE (musing) Straw to a drowning man. Straw to a drowning man. A drowning man. A man drowning. (beat) I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around that one—you see a man drowning, you throw him a straw. (beat) What exactly does the drowning man do with the straw? I mean, does he use it like a snorkel, to breathe underwater? Does he simply hold on to it, like a tiny life raft—hey, drowning guy, grab on to this, a thousand more and you got yourself a boat. (musing) Does he use it to drink the ocean or puddle or whatever it is he’s drowning in, thus hurrying his demise, ending his misery? Is it the same straw that broke the camel’s back, the proverbial “last straw,” that last little bit which somehow pulls him under? (looks at Gideon) What kind of straw are we talking about here?
~
from another bullshit night in suck city:
If you asked me about my father then—the years he lived in a doorway, in a shelter, in an ATM—I’d say, Dead, I’d say, Missing, I’d say, I don’t know where he is. I’d say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true. I don’t know him, I’d say, my mother left him shortly after I was born, or just before. But this story did not hold still for long. It wavered.
Even before he became homeless I’d heard whispers, sensed he was circling close, that we were circling each other, like planets unmoored.
~
from blind huber:
HIVE
What would you do inside me? You would be utterly
lost, labyrinthine
comb, each corridor identical, a
funhouse, there, a bridge, worker knit to worker, a span
you can’t cross. On the other side the queen, a fortune of honey.
Once we filled an entire house with it, built the comb between floorboard
& joist, slowly at first, the constant
buzz kept the owners awake, then louder, until honey began to seep
from the walls, swell
the doorframes. Our gift.
They had to burn the house down to rid us.
~
from some ether:
EMPTYING TOWN
Each fall this town empties, leaving me
drained, standing on the dock, waving bye-,
bye, the white handkerchief
stuck in my throat. You know the way Jesus
rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming & thorny,
the way he points to it. I’m afraid
the way I miss you
will be this obvious. I have
a friend who everyone warns me
is dangerous, he hides
bloody images of Jesus around my house
for me to find when I come home—Jesus
behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked
into the mirror. He wants to save me
but we disagree from what. My version of hell
is someone ripping open his
shirt & saying,
look what I did for you.
~
from a note slipped under the door:
WATERMELONS
I have an enduring image from my childhood, one that returns to me often, unbidden. It involves a plant that somehow took root in the backseat of my grandmother’s car. Collected on the floor between the seats and the doors was a mixture of sand and dirt, carried in on our feet from the beach, and as mud on our sneakers on rainy days. No one ever cleaned the dirt, not from the backseat—my grandmother never gave it much thought. When I was young I sat in the back with the groceries, watching the trees pass, pushing her dog away with my feet. The dog smelled—if you touched it, your hands smelled like dog. Over the years the soil that gathered in the space between the seats and the doors grew deep, deep enough for a seed of an unspecified plant to take hold and send up a shoot. I’d chart its growth in private, checking on it whenever we went for a ride.
I don’t think that I ever told her, for fear she’d uproot it. My secret.