A poem about Portland, because that’s what happens

This is a poem about all the books I bought (Nightingale, After-Normal, Holy Moly) and all the potatoes I ate, also let’s mention the oysters, the white wine and the red, the IPA I drank among other Ducks, also Colson Whitehead and Atlas Pinto. There was some rain, numerous transaction involving credit card and grief, sunshine, and also ice cream made of hazelnuts.

What of the man who said, “We’re not worthy of God’s Love”?

Sir, there are so many things I’m not worthy of, but let’s begin here: shoes that cost $289, but there’s no tax in Oregon, so let’s begin here. 

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The History of Cumin

 

I’m seductive, sublime, redolent of pepper and hot desert wind, but common, like salt. I fill the room, a hot, dense fog. No one ignores me. Not everyone loves me, I get that, I’m an acquired taste, like dry wine that tastes of berries and loam. I’m a smokier sort, the kind of woman who enters a room dangling a cigarette from her fingers, eyes blackened with kohl, her voice a thick Turkish coffee. You imagine the Silk Road, dusty paths with caravans of camels. Actually, I traveled with the Spanish, fertile and amorous, spreading my love to all, taking root in rocks and soot. I’m polymorphous; I’ve gone as far as China. But you’ll find me, in the mole, masala, mutaki. I sneak up on you. I’m sly and overpowering. I’m the overtones of the marketplace, the residue of the hearth, the charred remains of game .

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Poem in Which I Replace You with I (poem 30)

We were making sushi. I was fanning the rice with an old copy of the New Yorker. I said, “I’m not doing it right.” I was always saying things like that. I said, “Do it this way.” I was stirring the rice with a paddle, and cutting cucumbers into strips I could see thorough. I was making wasabi to the consistency of a baby’s earlobe. I told me that. I was using crab instead of fake crab made from Cod or Haddock. I only like real crabmeat. I taught me that. I was making my body a smaller and smaller version of myself. I told me that I was not too good for I. I was just normal like the rest of everyone else. I was not going on to better things. I should be happy just standing there in the kitchen making sushi with I. I tried to live in the moment. Like the time I hit me in the eye with a snowball. It could happen to anyone, I said. Sometimes an orange is the most delicious thing, an occasion to be celebrated, like the sunrise or the first cup of coffee. It was time to put a towel over everything. To absorb the steam. C’mon, I said, let’s just sit here. There was never enough space for I and me.

                                                                                                                        Set aside.

                                                                                                                        Allow to cool. 

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The Novel I’m Not Writing (poem 28)

The novel I’m not writing can’t be written. The novel I’m not writing can’t be written because it involves certain events in the future I am not yet privy to. The novel I’m not writing necessitates precarious jumps through time, involving flashbacks and use of the subjunctive. The novel I’m not writing takes place in the past, and in the present, in such a way as to seem contemporary and timeless. The novel I’m not writing requires the use of words that have not yet been coined, technology that has not yet been invented, people who have not yet been given life. The novel I’m not writing requires readers to imagine within the confines of their minds an entirely different landscape than the ones they are accustomed to. The novel I’m not writing presupposes the ability to conceive of multi-dimensional morality that is simultaneously visual and tactile. I don’t want to brag, but the novel I’m not writing is epic in scope. It might be the Great American Non-Novel. The novel I’m not writing does not involve whales or rivers or New York City in any way. The novel does not depict gastronomical orgies or erotic love. It does not engage in satirical word play or philosophical musings on the nature of Man. The novel I’m not writing, if you could read it, would blow your mind. The novel I’m not writing exists in an ephemeral dream space where all non-existent artwork dwells. The invisibility of the novel I’m not writing is infinite in the same way that a black hole is infinite: the idea of it negates itself. 

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Message in a Bottle

Dear whoever is reading this at an indeterminate time in the future,

The past is not as distant as you might think. If you row your tiny craft a little further and just over the far wave, it is there. Fragile as a blown glass skeleton with shark’s teeth and a raccoon claws, the past is waiting to buoy you up and then gnaw your face off.

In the past that’s what would be called exaggeration, but in the future, you know such language is passé. There is no way to exaggerate now, the present being what it is: in your face like a blow dryer. Please forgive me these metaphors, I am adrift on the perils of my mind which are triangular and dry. Only the intercession of dolphins and squid might assist me.

Let me now tell you the secrets of my skin: at midnight, adrift on the ocean, the moon is as far away as it ever was. It is as far away as I am from you. Do you understand? When people say that distance is relative, they imagine two fixed points in a fixed system. What I pose to you now is to understand chaos in relation to another chaos. Two starfish caught in two different storms.

I will say it another way: I will never be as far from you as I am today, nor as far from myself. I will continue to cast about for ways to reach you. No doubt my language is as illegible to you as you yourself are to me. Your face is a distant galaxy, luminous and calm, fiery and glacial, in motion and still.

Do not look for me, for no doubt by your inscrutable now I am nothing more than one more escaped atom of oxygen, lost in the universe, looking for home. 

(From NPR)

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The Sin of Dancing

(didn’t I say it probably wouldn’t be a poem? My students had to write a prose poem today, so here’s this!)

 

She wanted to spin, be spun out, her skirt flaring like indecency. She wanted the eyes to see her there, only her, not as if she were just one of many. Her problem was escaping the house, the day, the hour, the explaining. She had the money in her pocket, ones rolled up in little straws, their edges pressing into her thigh. It was easy enough. Down the back stairs while Mom was in the living room reciting times tables with the twins, Dad flat out on the couch like a bear. Sandy on the phone, brothers in the front yard with Frisbees. When the door clicked behind her it was like the world was her prison. She could go back. She would. The gym shone and smelled of old sweat. Raylene was there and they held hands like kindergarteners. When the music started and the teacher showed them the steps, one followed by two and three, then four. When the teacher’s  poodle skirt flared in a way that Mom would disapprove of, she felt her heart lift in her chest like a rocket. Even the mixed couples around them could not tether her. She knew there would be trouble.

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