Kim Addonizio: Sestina: Writing

I spent an entire day at my desk writing
vapid effluvia like I’m so sick of writing
pages of drivel, not feeling like a writer
at all even though “A writer writes
and doesn’t just talk about writing”
was drilled into me by a writing

instructor years ago. “Writing
begets writing”
was another lesson I learned from this writer
though she published only one book, written
when she was twenty-five, and never wrote
another. She taught writing

until she shot herself at forty. Writers
sometimes kill themselves—after all, writing
is difficult and so is mortal life and even good writers
are sometimes bad at living; writing
can be a place to hide, but you can’t write
all the time and when you hate what you do manage to write

it makes you feel dead already. To write
well is another story entirely. Sometimes writing
takes you so far out to sea that you, the writer,
disappear like shredded fog. There is no writer.
The ocean is the writer.
When it lets you go, weak as a dangling modifier, the writing

washes in like space debris. You say “I wrote”
but you didn’t, really. You only transcribed the writing
the ocean gave you. According to some writers
God is the Ur-writer
since He created the world and humans but as a writer
He got mixed results at best. The best writing

sometimes might be no writing.
Does the world really need more writing
and more people trying to be writers
when there is so much wrong that writing
can’t fix? It seems the most that writers
can do is call out to the world, but who listens to writers?

Possibly, no one. But keep writing; be a writer.
Without hope or reason: writing. Beyond good and evil: writing.
And if you stop writing, try not to shoot yourself. Get a life.

Kim Addonizio: Near Heron Lake

During the night, horses passed close
to our parked van. Inside I woke cold
under the sleeping bag, hearing their heavy sway,
the gravel harsh under their hooves as they moved off
down the bank to the river. You slept on,
though maybe in your dream you felt them enter
our life just long enough to cause that slight
stirring, a small spasm in your limbs and then
a sigh so quiet, so close to being nothing
but the next breath, I could believe you never guessed
how those huge animals broke out of the dark and came
toward us. Or how afraid I was before I understood
what they were--only horses, not anything
that would hurt us. The next morning
I watched you at the edge of the river
washing your face, your bare chest beaded with bright water,
and knew how much we needed this,
the day ahead with its calm lake
we would swim in, naked, able to touch again.
You were so beautiful. And I thought
the marriage might never end.

Kim Addonizio: Mermaid song

 for Aya at fifteen

Damp-haired from the bath, you drape yourself

upside down across the sofa, reading,

one hand idly sunk into a bowl

of crackers, goldfish with smiles stamped on.

I think they are growing gills, swimming

up the sweet air to reach you. Small girl,

my slim miracle, they multiply.

In the black hours when I lie sleepless,

near drowning, dread-heavy, your face

is the bright lure I look for, love's hook

piercing me, hauling me cleanly up.

Kim Addonizio: So What

Guess what. If love is only chemistry—
phenylethylamine, that molecule
that dizzies up the brain's back room, smoky
with hot bebop, it won't be long until
a single worker's mopping up the scuffed
and littered floor, whistling tunelessly,
each endorphin cooling like a snuffed
glass candle, the air stale with memory.
So what, you say; outside, a shadow lifts
a trumpet from its case, lifts it like an ingot
and scatters a few virtuosic riffs
toward the locked-down stores. You've quit
believing that there's more, but you're still stirred
enough to stop, and wait, listening hard.

Kim Addonizio: February 14

This is a valentine for the surgeons
ligating the portal veins and hepatic artery,
placing vascular clamps on the vena cava
as my brother receives a new liver.

And a valentine for each nurse;
though I don’t know how many there are
leaning over him in their gauze masks,
I’m sure I have enough—as many hearts

as it takes, as much embarrassing sentiment
as anyone needs. One heart
for the sutures, one for the instruments
I don’t know the names of,

and the monitors and lights,
and the gloves slippery with his blood
as the long hours pass,
as a T-tube is placed to drain the bile.

And one heart for the donor,
who never met my brother
but who understood the body as gift
and did not want to bury or burn that gift.

For that man, I can’t imagine how
one heart could suffice. But I offer it.
While my brother lies sedated,
opened from sternum to groin,

I think of a dead man, being remembered
by others in their sorrow, and I offer him
these words of praise and gratitude,
oh beloved whom we did not know.

Kim Addonizio: What the Dead Fear

On winter nights, the dead
see their photographs slipped
from the windows of wallets,
their letters stuffed in a box
with the clothes for Goodwill.
No one remembers their jokes,
their nervous habits, their dread
of enclosed places.
In these nightmares, the dead feel
the soft nub of the eraser
lightening their bones. They wake up
in a panic, go for a glass of milk
and see the moon, the fresh snow,
the stripped trees.
Maybe they fix a turkey sandwich,
or watch the patterns on the TV.
It’s all a dream anyway.
In a few months
they’ll turn the clocks ahead,
and when they sleep they’ll know the living
are grieving for them, unbearably lonely
and indifferent to beauty. On these nights
the dead feel better. They rise
in the morning, and when the cut
flowers are laid before their names
they smile like shy brides. Thank you,
thank you, they say. You shouldn’t have,
they say, but very softly, so it sounds
like the wind, like nothing human.

Kim Addonizio: The promise

When my daughter confessed she'd wanted to end her life at ten--
stepped out on the window ledge and stood there, at the edge

of a decision--we promised never to kill ourselves, never
to abandon each other. And I've never told her about the night

two years later when I came to a place in myself
where it seemed, for the first time, possible--

the way a door appears suddenly in a fairy tale, where the wall was solid.
I knew I could do it--I was drinking

and heartsick, I had enough pills.
I sat on my bed, arms around my knees,

and rocked the way I used to as a child.
Then, I'd believed in God; I would talk to Him

half the night sometimes, knowing
He was there, in heaven, just above the ceiling of my parents' room.

But now there was no one. Only
a couple of cats, locked together in some yard or alley, yowling

until someone raised a window, yelled and slammed it shut.
What a mess I was. How fiercely I loved her.

Kim Addonizio: Whack Report

A woman at the gym today said to her friend, Most people are whack.
Whack meaning crazy, displeasing, undesirable, stupid, of poor quality,
appalling, masturbatory, laid off, weird, or dead.
Most poets, as it turns out, are generally pretty whack
as in mentally ill. Anne Sexton, for example. Robert Lowell, also quite whack.
I myself am whack about sixty-seven percent of the time,
not counting nights and weekends, when it's more like eighty-two percent.
But let us focus on the beautiful wine glass, eighteen percent full
of sane, delightful, and intelligent fruit and acid. A whiff of rose petals.
Black cherry, pomegranate, cassis, devil's food cake. And limestone. Drink me
and taste my ooids, my hot buttered toast. For we must be ceaselessly whack
as in deranged said another whack poet who became a whack gun runner.
Guns are whack. Much of the world population experiences the whack factor
ninety-nine percent of the time, which can cause excessive thirst, diarrhea, death
and other side-effects. After a while, if you keep saying a word, it kind of loses
its meaning. Whack. Whack. Here come the weed whackers, beheading the grass.

Kim Addonizio: Like that

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night,
with no moon and no town anywhere
and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in the ditch.
Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty water
blurting from the faucet in the kitchen,
leaking down through the floorboards to hot cement.
Do it without asking,
without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s
shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV
showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways,
while the thieves slice through the fence with steel clippers.
Love me when you can’t find a decent restaurant open anywhere,
when you’re alone in a glaring diner
with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are greasy
and your hash browns underdone.
Snick the buttons off the front of my dress
and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just
beneath the surface,
their cold fins waving.
Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s driven
in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers;
and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat,
while turtles drag their bellies through slick mud,
through the footprints of coots and ducks.
Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes open up,
when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the pedal sinks to the floor,
while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another...

Love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me
when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak,
when you don’t believe in anything...
Listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down
with me and close your eyes, the road curves here,
I’m cranking up the radio
and we’re going,
we won’t turn back as long as you love me,
as long as you keep on doing it

exactly like that.

Kim Addonizio: The Moment

The way my mother bent to her car door, fumbling the keys,
taking forever it seemed
to find the right one, line it up with the lock and feebly push it in
and turn,
the way she opened the door so slowly, bending a bit more, easing
herself finally into the leather seat - She'd hurt her ribs, she
explained, but it wasn't injury
that I saw, not the temporary setback that's followed by healing,
the body's tenacious renewal;
I saw for the first time old age, decline, the inevitable easing
toward death. Once in the car, though,
settled behind the wheel, backing out and heading for the steady
traffic on the highway,
she was herself again, my mother as I'd always known her: getting
older, to be sure,
in her seventies now, but still vital, still the athlete she'd been all
her life; jogging, golf,
tennis especially - the sport she'd excelled at, racking up
championships - they were as natural
to her as breath. All my life she'd been the definition of grace, of a
serenely unshakable confidence
in the body; impossible ever to imagine her helpless, frail, confined
to walker or wheelchair.
She was humming now as she drove, that momentary fumbling
erased, no trace of it.
No acknowledgment of pain, of the ache she must be feeling
in her side. My mother
refused all that, she would go on refusing it. She peered ahead at
the busy road, the past all but forgotten -
somewhere behind us griefs, losses, terrible knowledge, but ahead
of us a day we'd spend together,
we were going there now, while there was still time, non of it was
going to be wasted.

Kim Addonizio: Fine

You're lucky. It's always them and not you. The family trapped in the fire, the secretary slain in the parking lot holding her coffee and Egg McMuffin, the ones rushed to Emergency after the potluck. You're lucky you didn't touch the tuna casserole, and went for the baked chicken instead. Your friend with breast cancer that was detected too late, metastasized to the lymph nodes, the lungs, a few months to live, lucky there's no history in your family. Another friend's fiance, heart attack at forty-seven. You lie in bed at night, your head on your lover's chest, and you're grateful. Your teenaged daughter, unlike all her friends, hasn't become sullen or combative, addicted to cigarettes or booze. She's not in the bathroom with her finger down her throat to throw up dinner. You and your family are fine. You're happy. It's like you're in your own little boat, just you, sailing along, and the wind is up and nothing's leaking. All around you you can see other boats filling up, flipping over, sliding under. If you look into the water you can watch them for a while, going down slowly, getting colder and farther away. Soon, if nothing happens to you, if your luck holds, really holds, you'll end up completely alone.

Kim Addonizio: Virgin spring

It’s a terrible scene, the two men talking to the girl who foolishly lets
them lead her away
from the road she’s taking to church, the men raping and killing her,
the young boy with them
watching, then left for a while with her body. But the film’s next scene
is more terrible
in some ways, the men and boy arriving at the house where the girl’s
parents live, but not
knowing, and the parents not knowing either, offering a meal, all of
them sitting together, breaking
bread at a long table—Is that the most awful, or is it when one man
tries to sell the mother
her murdered daughter’s clothes? — and she takes them, pretending to
consider. Though how
could she pretend at that moment, how control herself? Yet she does;
she goes outside,
locking them in the barn, and runs to her husband, to whom the task
of killing them falls.
So it goes on — rape, betrayal, murder, not even the boy is spared. And
what about the father,
swearing to build a church on the spot his daughter was killed, and the
miracle of water
gushing forth from the ground when they lift her body — Is that
enough, is there some sort
of balance now, good following evil, revenge annulled, the family
cleansed? What about
the other, dark-haired sister, the pregnant one, who had been a few yards
behind on the road
to church that morning, who had followed the men and watched from
a safe distance
while they erased the girl, her prettiness, her spoiled ways, her stupid
innocence —
I don’t know what to make of the sister. She’s the one who knows the
world is brutal
and goes on, scattering seed for the hogs, the one who says nothing,
the one who survives.

Kim Addonizio: Gravity

Carrying my daughter to bed
I remember how light she once was,
no more than a husk in my arms.
There was a time I could not put her down,
so frantic was her crying if I tried
to pry her from me, so I held her
for hours at night, walking up and down the hall,
willing her to fall asleep. She'd grow quiet,
pressed against me, her small being alert
to each sound, the tension in my arms, she'd take
my nipple and gaze up at me,
blinking back fatigue she'd fight whatever terror
waited beyond my body in her dark crib. Now
that she's so heavy I stagger beneath her,
she slips easily from me, down
into her own dreaming. I stand over her bed,
fixed there like a second, dimmer star,
though the stars are not fixed: someone
once carried the weight of my life.

Kim Addonizio: A childhood

Our drinks came with paper umbrellas.
My mother put on tennis whites.
My father went to the bar
the way he always did.

My mother put on tennis whites.
My brother threw me against a wall
the way he always did.
I believed in my guardian angel.

My brother threw my mother against a wall.
I walked in my sleep.
I believed in my guardian angel.
I woke up far from the house.

I walked in my sleep.
My mother read fairy tales and sang to me.
I woke up far from the house.
My mother was old, my father dead.

My mother read fairy tales and sang to me.
My father and brother crashed through the door.
My mother was old, my father dead
along with my guardian angel.

My father and brother crashed through the door.
I went to the bar
along with my guardian angel
and our drinks came with paper umbrellas.

Kim Addonizio: Good girl

Look at you, sitting there being good.
After two years you’re still dying for a cigarette.
And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?
Don’t you want to run to the corner right now
for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice
and a nice lemon slice, wouldn’t the backyard
that you’re so sick of staring out into
look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends
day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint,
the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs —
don’t you want to mess it all up, to roll around
like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren’t you a dog anyway,
always groveling for love and begging to be petted?
You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides
of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,
you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.
Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes
and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first
beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven’t they
been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn’t it time
you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets
to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?
Sure it’s time. You’ve rolled over long enough.
Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this
there’s one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.
So get going. Listen: they’re howling for you now:
up and down the block your neighbors’ dogs
burst into frenzied barking and won’t shut up.

Kim Addonizio: Forms of Love

I love you but I'm married.
I love you but I wish you had more hair.
I love you more.
I love you more like a friend.
I love your friends more than you.
I love how when we go into a mall and classical muzak is playing,
you can always name the composer.
I love you, but one or both of us is/are fictional.
I love you but "I" am an unstable signifier.
I love you saying, "I understand the semiotics of that" when I said, "I
had a little personal business to take care of."
I love you as long as you love me back.
I love you in spite of the restraining order.
I love you from the coma you put me in.
I love you more than I've ever loved anyone, except for this one guy.
I love you when you're not getting drunk and stupid.
I love how you get me.
I love your pain, it's so competitive.
I love how emotionally unavailable you are.
I love you like I'm a strange backyard and you're running from the
cops, looking for a place to stash your gun.
I love your hair.
I love you but I'm just not that into you.
I love you secretly.
I love how you make me feel like I'm a monastery in the desert.
I love how you defined grace as the little turn the blood in the
syringe takes when you're shooting heroin, after you pull back
the plunger slightly to make sure you hit the vein.
I love your mother, she's the opposite of mine.
I love you and feel a powerful spiritual connection to you, even
though we've never met.
I love your tacos! I love your stick deodorant!
I love it when you tie me up with ropes using the knots you
learned in Boy Scouts, and when you do the stoned Dennis
Hopper rap from Apocalypse Now!
I love your extravagant double takes!
I love your mother, even though I'm nearly her age!
I love everything about you except your hair.
If it weren't for that I know I could really, really love you.

Kim Addonizio: You Don't Know What Love Is

You don’t know what love is
but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up
with an ache she can’t locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

Kim Addonizio: For Desire

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;

and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal

surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,

or cherries, the rich spurt in the back

of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.

Give me the lover who yanks open the door

of his house and presses me to the wall

in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched

and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload

and begin their delicious diaspora

through the cities and small towns of my body.

To hell with the saints, with martyrs

of my childhood meant to instruct me

in the power of endurance and faith,

to hell with the next world and its pallid angels

swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.

I want this world. I want to walk into

the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along

like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,

and I want to resist it. I want to go

staggering and flailing my way

through the bars and back rooms,

through the gleaming hotels and weedy

lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks

where dogs are let off their leashes

in spite of the signs, where they sniff each

other and roll together in the grass, I want to

lie down somewhere and suffer for love until

it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again

and put on that little black dress and wait

for you, yes you, to come over here

and get down on your knees and tell me

just how fucking good I look.

Kim Addonizio: Stolen Moments

What happened, happened once. So now it's best
in memory - an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge -
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn't last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love's

merciless, the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.

Kim Addonizio: What Do Women Want?

I want a red dress.

I want it flimsy and cheap,

I want it too tight, I want to wear it

until someone tears it off me.

I want it sleeveless and backless,

this dress, so no one has to guess

what's underneath. I want to walk down

the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store

with all those keys glittering in the window,

past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old

donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers

slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,

hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.

I want to walk like I'm the only

woman on earth and I can have my pick.

I want that red dress bad.

I want it to confirm

your worst fears about me,

to show you how little I care about you

or anything except what

I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment

from its hanger like I'm choosing a body

to carry me into this world, through

the birth-cries and the love-cries too,

and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,

it'll be the goddamned

dress they bury me in.