The Brooklyn Rail

MUSEUM OF GIRL

What my lover at the market didn’t know was that I’m at stakes with myself or I’m with

nobody:   At nine I thumbed at the mottle of blood clot between my legs, my mother telling

me the toallitas are the best chiquita,    they don’t hurt the way tampones do, all bonded by

a divine and crucial   lack     —     nestled right in the area

where the pretty meets its eye     I use it as allegory for when I’m seventeen, body a cling

to the stilted tank where I’m  standing no, I’ve  knelt  atop a bus station in mid-February

where a boy  this walled thing of his own  sets his lips together and I try to sober him the best

I can but I’m dulled to the intrigue       I can imagine it now, his cracked palm roughed

on an elevator door,  where I think I quiver,  and I think I try to conjure an image of the

downtown river winding its way east, where a specific crack against the bridge —

and that boy — he turns to me then, wind-beaten lip flesh rabid against his braces, he turns

and shoots a glob of spit onto the concrete, where the cold wishes it away, and he tries

to catch my eye — this boy — and later I’m standing above my mother’s thinning grey hair,

belly ballooned with trouble that lasts, where she sees I’ve come home after meeting with the

good-natured boy for the first time in a long while  and she belts when she asks, See, that didn’t

hurt, did it?  And I’ll torture a smile on my face, will it to break, and say No, not at all.

THE PROGRAM

I was at the club when someone told me
a part of the sun had torn off and ate

itself. I mean, I can’t say I believe it much
but I’m almost certain the sky had

abandoned its stewardship. I mean, I really
don’t care for that stuff, if you know

what I mean; I’m a bit of a lost cause, having
keyed my way to a system of desire, hm—

Every time you smoke a cigarette, [STAR] says
suddenly, you’re connecting to an ancestor,

and she lets the plume of marijuana elude her
nostril, drones about retiring from the

Lower East Side scene and becoming a pastor.
I’m with it, I say, let God do the modesty

for me, then, why not? I’ve got moral gravitas,
right. Smart and literary. Short and suspended.

We lean against somewhere, my crater of a stomach
spilled over the edge of some dream I try

to sell myself. We’re in New York, amores, here’s
the fucking real: IF YOU KEEP SEEING IT

AS GOOD, ALL YOU’RE FALLING IN LOVE WITH
IS POTENTIAL. It’s all very low vibrational,

duh?


Yeah, I keep the toxins in me. Dog-eared
and licked, hm—it’s time to be kind today.

The pastoral has been killing itself
lately, though there is not enough of

me to wonder why. This Dominican Scorpio takes me
out on a date, kisses me with teeth, says you’re too

good for twenty-three. Writing the body feels urgent to
me, and so I ask him what color bedazzle

he wants the world’s skinniest skyscraper to be. This is too
New York, I think, too dramatic force

without the obligation of must. Time to render an invisible
lilt, cursor to the eclipsed moon though when

I raise myself to the center I can only imagine the
circumstance it imagines in. New York I’ve got

a belly in me, it’s all abstraction but most importantly
it’s all love. Of which the diatonic scale

scalds itself, all buttered up in this line of—oops,
the skinny white girls saunter into this room

of a room, the snug of halter top always in the name
of a lived evening. The boys follow suit,

weighing desperately against the prevailing key, these
Lower East Side it boys, all clad in nothing but

silver and whole step—they loiter along the block,
hoping to be it, these it boys, how they’ve whitened

the intervals. She’s kind of a slut but in a good way,
one drawls. Oh, these dream boys,

how glad they are to run the New York initiative.
Love a good slut, the other retorts. Are you

prepared for a . . . the narrative recourse, then? Fuck
off with that derealization shit, babe, we’re

charting internal histories, clamoring for the blue-warm
soaps of hunger. There’s no way we won’t

heaven ourselves underneath the Queensboro Bridge,
or the sultry palisade where we linger our toes

against leisure, where I attempt to understand everything
in relation to other people rather than myself, and

the second hardly metabolizes the brief moment before
I think: I hate you, it’s true. This isn’t about that,

though. This is moving toward the greater good, I’m
so fucking good, reticence’s calling up the

bloodshed. There’s no you in this poem. Don’t worry,
anything splendid is willing work. The sun itself

pretends to voyage in memory of its own wake. Slippage
is where the autopsy takes place, though I’m

afraid I’ve already left. To the excess of common sense I
must catch up. Is my impatience not a virtue,

New York? The spit on the side street is melting, rats
gathered in caustic prayer. The block’s fallen

silent, wherein a man has parked his body in front of the
B46, calling out to the bus driver as his subtle

muse, a poet in New York. He swings the plastic bag
by his hip readily, whirls around to catechize,

You lost your lover, baby? A horn assuredly blares,
most certainly a confessional. And now I’m it.

LOCALLY REAL

I’m holding the sleep-breath tightly, letting the reedy
frame speak for itself:  I want to naive kiss you,




mumbling a sound, controlling the lengths
to which the grippy voices become noise.




her ring to catch on its knit. An assemblage
of things. Never in a state of rest, she




won’t forgive me. She’s all scalloped lace,
I a room bloodied by a tapered candle, its




leans closer, of course I’m wishing for the
throbbing anonymity of time to hold us




all about love, and you wouldn’t believe
what I’ve learned to deify: exit wounds,




the physiological capacity stimulating N/A
to instinctively reach her hand over mine.




a shame I haven’t forgiven my dreams yet.
I’m homing a ladybug in the meantime,




perpetrator? N/A feeds it beads of coconut
turmeric rice, saying hell isn’t real and




lost sight of it all. N/A and I linger at parties
together, galaxies of pop-tops promising




told how to feel. If not, I’d rather die
in oblivion. You think they honor us as




Crosswire ribs drowning their throats, as if
willing us to strike the match with our mouths.