The Brooklyn Rail

Essay on Form

I’m going to tell you a secret:
poetry has no form.
You find it in the dirt.
You’d better start digging.
You must hold the worms in your hands.
Squeeze them to death.
Now you’re a monster.
A true sociopath killing innocent creatures.
You destroy forms where you find them,
and that’s why you find yourself in a deep grave.
You’d better get used to seeing your name
carved into stone.
You have no right to protest.
This was always your home.
I’m going to tell you a secret.
It isn’t a good fit.
When it rains, the graves fill with yellow water.
Is that the kind of life you want?
Drowning every day.
Drowning even though you’re already dead?
This isn’t good for you.
Go find delight in real shapes.
Go find your forms.
Go find your figures.

Essay on Periods

It’s both blood and a full stop,
a surplus overfilling the body,
spilling on the hotel sheets.
This is a nice hotel so now
you’re scrubbing your underwear
in the sink. Blood changes color
like fall leaves. Once a king
cut his wrist open and was surprised
to see that his blood didn’t pour
out blue. “I was always a fake,”
he said summoning his servants
to bring him a bandage.
A line of periods is an ellipsis
which isn’t a full stop, more like
a hesitation. The body is full
of trembling hesitations.
You know this by the blood
you feel pounding in your
forehead when you’re going
to tell someone something
they don’t want to hear. Yes,
this is a very nice hotel even if it
overlooks a town recently hit by
Hurricane Fred and the trees
are all twisted up with the ocean
and the sky has a pink tint
at night that some say would
confuse the sailors (they saw women
in the waves) which made them
stop…turn their ships towards
the sky…and sail off the earth.

Essay on Tragedy

Our lives are full of indignities;
it is good to have a lover. If he happens
to also be a worker, he will put his hands
to your lips late at night and tell you not
to complain too much. You may say
it didn’t have to be like this, so much time
stolen, so much energy extracted from
the flesh just to erect towers for people
you will never hear nor see. And he will agree
because he is exhausted too. It is good
to have a lover who notices the hawk
swooping from a pine, even if it holds
a rabbit with moth-eaten fur in its talons,
entrails spilling to earth, who pours you coffee
in the morning, who takes one moment
to listen and another to quiet.

Essay on the Afterlife

We carry on
the tradition
of mourning
our dead by
placing a quartz
crystal in
a deity’s
asshole. You
can either
deep freeze
your body
or body and head.
The head alone
will be cheaper,
but if you desire
to add on the body
and you have
the resources
to do so, one
day you may once
again wag your
unthawed index
finger at your
cryonic double
in the mirror and say,
“it was all worth it
in the end.”

Essay on Madness

Loneliness is that elm over there
throwing itself off the mountain
like a bona fide maniac. You think
you know so much more than you do,
that you’re better than that thrashing, but
one day you’ll end up reckless too,
tearing out your roots from good soil.
Your diaries are dwindling into meticulous
lists of drug dosages,
sitting there looking at the elms
in your pink bathrobe and dirty hair.
Still, you are very lovely
and somewhat beautiful
which is why I’d like to speak to you.
I’m attracted to your suburban
derangement, your rows
and rows of poems, some of them
only two lines long:
There is a genius among us;
she will not raise her hand.

Essay on Discount Poetry

I have been told that because I write quickly,
my poems are of lesser quality. This theory
is somewhat correct. I can sell you a knockoff
Grecian urn for much less. Of course,
the youth beneath the tree will have aged
a little, and the pastoral will not be cold (after
all, this is the 21st century, and the sea temps have
risen dramatically). But still, if you have a cocktail
party, no one will be able to tell that this urn
isn’t the urn and that the fair youth wasn’t
once fair. I have also had to sacrifice the green
alter. Now it’s a glittery countertop, surrounded by
white wainscoting, over which dimmable
lights are hung. Once you hand me a gin
and tonic, and we get through some small talk,
I will find the perfect spot: place your fake urn here.

Essay on Secrets

I told my students they need at least one good
secret to be an interesting writer. My recovery
group says that it’s secrets that make you sick,
but who’s ever heard of healthy poetry?
The reason I didn’t call you back is because
I didn’t want you to become a secret like the other
other secrets who were sitting on my shelf very angry at me.
One became a quartz crystal found in Nova Scotia
as the tide was coming in, another a 100-year-old bottle
of gin pulled from the Vermont woods. Another
was a postcard of a horse in Lexington. That was you.
I was so scared to walk through the restaurant doors,
my hands shaking as I write this silence made my secret
morph into pages and pages of unsent letters, hours
of wondering what to say, how to say it. My love
is fed by negative space; the postcard burning.
The horse has galloped off the shelf. Did you know
that Victorians put a black border on stationary
to signify someone died? Nothing will kill my secret.
Do you see the black border around this poem?