Sixfold Poetry Winter 2016 Read online

  even though you hate goodbye.

  You must leave then

  before they cover up the body.

  You must remember

  it is just a body.

  Spider

  Smoke curls in the orange street light

  as your hand crawls up my leg,

  a thick-legged spider

  with a dozen black eyes.

  Evaluating

  the broken veins on my thighs,

  the soft swell of my stomach.

  Deciding

  if I am good enough

  to pin and devour.

  I am praying you won’t care,

  about the acne scars and rolls of flesh.

  Knowing that if you voice disgust,

  I will push you off

  with an outrage so pure,

  its heat will pucker your skin.

  I will wrap myself

  in a blanket of contempt,

  I will invoke the anger

  of a thousand women,

  deemed too ugly

  to deserve decency.

  Leave you on the porch

  stung and unsatisfied,

  while I stomp my way

  up four iron flights,

  the sound vibrating through my boots.

  But as my door swings shut,

  my fury will quietly dissipate,

  until only slick shame remains,

  like dregs

  at the bottom of a glass.

  So please,

  don’t run your rough fingertips

  over the missed patch of stubble on my knee.

  Don’t sneer at the stretchmarks,

  translucent lines that litter my whole body.

  Please don’t.

  Because I’ve been here before,

  and I’ll be here again.

  The Big Girl

  It’s hard to say when I started noticing

  how much space I filled.

  It might have been a revelation

  brought on by a collection of disgraceful moments.

  Squeezing through the maze of a crowded restaurant,

  pressed between chair backs,

  blood rushing to my cheeks

  as I knock a glass off a table.

  Twisting out of clothes

  beneath the hot lights of a dressing room,

  trying to free myself,

  like a trapped animal.

  On the outskirts of a party

  magnetized to the wall,

  holding my arms tight against my body,

  willing myself to shrink.

  Being big

  you’re both invisible and conspicuous,

  your form calling attention

  and then dismissing it.

  They assess you

  and then look away.

  I lose pounds

  and suddenly people don’t look away.

  They look me right in the eye.

  Suddenly people are a little kinder,

  their smiles last a little longer.

  They don’t believe I was that big.

  Their mouths drop open,

  putting on a show of shock and awe.

  Wow, they say.

  You look so good now!

  It goes unsaid

  that the big girl

  would not have been their friend.

  At first I don’t notice,

  the shadow that follows me.

  Its edges extend too widely,

  threaten to swallow me whole.

  The big girl follows me,

  and sees all the people she will never talk to,

  all the fun she will never have.

  Guilt chokes me even as I laugh,

  and pose for a photo.

  The big girl pinches me,

  stunned and betrayed.

  The big girl was never in a picture,

  pouting in a filtered selfie,

  grinning in a group shot.

  The big girl is behind me,

  breathing down my neck.

  She whispers,

  Isn’t this what you wanted?

  But I didn’t think it would feel like this.

  Like the big girl in the corner locked eyes with me,

  and I looked away.

  Lisa Zou

  How to Begin a Song

  Begin with sight: the electric blanket of a sky in the seconds

            before a storm. This time you leave the umbrella at home,

  surrounded by the antiques your grandmother left; you learn to

            knit scarves. The whole day through, just a sweet old song.

  Begin with smell: the blood vapor of rusting metal. How you can

            sense dust before it exists. The earthy aroma of old

  bookstores; the essence of a child’s room. This time you’ll forget

            to spray the perfume on your jacket, leave the door open.

  Begin with sound: the sewing machine’s melodic hum,

            the light switch in his apartment. The crackle of thunder,

  the buzz of bees with Sinatra in one ear, and Elvis in the other. The

            spilling of apologies. This time you won’t listen. Georgia.

  Begin with touch: the structure of the human body—the way

            skin becomes a rainbow of pink, purple, green. How

  your veins stretch like roads, bumpy and convex. The viscosity

            of honey, the weight of wrapped vinyl records.

  Begin with taste: the syrup of summer, the lemons you saved

            for winter—now overripe! Oh, the bruised peaches—

  how nothing worth keeping will last. The snow does not show

            signs of melting and you knit. The road leads back to you.

  Forget the distance between the missed and the mist.

            This begins with you—my road has always led back to you.

  Fission

  You grow a beard, check the mirror,

            notice you are forty years old, the next

  morning, you shave it off, find you are

            sixty. But life is like that, suddenly

  everyone you know is dying and they

            still visit you with your back turned to them.

  One day, you took the school bus

            and you earned a gold star for answering

  the last question right. Now, the nurses

            on night duty ask you something which

  you can’t open your mouth and respond to.

            All you know is that someone switched

  off the light and you don’t know how.

  Under the Parlor

  Under the Q-switched laser, the dragon

  blisters from skin to dough. The navy blue

  having stayed with me for decades—

  I got inked too young, too full of hell.

  How the lines resemble

  well trodden roads, now burned by the

  side of banana peels and the newspapers.

  How the therapist said I was a slave

  to perfection, suggested I wear

  my mistakes like a crown.

  If

  The boy took

  the other road and

  stopped by

  the bookstore and

  purchased a book—

  of any cover. The man

  he would have

  become is now dead.

  Blind Mammal(s)

  Scientists in Honolulu have uncovered

  a primeval tortoise long alleged as extinct.

  The blessed creature stumbled out of my sink

  in the company of toothpaste patches

  and last Wednesday’s soap suds but

  now this no-eyed sea residen
t with three fins

  is on a trip to the lab in Maui, traveling on a boat

  rather than below it. This morning, the newspaper

  announced that he is not native; how many miles away

  from his motherland we clearly cannot fathom.

  Hazel Kight Witham

  The Week Before

  Tonight we shimmy galactic

  under strung constellations

  beside fertile citrus

  the desert a kind of starship

  flinging us far from all we know

  our tiniest torments

  all we’ve left behind:

  the boy, three years old,

  the one we longed for

  over two long years of clockwork trying

  and then,

  ~can I say it?

  when the crush

  of parenthood smothered all,

  how we forever longed to escape him

  for just

  a breath,

  a minute,

  a small visit to the old life

  we were so determined to leave.

  This desert night we shimmy, sway, swing,

  and I pretend

  the globe of my belly

  full of a surprise second baby

  is meant for

  dance after dance

  songcall summoning me to my feet

  again, again, one more

  even as my lungs are broke with bursting

  six months is still babymooning time,

  six months is still second trimester,

  all energy and fine,

  so much time still left

  you have to

  shake it while you can.

  My man and I,

  the new life before us

  a new world between us

  slung dizzy with orbiting only each other

  for this one night when we are

  fearless and wild

  manic and mischievous

  summoning the teenagers we once were

  those kids who never met

  until out here, all night,

  broke with bursting,

  like there is nothing to lose.

  Hoofbeat Heartbeat

  These four days are crowded and lonely

  nurses quiet chaperones to a new world

  I am citizened into, restrained by

  thick tape pinchpulled over IV needle

  oxygen monitor jawsnap on my big toe

  legcuffs inflating to remind blood to flow

  blood pressure cuff sighbiting

  on its own accord first every fifteen,

  then thirty,

  then sixty minutes

  All feeding the story of me, of us

  to monitors that remind me regularly

  of how my body is failing us both—

  my swimming boy and me

  Belly circumscribed by the fetal monitor

  forever slipping from the spot where

  it can listen in on the loping gait

  of my tiny boy’s frantic heart

  I learn to adjust it myself before the

  nurses rush in to find the song of him again

  I learn to heave

  my beached broodmare body alone

  when his heartbeat slows

  because if I don’t they will do it for me

  fevered and fast,

  turnover turnover turnover othersideothersideotherside!!

  I want to listen

  because I need to know he is here

  and so the soundtrack of these four sudden days

  is the bah-bum, bah-bum, bah-bum

  of his fast foal heart,

  and I close my eyes and listen to him

  hooves pounding some beach

  we will someday run

  bah-bum, bah-bum, bah-bum

  a promise, a presence, an I’m here, and I’m fine

  sure and steady most of the time

  those hoofbeat heartbeats

  that doubletime mine

  the only thing that offers

  any kind of comfort

  in the empty open night.

  First Visit

  My feet braced on silver flips

  my legs covered by hospital issue cloth

  my sore everywhere body

  still leadened by that

  miracle metal magnesium

  because, they say,

  for two days after birth the risks increase

  We twist through the halls

  and we buzz for entry

  into a hushed place

  where I first stop

  and stoop at a sink

  peel back a sterile soap sponge

  little plastic scrubbers

  made to make me clean

  two minutes I brace

  new-seamed, scar-tugging

  hunched against the pull and pain of it

  watching a clock tick down

  the seconds until I’m done.

  Clean, seated again,

  they push me in to the open-air pod

  four babies four-cornered in the space,

  he is in the back corner

  beside a big window

  that offers a view

  that should not soothe:

  a building,

  all twisting pipes and mammoth machine

  spitting steam into the dark night

  as here, all around me,

  space-age monitors attend to

  the story of too-tiny babies

  in numbers and sounds

  and then

  there

  he is

  closed in his new womb

  bathing under violet lights

  they say his skin needs to adjust

  eyes cloaked by gauze sunglasses

  all of him so tiny

  my body clenches at the sight

  so skinny, swathed in only

  a diaper the size of a dollar bill,

  too big for this tiny life

  and oh, the lines:

  through his nose,

  into his arm

  patch monitors sticking to thinnest skin

  ET O2 toe glowing red,

  a tangle of modern medicine

  so different from soft simple swaddle

  he sends a shatter through me

  all over again,

  and when I am told I can touch him

  I am electric with fear

  but I open the latch

  to the portholes

  of his small ship

  I talk to him

  and hope it’s true about voice,

  that they know it from always,

  and I reach into the warm cocoon

  scar-stretched across my

  own aching skin

  to touch

  dark damp hair

  wonder-soft over spongy skull

  all of him still forming

  my whole hand

  cupping across

  the small globe

  of all he is

  My other hand finds his wildly

  precise feet, the biggest part of him

  all one and a half inches,

  toe tips tiny rosepearls

  and I press, gentle and still

  and so

  here it is

  our first embrace

  my arms bracing against ovals

  my head leaning against plastic

  my heart trying to leave my body

  to enter that small humid universe

  where everything

  suddenly

  is.

  how to become unraveled

  cut your seroquels in half

  those pills that quelled

  sleeping beasts

  but made you sleep

  just too deep

  when rising at 3 am

  has become part of your day’s

  unceasing song

  and you thought you’d

  give your broken self

  a little
more pep

  in the thinly threaded

  night hours

  when no one is up

  but you

  and the unquenchable thing

  you strap yourself to

  eight times each day

  to make milk

  to bring to the tiny baby

  you only see

  when you visit

  the locked ward

  for a clutch of hours each day

  where he lays

  every day

  since he came

  three months early

  untangle the knots

  and count the days

  he’s been there

  —53—

  count the days

  until he comes home

  —no one knows—

  count the ways

  your life no longer

  knows you

  untie all of it

  stack the to-dos

  til they tower before you

  and your stomach

  twists new knots

  and your body

  won’t have sleep

  it shakes you awake

  to shake hands again

  with that old

  undoer anxiety

  and you know

  you know

  you should probably

  be under the care

  of an expert in these things

  before you go

  halving your pills

  but its all so tangled now

  and you can’t imagine

  how you’d unfurl the mess

  to some expert

  and it’s been so long

  since you were in

  your own locked ward

  that you’ve earned the

  title of expert now

  but a baby—

  especially one that comes

  three months too early

  and just in time

  all one pound, ten ounces—

  can do things

  to unravel

  the knots of a ladder

  you so methodically tied

  you are the expert now

  and you aren’t sure

  you’ll listen

  to someone who

  cannot hold all the threads

  anyway

  and besides,

  you tried

  you made an appointment

  they just didn’t have one

  for three months

  three days after

  his original due date

  and So

  you gather the threads

  in those

  fraying indigo hours

  and braid them again

  into something

  that might hold

  and hope

  to hold on

  until then.

  Margaret Dawson

  I See the Future in Your Mouth

  There in the X-ray—your five-year old skull

  a premonition of itself in the grave.

  Behind each milk tooth the grown ones loom,