DEAR MEN:

DEAR MEN:

this is not a poem to say i hate men. but-

i am cat called by cars on three separate occasions on the same stretch of road while i am running just in one week and there are only so many times you can say fuck you before someone takes you up on it.

i am not flattered. i am always afraid.

because the men on motorcycles at a rest stop say hey dear in that voice, and suddenly i don’t want to stop.

because they make fun of women for going to the bathroom together when they know what happens when we go alone.

because a man buys a drink for me and it’s fruity and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a whiskey.

because i eat and i am called fat and i don’t eat and he goes babe, do you have an eating disorder or some shit? i don’t want to deal with that.

because i want to pay for my own dinner so you don’t have to deal with that.

because a man buys me a whiskey and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a sangria.

because i would like to buy my own damn drink.

because i go to work out at the gym and i can feel them looking at me, i can feel it itching over me.

because one of them slaps me on the ass and says look at that to his friends when it jiggles.

because it was like a gunshot and i am still flinching.

because it was a touch and i am still flinching.

because it was a long time ago and i am still flinching.

because every day there are these men and they don’t understand that i am a person and not a body and a human and not a body and i am a woman and not a body and this body is not your own.

dear men: you are one letter away from mean.

dear men: i don’t hate you*

*all.

dear men: sometimes i love you. too much. sometimes i need to let you go.

dear dad: i love you too. this is not a poem about you, for once. it’s about them.

dear men: THIS IS NOT YOURS. dear boys: learn from this. dear men: LISTEN TO THIS. dear women: do not take this.

coffee spoons and teaspoons

i leave a spoon in the fridge while my mother’s throwing up. eliot measured our lives in coffee spoons, teaspoons, the things we love small enough to be scooped up and held inside our mouths. a sweater unraveling to leave me cold but still thinking i am warm. still capable of holding a spoon to my mother’s mouth, feed her panic with a soft voice to keep it from rearing its head. i wrap my lips around the edges of comfort and taste the metal of our loves. a white bowl does not mask the acrid scent of something bloody falling out from her body, something too large to kept in the same hollow space as her tongue and teeth and words. lovely how we fill our life-spoons with cough-syrup, sweet or bitter kisses, things that linger in a taste and still we can manage to have our mouths open, to fit the loving in. that we can hold everything inside us: a strawberry as big as my hand that leaves a spreading stain on the skin, the vomit dripping over the tiles, eight dry heaves in as many minutes, a shivering form only now realising it is cold, my own sweater i draped over her, the unraveling hem and sleeves, the nested spoons across a counter top with one missing in the fridge, the unspooling thread of time getting tangled up in things. was this once or as many as you can remember. each day i try to form the words in my mouth and find them a little less strange than before.

the genocide of xenophilia

there is potentially a spider in the bathtub so i’m whispering for you to kill it before it can find out. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill the bees, a flowering of destruction on accident. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill everything.

i am sorry that i am afraid of what is not like me, the wide eyes of a long-legged small body in the corner of the shower.

i am sorry i would still be afraid if it was you.

but no one knows why chimpanzees cannibalise each other. why we can murder ourselves. and still no one can explain to me why we have decided to kill the bees.

so in twenty years, this holocaust will be halfway complete and the earth halfway wrecked. what will be left?

(please come kill this spider.)

i am sorry to take part but this is how it goes. i am afraid and so i kill.

the world dying in small doses, a little violence in our breathing, every blink and motion an angry shudder. condone violence and yet wallow in the glory of a crushed body, the crooked neck of a mouse in a trap like a sick revelry.

our bodies do not enjoy completing deaths or so we say, reject it but reject that foreign alienness more and our hands move slow-motion to slam down on the bathtub and kill a body no larger than a fingernail, legs twitching in a gruesome little death.

it could have moved out of the way but instead chose to accept it. it is as complicit in this as we are- we cause the action and everything else allows it to happen.

but how could they have ever stopped it.

a history of sitting still in the face of something that you knew was coming.

a refusal to let yourself be washed away. no matter how deep the ocean is.

even if the real ocean is deeper than a bathtub flowing over, a spider refusing to choke and give in to a death by cleansing and the drowning, broken motions of something killed for no reason besides the irrational-

the silence of one body slipping away from view.

washing away the guilt of what we have done. how much guilt the world must hold.

the right truth

in specific contexts, i am a different person now then i am then. alice: i can’t go back. yes, exactly what i mean. for every question there is a different answer depending on whether or not i trust you. or the setting of the situation. take these, examples,

SITUATION ONE. i am at a party. it’s a friend’s party. i was late. listen, i didn’t want to come. they can’t know that, so what do i tell them?

answer: make up some elaborate hilarious story about the cat and the driving and putting on clothes in the wrong order and not how you sat in the closet for two minutes rocking and how you took four pills for anxiety before coming. if they laugh, they won’t notice the way you slip your eyes closed too often to be real.

SITUATION TWO. i’m with my family and they ask me who i’ve decided to love (have i decided to love? do i know what that is?) can i tell them the truth of it or do i have to hold my hands palm in to my chest, don’t let the lines tell them what they want to know?

answer: you can say a little. tell them you’re in love but you’re not sure of it, don’t tell them who or what or how many because really would they want to think about you and love with their closed door minds? they can hardly think of you as it is.

SITUATION THREE. i’m seeing another therapist. oh god, what do i say. what do i tell them?

answer: the part of you that you can stand to bear on your mind. the truth that seems right under the circumstance.

for every question if you told me when and where and how i would have another answer because who i am depends on who i’m with. that may not be right, but it is true, and i’m never the same person twice. but is anyone? and that’s the kicker to this sad sorry punchline joke. nobody’s right. even if it’s all true.

foreign(or) god

god comes down to say hi sometimes, stepping out with the people of all race and ages. god has an accent no one can discern. god is an immigrant stumbling over the foreign languages of grief, emotion, not recognising the subtleties between happiness and happy-in-this. and even god suffers from cognitive dissonance, can’t say anything the same way we do. trying to find the right words and only coming up with something we won’t understand or will tend to misinterpret. half the time god doesn’t even know what he means, those misharmonised thoughts making less and less of a self when put together. god is a collection of parts we have assumed fit him without asking. god wears the twice worn pants of someone else and has to hem them by hand. god is tired of this. god was tired when he heard this. god speaks softly so as not to wake the demons we tell children about when they come here: loneliness and depression and never really belonging. there is something so sorrow-filled in the way he begins to recognise we cannot do not want to be saved. god walks away and we justify his actions to ourselves as if he had done the atrocity. god has a limit to forgiveness and it starts with desecrating kindness. god has all the accents of the people we have turned away.

speaker for the dead

i will not write your obituary.

i will not grow flowers from the mouth of someone who refused to look for what was beautiful, i will not make that beautiful.

there is no surrender, no good fight, believe me when i say that i have spoken for the dead and they say:

nothing, when you die i will say nothing because that is what is waiting, i will not write you an obituary because you will be dead. and i, the one speaking, would be putting words into the air about you, without you, and no defences against them because i will be angry. if you choose that-

i will not be a speaker for the dead to let you live in a memory.

i will hold you through this unbearable life and do what i can to make it bearable. i will not be angry if you ask me if you just ask me for anything other than an obituary. you can call me if you are lonely.

and if the world becomes too much to bear, you are not Atlas. let it fall from your shaking shoulders. and i will write the way the world ends, i will write you the way it feels to be free i will write you in another life a thousand alternate times in which you are you but not and still you this crippled fool, a light opera and i will write you anything if only you are alive to hear it.

and i ask the same of you; in the case that my mouth becomes a birthing ground for the bodies of small violence, roots to wind their way around my tongue and teeth for the trees to swallow me swallowing the empty earth whole, come no mourners and no words. let the decay speak for itself.

do not talk at my funeral. do not read these words at all.