Young Poets

Burial poem, for my ex

In the end you have a ship burial.

I lay out your body in a longboat’s prow

and fill the hull with everything you’ll need.

x

You are laid to rest on a bed of clean socks.

Ibuprofen, dental floss, dishwasher tablets:

all the things required in the next life.

x

Archaeologists will find your bicycle pump

and think it’s the hilt of a viking broadsword,

a dark lump misshapen by soil and time.

x

I lay down your speakers and your charity

shop CDs, your cigarettes and sunglasses.

I line up beer bottles like canopic jars.

x

Next I give you heirlooms. Your boat grave

is full of gravy boats, a great aunt’s hideous

porcelains, your baby shoes, your school notes.

x

I tuck grey hairs among the grave goods;

grant you old age, another girlfriend, a child, a cat.

I gift you hobbies: woodworking, cookery books.

x

As flames lap at the longship’s sides — waves of fire

slapping at the keel, heat running over your skin —

you are freed from one life, released to the next.

x

Walking Across the Atlantic

After Billy Collins

You’ve told me the story of your mum and dad:

how he walked from Cumbria to Scarborough,

to ask your mum to marry him. With plodding

devotion, he printed his love letter in mud. Yes,

she said. He’s yet to make the journey back.

I have no such story to tell our made-up child.

x

No. I didn’t cross the Atlantic. After you left,

I never slipped off my shoes and threw myself

from the end of the pier: bracing for cold,

then testing my weight on the buoyant swell.

It would have taken half a year at least,

those icy, faltering footsteps towards

x

America. Otherwise, I could have told our child

how the waves were soft against my soles.

How the crests copied shapes from home:

greyblue dales, whitecombed fells. Water

deep and desolate as peatland. I left no footprints.

Sea forgets, I’d say, where land remembers.

x

Bladderwrack

Day on day I’d harvest it

from the black rock,

never knowing it had

a name. I loved instead

its feeling on my skin —

wet and ridged and thick,

those fistfuls of sea-cysts, each

pustule glossy as an olive,

webbed like frogs’ toes into

one slick mass, which belched

when pinched. I pressed

the warts of salt-air

in my fingers and they

named themselves:

x

plerp    brop     plip      slarp

***

some have also called it:

popweed          bladderwrack

            sea oak            rock wrack

black tang        sea grape

            rockweed

and                  seawrack

and maybe others:

welt-bush         bubble-shrub

            boil-tang          blister-leaf

plerp-weed      brop-wrack

            slarp-grape       plip-oak

x

salt-names bursting

from between human lips

The Disease

Womanhood and all the iron teeth
Of its hairbrush.
Womanhood a disease;
Hot tumors growing under the taut skin and call attention and
Craving pretty sheep coats instead of our own leathery and hair prickled skin
No matter its upright disposition.
Running hands over buttery stomach and wishing the fat could crawl out
On its hands and knees.
Lining insanity with powdered sugar never made it better, just wrapped it up in a digestible manner
to cover its atrocious taste.
Leafing through texts of
America and its jaded wings
What is meant to be moon snails
And dusty lange
Turns to pink ribs and cut feet.

The True Hues of Memory

We are what we can’t forget &
(What I once could not forget was the curdling of egg yolk on
Curled fingers &
The joy of being accepted in the loud, big Spanish family that one summer & the dusty pall under
bridges & blueberry tinted mornings & the cuts on curious fingers
& all the oddities of being a stranger in all this rubble.)

We are what we can’t forget &
Who on earth would have thought that a creature of skin and liver
Just like you
Just like I
Could make the unforgettable so unbearable & take the sweet
Fantasy from fingers to iris

The unforgettable is a dark, dank room
& a hand over the fishbowl’s opening
Leaving the water acidic and a limp body
With a wool-soft underbelly
Floating in its bitter bile.
The unforgettable is that
One body
Was worth not more than a chipped dime and
A plastic smile.

We are what we can’t forget &
Though the curiosity of the sun still
Calls to me
somehow
All I seem to wish for are shadows to make me forget.

Milkshakes Rejuvenate

I once had a creature crawl out of my intestine
And squeeze its snapping jaws out of my navel.
My very own squealing lump of lard
Together we watched the long fog of new day yolk over the
Sea and
The red neck’s yellow apples
Ripen and rot.

Together we watched
The nuns embroider their scripture into each other’s back

Together we drank milkshakes on
America’s bloody concrete
(which we later regurgitated for we both liked the glamour of ribs)
And watched the sky churn a
Vivacious perse bruise.

Together we shriveled like raisins and once old,
We did our laundry together in Chinatown
And reeked of panty hoses and clementines.

We ate perogies for we
No longer cared for the 90s

And once our time came we shrouded ourselves in the
96% Polyester & 4% Spandex Charmeuse of heavens glow.

My intestine creature split me cleanly
Down the middle
And gnawed my tendons until I lay
Across the oak wood flood of our rent stabilized apartment
In ribbons.