LITMIR.BIZ

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this:

      There is nothing like an income

      To cheer, nothing but

      Humourlessness to fear.

       The Rabbit Catcher

      He guides you across the floor,

      Thumbing your American neck:

      Right, left, steady as a joystick.

      What’s in this for you, lady?

      You’ve already embraced

      The ledge, tossed the crinoline

      Off the roof, written yourself through

      Paralysis and into your own book.

      Was it reproduction that

      Bent you to the gilded frame?

      Like a poodle you leapt into

      A knot of gold, you entered

      The ring without armour. You

      Strike a blow, bite, don’t think

      To duck. It’s all foreplay,

      Your body preparing to multiply.

      I want to take you by the ear:

      You have a spine, use it!

      You don’t need a tarot pack

      To see where you are:

      Your rabbit heart bleats

      In a field of stones.

      Don’t just lie there

      And let it leak,

      Don’t let him

      Drink you in, sell your skin,

      And buy her roses.

       Cut

      But it wasn’t a man

      That knocked me down

      With the thrill of a slice

      Of my will.

      She was mannish,

      Chilled, flung

      Her will across

      Mine then laughed

      At my shock, when she

      Gripped my neck while

      Lingering over a request

      For the evening meal.

      Later I sliced a tomato

      Close to my wrist.

      The door was open.

      She had warned me

      Never to shut it against

      Her. Otherwise

      I was free to come

      And go. Maybe she was

      Right? I was zero

      To the bone? Meanwhile,

      I had left the hose

      In the pond. The goldfish

      Cowered in the reeds.

      Whose side were they on?

      I am ill, I thought,

      Slogging across

      Soggy green.

      If I bow any lower

      I will be looking up

      At moss.

       Thalidomide; Or, What She Didn’t Ask

      What planet have I swallowed? What

      Counsel has thickened my veins?

      What knuckle and screech

      Have I kneaded into your young minds?

      I bury my doubts like glass seeds lick

      Your knees and feet. I am only trying

      To sleep, I am only trying to spare you

      The worst of my thoughts.

      I must evolve because you, you

      Take all that I have eaten as gold.

      You are a vial of mercury swinging

      Like hips at a cocktail bar.

      I hold your heads,

      Your limbs, soft absences

      Whose screeches

      I will never know.

      I am the hanged woman.

      My shame rushes to your future.

       A Birthday Present

      The light on the coldest night of the year is glacial.

      The sea has frozen and slid across the mountains

      Right into the centre of our nine hundred square feet

      Where nothing grows. When Gertrude Stein was a small

      Girl she kept hearing a sound she described as nails

      Striking stone.

      Years later she realized this was Emily Dickinson

      Writing and she took up the axe.

      Now I watch the twins swish in unison.

      The poems on their steel rails go each

      According to need. A rogue poem like a wave

      In a white woollen poncho,

      Its fringes a soft broom sweeping down the hall, out

      Into the evening traffic, which hisses

      Like a fire that might bring you ease.

       Daddy

      I feel all the daddies, Sylvia. They brawl inside me like drunken Colossi, elbowing my aorta, kicking my uterus. I hear you wrestling with them too, trying to keep down that one toe, big as a Frisco seal. They rise up again in bean green over blue. I always heard that line as a choke of rage, now I hear you choking back disbelief, then laughing as they turn and turn. Laugh if you will, in the end it was you who was through (or not through), you who coughed your life up into husband-daddy’s hands. Still, I envy your arriving at funny. I wish I could laugh when the hands that caught me at birth and later slit me in two like an apricot fly up at me in the middle of sex. Don’t complain, the brothers say, at least he showed interest. And that is true: if you’re going to defile one of your children, you might defile them all equally. Years later I returned to that hotel room and picked that fifteen-year-old girl up off the floor. What a fool, I thought, so weak, so trusting: my vulnerability repelled. I had no love for it. It was her or me and I wanted to live, Sylvia, so I stuck a dagger in her then, and I said, We’re through. She cried out as if I had killed her. I said, Surely you’re overstating harm. Surely you can do with a gash or two, a lost limb, a cunt that drags – how greedy you are to want to be whole. You see how inside out I was? So, Daddy, I had to kill you too. I didn’t need a knife for you. I made a guillotine of my mind and let it drop. In a blink you were gone. And then you were really gone: the black boot of your lung had rotted from the inside out, and when the surgeon pierced bone, a small Nagasaki was unleashed. But even death did not kill you. You followed me for years, a man in a clean white van, offering me sweet things if I went for a ride. You haunted me with

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