pious dream

I don’t often remember my dreams enough even to write them down. This one’s from a couple months ago. It was oddly tame and somehow dangerous at the same time. Sorry, friends, no sexy dreams today.

###

a dream of me and a woman who looked like me
praying for a man who was angry
he was black and he was angry
and I remember he had a right to be
and it was a situation where prayer might have been considered
inappropriate
but somehow it was all right
and I was looking at the floor and sitting
and she was standing and doing the talking
quietly
and he stood between us and we held his hands and loved him like a brother
The floor was tile and green like the scales of a dragon
It was a bathroom and dark
I sat on the toilet and listened to her prayer and prayed along
in my head
and felt angry along with this man

Moira Kay

this is for you
this is for you, Moira Kay, not yet formed, not yet known,
not yet knit in your mother’s womb

this is for the dream of you that your father had:
your name, Moira Kay, he dreamed your name,
he dreamed little shirts and little shoes
golden-brown hair
(like mine when I was that small)
and nothing more

Moira
Moira Kay
Moira Kay

or whatever your name is

this is for the day
the day that you are made
the day when your path is unblocked and you rush into me like a flood

this is for the first time
you feel your sex heavy like a river dragging on you
dragging on you like a river that wants to carry you someplace
or drown you
not knowing whether to laugh or scream
for your reflection that begins to melt and replace itself
with someone else
the someone that you think they see

this is for the day that you forget what you look like

this is for the day that you remember
this sings to whatever reminds you
it stretches its arms to whatever brings you back

this is for you
slung on one hip as we blaze foreign paths
the three of us anywhere not mattering but together
fearless your blue eyes/brown eyes OPEN open
passed hand-to-hand by black hands and white hands and brown hands
tongues of all tongues shaping to say your name
Moira
Moi-rah
your hand holding fast my hand your other hand holding fast your father’s hand

this is for the hour of your coming
this is for the moment you open me like the first time I was opened
from inside this time
this is for the moment I and the world and all hearts open wide to receive you
this is for my body yawning heart and body unhinging to let you out
should it ever come
this is the herald of your arrival

baby migraines and starfish arms

A scrap of something I wrote the other morning.

###

03/18/2006

It’s the edge of a migraine this morning
a rusty scimitar, a dirty crescent moon
stuck on the right rear quadrant of my skull
the kind that makes me debate whether to blow an Imitrex on this one
knowing it’ll be gone for sure
or take my chances with OTC stuff that sometimes works
and sometimes leaves the pain untouched, leaves it to grow
like a few bad cells still hanging on
the starfish arm that could grow a brand new misery
whole, entire
wrapping its arms around my head, over one eye
it waits like a promise

Whoa.

Found this in the personal folder on my computer at work and tweaked it a little then posted it, a little rant or journal thing I wrote about one of the young women I work with. Must be from about six months ago, when she first got pregnant with this baby; she’s gonna be due real soon now. She graduated two years ago, but I still see her from time to time at this alumnae group that we have.

For N, pregnant with her fourth child

You deserve a man who will put on a goddamn condom.

You deserve a man who, if he is so dead set against wearing a goddamn condom,
so needful of the feel of birth canal against penis skin, will pay the price of monogamy
and birth control pills.

You deserve a friend who will tell you this.

You deserve a man who will not spend his kids’ money on another woman. You deserve a man who will not stick his penis in both you and her.

You deserve a life that would’ve prepared you better for this, a childhood that would’ve grown you into someone better prepared, to resist, to live alone, to find someone better.

You did not deserve to be pried open against your will and impregnated at 14. You deserve sex of your choosing. Your first son also deserves a better father than him.

let’s go back to 2000…

Taking a cue from Ian, my cuz, I think I’m going to start posting some old shit every once in a while, particularly (in my case), old shit that maybe never turned into anything.

This is a draft from round about August 2000. The title is because I thought it would be the first of a series about this period, this moving, but it didn’t pan out that way.

Part 1

I don’t believe that anyone really knows how to pack. I’ve done it dozens of times: home to school, school to home, home to Dublin, Dublin to home, home to St. Petersburg. School to San Diego. It’s never really gotten any easier. Regardless of planning, regardless of items weighed in hand—give, store, or throw away—there are always the crunch hours when life seems impossible if just packing up and moving is this hard. It always descends into throwing and pushing and squashing coffee cups onto old poems, towels wrapped around books, stray bits of makeup and pens scraped together and chucked, afterthought underpants pressed into crevices like mortar. I didn’t know how much this house had taken hold of my shit until I did the last walk-through the sixth and seventh time today, trotted out with my armloads to my car already impossibly full, fuck, fuck, where am I going to put this, biting my lip and flinging through the back window.

The 12X8 trailer that Cullen rented seemed excessive to me until I saw with my own hands how much shit can fit into a space. He’s going through this day the way he does most things: word by word, banging it out, stacking things. He knows every task that needs to be accomplished before he can lock the doors and get in the van. His eyes are very wide and wild, like he’s changing their depth of field by force of muscles, like he’s holding every task inside of his head at once. I am just the opposite: I wash over everything at once again and again, in layers. All of my clumsy and loose-limbed qualities are out in full right at the surface. No object is safe from the brush of my hips and breasts as I pass, no glass is immune to my flying hands. My eyes are hooded and erratic. I take up much more space than usual.

Ian’s not going back to Ireland until October, but today is my last day. He helped us load up the trailer as if it were his life’s work. He left for his job late in the afternoon. He laughed and said that a quick goodbye is best. He didn’t kiss me until I called him back and did it myself, once, the firm fraternal kisses we’d become accustomed to. He pulled out of the driveway and I folded up on the back steps and cried like an exhausted child.

Cheerio betrayal

I was maybe four, and we were living on our old house on Brammell in Detroit. I spilled a whole box of Cheerios on the kitchen floor trying to get it down, the rings went skittering across the pebbly linoleum, and here comes my mom up from the laundry room, doom, doom, doom, up the steps, “Who did this?” –she demanded an answer, and I had to give one, and I’d be damned if it’d be me. “He did,” I pointed to my little brother, aged three, standing in the kitchen doorway, possibly in a t-shirt and a diaper at the time, probably in the middle of potty training. And the face he turned to me, the face that suddenly knew that this was possible, that your sister could betray you to your mother, even that such a thing as betrayal existed, that you could do nothing wrong and get in trouble anyway, and no one would find out–it knocked the denial right out of his mouth–I waited for him to protest, my heart begged him to accuse me, but the words wouldn’t come to him. It was already too late.

this morning

I jotted these this morning right after I woke up.

###

Irais, you are smoke and ivy,
shouts echoing through alleys.
Mayra, you are concrete steps up the side of a mountain,
that collision of cement and stone.

I’m really angry that they didn’t get invited.
I’m so afraid that no one will ever hear them.

###

I woke up this morning with a dream in my head
of me and a woman who looked like me
praying for a man who was angry
he was black and he was angry
and I remember he had a right to be
and it was a situation where prayer might have been considered
inappropriate
but somehow it was all right
and I was looking at the floor and sitting
and she was standing and doing the talking
quietly
and he stood between us and we held his hands and loved him like a brother
The floor was tile and green like the scales of a dragon
It was a bathroom and dark
I sat on the toilet and listened to her prayer and prayed along
in my head
and felt angry along with this man

###

re-edit of poem posted a while back

Some changes. Some lines added, word changes, section breaks, a working title.

###

fear of God

I just wanted to talk.
At first, anyway.
So that’s what it feels like…
That’s what I thought,
that’s what went through my head
when my fist connected with her pretty cheek
So that’s what it feels like
to hit a woman…
as the hot blood flooded into my skull.

See, it was the Sunday night
before Martin Luther King Day—
we didn’t have to work the next day.
We were stopped on Orleans,
me and my boy, and this fucking
moreno, he bumped my boy’s car a little
and we stopped him, we got out,
just to talk it out, man to man, like.
But this guy, he wouldn’t get out
of his fucking car, right?
And he’s on his phone,
and I tell him to get out,
Roll down your fucking window
I tell him,
Roll this fucking window down right now
or I’m gonna bust it out.
And he doesn’t, and so I, like,
spit on the dude’s window—
that’s what my boy tells me, anyway;
I don’t really remember that much—
I guess I was probably afraid
to break my hand, ’cause that’s what happened
the last time I punched something.
Then I catch sight of this girl crossing Orleans all alone,
and I start walking over, you know,
just to talk, like,
Hey, girl, what’s going on,
But she had to be all fucking bitchy, like,
Look, I’m not even tryin’ to talk to you,
sweetie.

It was the sweetie that really got me.

I just wanted to talk to her.
And she turns away and walks faster, and this fucking pink stripe
she got in her hair blows back and up,
like a, like a, pink piece of flame or something.
And I start to walk away, but I think about
the dude who won’t get out
of the fucking car, and my boy waiting,
and my spit dripping down the window,
and I hear her heels going clik-clik-clik
and her cute little ankles crossing back and forth,
and I just turn back around
and don’t even know what I’m going to do
until I do it, and I get that rush,
that rush that you get when you’re doing something bad,
something bad that you really really want to do,
but then all of a sudden you get terrified—
like when me and my sister were real real little,
and I’d lose my head and pop her,
and in about a split second the satisfaction wore off, and the fear of God
came into me, otherwise known as Mami,
knowing what was coming.

Well this time,
the same thing happened,
except after the fear of God,
there was no punishment.
Nothing happened.
I ran up on her,
I punched her on the side of her face,
ran back to the car,
but no one came to help her,
no boot up my ass to teach me a lesson.
She yelled, hard,
What the fuck is your problem, you fucking cocksucker?!
And, I don’t know…
this is gonna sound weird,
but if I didn’t know better,
I’d say that she wanted me to come back.
Come back and fight, or explain myself.

I don’t know, though.
I can’t say for sure.

Excerpt

This is the first part of the first draft of a poem I’m working on.

###

You stood in my kitchen doorway
while the rest of us cooked dinner
chattering in English
and I asked you, in a slightly lower strata of voice,
“How old were you when you lost your brother in the war?”
“Fourteen,” you answered.
“Fourteen? Goddamn”, I said.
“You must have been pissed.”
You laughed a little, as though you had tripped and fell.
“Yeah.”

I wanted you to forgive me for something,
but I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

I wrote this in my group today with my girls

My father is the man who gets things done.
He is the man who gets called when the pipes
freeze,
he is the man they call
when they don’t know what to do.
I once heard him say that when a man
wants to show he loves his wife,
he cleans out the basement,
and I thought, “Shit, I hope not.”
This is a man who rests on nothing
but his own usefulness.
When my grandfather died
my grandmother called my dad
and he planned the funeral, everything,
down to choosing the casket,
but when the service was over
and he stood last in front of the open coffin
that contained the dead body of his father
he didn’t say a word, and I couldn’t see his face,
but I could tell that his back was very old then
and it was my mother who had to take his arm
and lead him away.