That night I shallow-slept with fire
licking inside my eyelids         I dreamed an auto bio-documentary,
A Mother's Mistake, and re-imagined being born to a mother
        who sneered
like a debutante returning her first plate to its kitchen.
I wept myself awake then & listened to my bedmate snore—
her sweet surge of breath rhyming with the
burgeoning streets below. I longed to know, to touch
the foreign machine of her,
        less than a pillow's thickness away.

But in our first kiss, her mouth clamped to a smirk
                as if it held a shot of sour medicine;
        as if she could taste how I was mismanufactured
& bio-chemically rinsed in a steel sink to be filed under a stranger's
name & address.

She         slept        supernaturally                     while all night,
            I watched the dark-
ness as if it might disobey. I expected my father's phantom to
emerge like an alligator from the room's horizon of shadows—
          I believe in ghosts, because I am used to the intimacy
          in cold spots
but nothing moved except the Morse code prayer of my pulse.

That next morning I stared at the undifferentiated
tissue of my body—a key unlocking nothing.
It didn't matter which word tickled, turning on her tongue,
or locked me in the solitary closet of my body.

This is mostly about the mind, isn't it?
         The expectations of failure;
the familiar spirit of personal cruelty.
         The deliquescent nature of
relationships & how I think of my father whenever women look
         past me.
                    Here's the real question I'd like to ask my father:

            What might you have told your real son about the nature of
            love-
claiming it, feeding it, keeping it alive in spite of its instinct to
        thrive
                                                                                              without you?

What might you tell a son you loved
        about the hieroglyphics of bodies
                or the nature of culling desire—
        as a man, what exactly should I surrender to?

Let me answer the question you have of me: No.
You were my idol. Of course I don't know how to love
                    but I know how to be shamed
& no two tears fall or taste the same.
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Poetry Daily Logo
Poetry Daily Depends on You

Our End-of-Year Fundraising Drive is underway. With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
DONATE NOW
Head shot of Heather Christie, author of the book under review, The Crying Book
"The Crying Book Follows the Many Tracks of Our Tears"

"To insist on anything too permanent is to lay a trap. The kind of metaphor Christle seeks is at once truer and more tenuous. She envisions allowing 'two stories to correspond briefly, to align themselves into one moment as they travel on their separate orbits, to know that the instant of recognition of sameness must not last.'"

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
What Sparks Poetry:
Tanya Larkin on Emily Dickinson’s [I started Early—Took my Dog—]

“When I was in high school, I wrote out Emily Dickinson’s '[I started Early—Took my Dog—]' in outsize Goth-y script and taped it to my wall—understanding little of it. I had come across it while doing the dreaded twenty-page research paper for US History, the hallmark assignment of many a college prep school. My teacher was kind. He allowed me to take a patently literary topic and wrench it into a historical one, which is how I found myself leafing through Dickinson’s Collected looking for vaguely feminist poems. This one must have stood out in its forceful expression of utter female power."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2019 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency