Little. Pretty. End. [a poem]

Little Pretty End

I never used to believe in superstitious bullshit

like monsters, isolated with anger.

like fairies, all simplicity and grace.

like ghosts, those shadows of our fears.

I never used to be          

lots

of

things.

           

I was gasping with potential once,

back when my hair

was summer blonde

and eyes distinctly blue.

Now my eyes are cheap mood rings turning your fingers green,

and my hair is murky dish water.

At this age, no one has time for those

not explicitly sublime,

and in the end

you’re only swimming against yourself

alone.

I am

            det

    ach

  ed.

In the way

       clouds are

far and transparent.

                        As they are on the nights

                                    when stars look like bowling pins

                        aligned and teetering,

                                    as risky and fragile as a first kiss.

Before you recognized life as a script

not written by you.

I look from the mountain top

down into the valley, and from

this height I can tell you,

with perfect clarity, all the

workings

and meanings

and mechanisms rooted there.

But I cannot tell you

what the apples taste like,

or the temperature of the water

on the first day of summer.

                                                All I know is: those people below

                                                seem to think safe means they’re

                                                never going to die.

But pieces of us die all the time. My first ghost was playful,

like a shock of half-melted ice cubes

teasing down the space between my spine

and the edge of my mind.

I was too young to recognize her - that

small

separation

of myself.

She cried

               far too often

               for a perfect young lady like me

               to put up with, or comfort.

And so I hushed her

tears; smothered her

with strength; no more teddy bears,

band-aids, or night lights in the hall. 

Little Ghost

                                    had no mother to protect her. I took her heart

                                    and put it in a jar covered in Nutrition Facts stickers;

a thousand irreversible calories, teaching her

 the threat of XRay eyes used for seeing what was actually inside.

People wear them on their souls, sometimes.

We both understood love

                                    was harder

to find when you don’t believe in men

in the sky,

   mall,

         magazines,

                      or otherwise

So when the second ghost

                        festered in  my intestines

                        demanding me to be some

body, I thought she’d gotten lost or maybe just bored.

Lucky,

                        I had taught Little Ghost well,

                        she helped put Pretty Ghost in her place.

                        Pressed her down,

a grape into wine,

so we would never

have to taste

the dripping of disappointment.

Sensuality gone to rot;

overlooked at the market on a boiling-blue Sunday.

Little Ghost turned tough and vulgar

as she drank up all that pretty, pretty wine

when no one could judge her – in the dark –

where nothing mattered (but it did matter)

and she began to dream

of slugging down fat blue pills

like trout swimming upstream;

            she imagined they would pour down her throat

with the mechanism of nature and

she would be free to float on her back

through a long black river

of timeless

quiet and peace.

Wallpaper yellowed and began to peel away,

stickers fell off old school notebooks.

The ghosts were coming unglued from tissues and bones.

No amount of strength or smarts

seemed able

to save us, save me

from destroying what I had failed to become.

Third ghost, End Ghost, sensible and wise,

found me on my back, staring at the ceiling,

face half in shadow of a liquid crystal display,

when I should have been

sleeping

or studying

or being held and holding.

End Ghost

ordered a meeting

around the table of my eye;   

Little Ghost

                        sat unchanging, with her shoulders

                        overgrown from her tiny body;

                        her bones pulling, too early, and stretching the canvas of skin.

While Pretty Ghost was a tall, lean bottle;

                                                                                    all the bubbling red wine emptied

                                                                                    long before it could mature.

Three ghosts and me

                        all wanting to be happy,

                        as though it were a piece of colored glass kept in the pocket of a child’s sundress.

                                    I am unsuited to care for such delicate things.

End Ghost was the shape

of my mind

                                    my body.

                                    my heart.

                                                            The future past

                                                            where you are not alive, but

                                                            merely a memory on repeat.

                        A life lived,

and gone, and

lived again.

                                                                                    I was told to be someone,

                                                                                    but all I came to be was a collection

                                                                                    of ghosts; of what others thought was real.

So I escaped into the mountains

 where no more ghosts could find me and

                                     Little, Pretty, End and I

 lie free and naked under shades of grassy solitude

                                                            watching the dividing stream

                                                            slipping between us and the valley;

                                                            between me and the woman I was supposed to have been.

Chicagoland [a poem]

Chicagoland

Chicagoland

summers blister under  nails,

winters bite through bone,

autumn wrenches out the eyes,

springtime

            springtime

                        springtime brings the trout back home.

Eli Louis

has a job on East

            Huron Street opening doors

for privileged guests

            in black shoes and red dresses.

Calls himself by his whole name,

            says, “That’s what my heroes did.”

Nat

King

Cole

Pours into the lobby full

            of deaf trout in springtime coats.

 Tilts his dusty, black, thrift-store

hat when he holds open doors;

      winks if you look him in the

                 eye, instead of the little

.                             holes in the cuff of his shirt.

Usually

            No one looks at him at all.

                                         up

The Tourists look up

                             up

and the trout stare right through you.

Jaded by the walls of glass

                                                       kissing God above the sun.

Zora, Zora -

            Eli Louis shouts my name

from across some busy street.

            I am watching skinny girls

                         take pictures of stilettos

                                     when they should be eating peaches

                                                                in the light of spring.

Eli Louis  

                                                                              He’s always blowing his horn.

           Throwing music into the crowds.

    Waiting

                                            Waiting

                               Waiting for some kind trout:                                                                                                  

            A benevolent

benefactor who will

pave (his) dreams with gold                    

Buckingham Fountain

                                  is where I write                                 about the sun and the

           cellphones buzzing                                                                   in the park as Eli Louis

asks for change out of an old saxophone case that can sing the blues for him when he gets tired.

Zora, Zora –

             He was out fishing

             for a warm lunch when

             he caught the ear of

             some mysterious prince who

                                                            claims (our) time has come.

Eli Louis

            was offered a record deal

            by a stranger on the street

            and I told him to take it

            that “we all deserve our dreams.”

            And so it was he

                        who inspired me

                                    to submit my scribbles

                                                to the Times and the Tribune.

            But when they wrote back with checks

            Eli Louis wept in his

                                              old, empty, saxophone case

                                                                                               and the Prince never came back.

To this day I don’t blame him

for putting me down

just when the soup got thicker

and the beds got softer and

            the springtime bloomed in the park.

But I wasn’t going to

let him take my life

just as it was starting up

no matter how down he was.

Eli Louis

            had a nice funeral

            for a man who tried to kill

            his wife. Or so I heard from

            a south side jail cell.

The Times and Tribune

                                        don’t write checks anymore

                                                                                    since my incarceration.

In Chicagoland

              summers still blister,

and the winters bite through my bones,

                                                                            autumn wrenches out my heart,

but in

springtime

springtime

springtime I leave the trout alone.

                              

                                                                                                                                               

            

Poetic Explanation for Chicagoland

This story has many elements that I thought might need more explanation.  “Chicagoland” is a poem which retells the story of “The Fisherman and his Wife” in modern day Chicago. The old man and woman of the fairy tale have been turned into Eli Louis and Zora, two artistically talented and homeless citizens of The Windy City who are in their early thirties. In my version, the trout are actually the wealthy who dominate a famous shopping street called The Magnificent Mile – literally a mile of road dedicated to capitalism. Eli goes “fishing” for them in the spring when many of them are tourists, still able to feel awe for the city. He thinks he “catches” one who says he is a prince (the golden fish), but in the end betrays him. Eli’s problem is that he keeps waiting for success to happen to him; meanwhile Zora actively sets out to fulfill her dreams and get off the street and out of poverty.

The poem is told through Zora, who is named after Zora Neale Hurston. As such she represents and references feminist and coming-of-age elements of the book Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Even though she is the main character, she uses her voice, at first, to talk about Eli Louis, the street musician and hotel employee who, in the end, cannot accept it when Zora finds success before him. It’s also significant that in real life Zora Neale Hurston ended up being alone and buried in an unmarked grave in Florida.

The syllables and line arrangement are symbolic of the improvisational style of Jazz as well as “blue notes” which holds a Mecca in Chicago. Blue notes are the sliding musicality found in Blues and Jazz music, created when African slaves came to America and had to sing in church. Blue notes were created when the slaves tried to find the correct note to sing, because the scales of the western European music and the western African music are different.  It was the mixture of these five and seven note scales that created the foundation of Blues and therefore Jazz, and so that’s how many syllables the major lines contain. Heading “topics” contain four syllables.

I wanted to give a feminist spin to what I saw as a very sexist story. The original story is only about greed on a very basic level. More so, it is about the “terror” of women’s ambition and the shame of any “spineless” man who would listen to her. By incorporating religious images, the old fairy tale adds another element of destiny and predetermination and “natural order” as well. I wanted to show how both genders are more alike than they are different, both have the right to dream, and the right to defend that dream – while also equally capable of darkness.