A Date with Dahmer

These are my bodies.
This is my skull.
Hair and flesh boiled away,
painted grey and on display for you.
 
This is my skull.
Touch it. Feel the ridges.
I painted it grey and put it on display for you.
Don’t be afraid.
 
Touch this. Feel the ridges.
Formaldehyde keeps male power preserved.
Don’t be afraid.
Take this. Drink it. It’s good.
 
Triazolam keeps male power preserved. 
You see, only warm entrails arouse me.
I will take your heart and eat it. It’s good.
Then, you will be one with me.
 
You’ve aroused me. Semen coats your entrails
and your hair and flesh have boiled away.
Now, you are one with me.
This is my body.

Tags | poetry | pantoum |
Straphanger Solidarity by Jess Spinosa

I board the Q59 smiling, and greet the bus driver with a hello, ignoring the sign that says to leave him alone while the wheels are in motion. His eyes betray his composed posture. Meeting mine, he explains, You are the first person to talk to me today.

An eight hour shift:
forty-four mute passengers
on a crowded bus.

His sigh says, City people only exist within the limits of their seats, they don’t see other people seeing nothing beyond their knees and their needs. I dip my metrocard and my eyes, paying for the lack of shame of the high-schoolers, the old women with canes, even the Local 3 union worker I sit next to.

Dusty, stained work-boots,
frayed jeans and a canvas coat 
dress his haggard stare. 

But soon I, too, lose the crowd in the maze of a poet’s building up to a punchline. When it comes, we are reunited in the common purpose of laughter floating high above the low buzz of headphone music and turning pages, my neighbor apparently reading along with me all the while.

Our dry city lives
can reignite with friction —
we are not alone.

Tags | poetry | haibun |
Whatever Doesn’t Kill You… by Jess Spinosa

Sometimes, I find even the word hard to hear or say: “mother,”
because it awakens the memory of cancer eating away at my mother.
 
Hollow doctors telling trite truths without the glaze of the personal —
but terminal, palliative never pierced through the naiveté of my mother.
 
Bone, lung, the bump she found near her underarm and broke down —
but I never cried. They will fix you, I lied every day to my mother.
 
When her second lung collapsed, the garbage can became a spacecraft.
She was gone. Left behind was the mania of my medicated mother.
 
The breathing mask made her lips billow like towels on her laundry line.
Accepting it, and out of fear, I told them Do Not Resuscitate my mother.
 
We took her off the respirator so she could eat her last burger and shake.
She mumbled, Marry for love. That was my last Monday with my mother.
 
In death, she could breathe. That aerated me until November, her birthday.
Then, her loss ran through me me like water through paper maché. Mom! 
 
Now movie mothers, no dinner, cigarettes bring me back to that word:
remembrances emitting erratically like radioactive decay. No mother.
 
Even then, I see the bloated paper woman-doll laying in a coffin, not her.
Jess, old friends’ eyes seem to say, I always thought you hated your mother.

Tags | poetry | ghazal |
Moisturizing My Mother’s Hands by Jess Spinosa

Wyckoff Hospital, May 2009

My mother’s hands crack 
dry and red with eczema
and decades of dutiful work
with her household’s chemicals.
 
She spent her life cleaning
that spacious apartment, empty
except for the cat hiding 
under the bed her husband sleeps on
alone, brimming with the Budweiser
he hid in their pristine kitchen.
 
Maybe she thought bleach would wash away
the stains of her reasons to stay
as well as it hid the blood he drew,
cornering her in the bathroom
when the latch broke away 
from the inside door frame.
Never trust a woman
to do a man’s work.
 
Still, she scrubbed at the stains 
of the wreckage of her days
on aching knees, even as cancer
spread to her lower back bones.
I wonder how the glow
of her bright white bathroom tiles
never highlighted the strain 
he placed on her breaking back,
how over the constant hum 
of her washer and dryer, no one heard
 
her life giving out.

Tags | poetry |
New York, I Love You (But Not Today) by Jess Spinosa

A reckless tagger receives just punishment via D train
causing a two hour delay on the Brooklyn bound R:
this is no more than just another news report.
 
A crowd of New Yorkers making signifying watch glances,
cursing “tunnel traffic:” the MTA monicker 
for graffiti vandal run down by braking D train.
 
The law-abiding on news blogs call it “poetic justice,”
this blending of sprayed blood and yellow paint:
“just”, callous commentary now driving the news report.
 
But what if baggy jeans’ NYU art degree taught him
to make spray paint breathe life onto grimy walls? —
a famous tagger cut down early by the big D.
 
Maybe sharp screams could puncture their impatience
with thoughts of electrocution and broken bones.
Would they condone his craft, then, below the news report?
 
Why these red faces, this pacing and racing breath,
this shared laughter? I hope the train was okay —
an artist’s memory murdered when New York mourned 
the commute. This boy is more— this boy is no more.

Tags | poetry | villanelle |
Hoping They Learned Consent by Jess Spinosa

My eighth graders stare at me
with question mark eyes
and heads put off
to the side:
Rape happens 
in relationships?
 
***
 
We laid there on the floor
behind his couch. Shirts
on. Pants ripped
down low enough 
for easy 
entry.
 
It was like we were hiding,
though there was no one there
to speak 
out about his jackhammer 
thrusts, piercing through 
and breaking down the sacred earth
-ly flesh
reserved for supplicants, 
warm offerings, not 
this.
 
Are you finished?
 
***
 
In the definition of rape
forcibly is modified
by: with threat of injury 
and female 
by: a person incapable of valid consent.
 
***
 
We took the train together
in the mo(u)rning
staring straight back
at the past escaping
our mentioning
it
down the dark subway tunnel.
 
What if I pushed him? 
But - Stop…
What if he listened?
Stop!
 
***
 
From the back of the room
Victor asks me:
But if she said yes at first
how can you blame him?
 
They repeat after me:
There is no sex if there is no consent.
There is no sex if there is no consent.
There is no sex if there is no consent.
 
***
 
I said, No!
 
What if even no isn’t enough?

Tags | poetry |
A Hard Lesson by Jess Spinosa

I want my students to understand slavery: to feel it’s burden on their backs and minds, to see the scars it left behind on their “democratic” country. 
 
The Slave Narratives:
Voices telling black stories
of their oppression.
 
Students hate documentaries that tell, so I find one that shows the damage done. It tells, as well, but looking straight at them with passionate pain.
 
My master’s three sons
took turns raping my mother:
how I came to be. 
 
Some students cover their eyes. Others look on in terror. Annie covers her ears to the story of the man getting whipped who attempts silent defiance but cannot hold his composure:
 
Massa have mercy
on this poor filthy nigger.
Oh! Please have mercy.
 
They invoke these stories in response papers, some saying they’d run, others not seeing the point. Natalie’s response stands apart:
 
Crowded black people
produce heat and smell funny,
so I’d run away.
 
Tell me: how do you teach humanity?

Tags | poetry | haibun |
City People by Jess Spinosa

The tree house in El Hato had no bathroom
except for a communal one, of sorts,
about a city block away. 
There the water was no warmer than the rain
and the toilet was no more than a lidded hole
in the Guatemalan soil.
We didn’t mind the latter but I couldn’t stand
the water washing my warmth down the drain.
So, I begged him to climb the hill with me
to find the hidden hot shower in the woods.

After several minutes of steep climbing, heaving
we creaked open the door and peeked in
to see our heated oasis -
Though disappointment came in the shape of pincers
on the head of biggest beetle we city people had ever seen.
My lover, the perpetual optimist
was sure he could lure the beast out.
But in trial after petrified trial,
the beetle only planted itself more firmly
in the corner of the room. 

Admitting defeat, I quickly gathered my things
to leave, but AJ much more calmly
laid his clothes on the toilet seat
and turned the water on without me.
The steam so intoxicated my body that
before I knew it I was standing naked 
next to him, straining to shift my eyes from the beetle
inching closer and closer towards the shower
to the man standing in front of me,
never losing his focus on the beetle
as, finally, we washed my hair. 

Months later, Beth tells us that one day,
drizzling in the woods
her little girl said don’t worry, Mom,
I’m sure it’s only the air conditioners -

At least we were better than that, baby…
at the very least. 

This Love Song by Wesley McNair

He is such an unlikely lover, wearing sneakers
someone has dressed him in, his old
floppy legs hanging down from the bed
they have sold his house for. What he loves
is not even here, and when he rocks
this way, his head thrown back, holding only himself,
he is not much more than a chest
heaving and a few teeth you can almost
see right through. It is the clear refusal
to open his eyes and be where he is
among the pleading nurses and his roommate,
the sad, lost man, that sets him apart.
It is how he will not let go
of all he does not have, making up this song
about it, this love song, which fills
the lonely hall outside his room and no one can stop. 

The Poem Project

So, I haven’t been on this thing in a while. It’s been a crazy summer, and I really haven’t even taken a second to log on once I got my new MacBook Pro. This is all going to change in 3…2…1!

From now until who knows when in the (un)foreseeable future, I will be using this space to post poems and songs that inspire me, as well as (of course) any poems that might come out of this inspiration. 

The Poem Project is the title of a challenge I gave myself this summer - to read as many poems as I can get my hands on and write in the margins of the ones I like best, and in my 2 notebooks, and on the notes app on my iPhone any ideas that come out of these poems - only to weave all these loose threads of poems together at summer’s end.

Well, it’s the end of summer now, so you can expect at least 10 poems in the next two weeks written by yours truly!

Here’s hoping you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them.

Laid. by Jess Spinosa

When you returned
she tasted a mixture
of gin and whiskey
on your itinerant tongue.

When you pushed
her sick body
up against the empty fridge,
she heard even her kidneys
scream stop.

Yet you compelled her
through what was once your
apartment, carefully discarding
her rigid resistance
onto the four-poster bed
now reserved indefinitely
for someone else.

Still, you tore
off your usual v-neck, black
as your always-empty eyes
now staring at the breasts
they knew were protected
only by permeable layers
of blouse and brassiere
because surely she missed
you, ached for this.

But when your hands
attempted to caress
her desire up towards yours
You’re hurting me…
came pouring impiously
from her lips, tattling
to soften this situation.

When you finally left
sober the next morning
she changed the sheets
and, weak with resistance,
she lied in bed all day,
her sacred space mangled
by your last failed attempt
to tangle your skin
with her needs.

Tags | poetry |
Washing the Fight Away by Jess Spinosa

Your hair fights the faucet’s falling bursts of clean
unyielding to the lavender shampoo my fingers covet
to caress into the stiff blue-silver blackness,
the friction urging my body
closer
     closer
          closer to the racing, running water,
          the tender toughness of your arms.

My hair knots rough around your struggle
to clean the suds from my stubborn strands
but still you smile inexorably, securing my waist
and pulling me punctually
closer
     closer
          closer to the calming steady pulses
          ushering this rest upon your chest.

Tags | poetry |
Parents’ Weekend by Jess Spinosa

Sabrina stands behind candlelight with her sorority
sisters in the unfinished basement of the mansion
she lives in now, not a girl anymore
and three hundred and fifty miles away
from the kitchen table we’ve both lost.

Her words are dedicated to her sisters’ fathers
standing around in a circle with straight backs
and clean nails – the providers and new car buyers,
the white businessmen smiling in ironed shirts
and ties, whispering whines to their wives
about the Giants game they’re missing for – this.

Her voice is no longer a whisper slipping down to me
through the gap between the wall and her top bunk
and her hands are not shaking as they did
when she gripped the sympathy card of our—

There are no cracks or stammers breaking her voice’s
faux composure - because she never called him father.
Our chocolate chip pancake maker, who explained sex
via anecdotal voice-overs of Discovery Channel specials.
The only man we ever knew who cried,
shoulders shaking, at our graduations was always Pat.

She finishes her speech, desperately scanning
the crowd until our eyes and weak smiles meet.
She is pleading with me to be thirteen again,
sitting beside her on the right side of the table
on Sunday morning saying thanks for the pancakes,
Dad… But how can we go back?

Before she can answer, the blowing out of the candles
cleaves her away from me, dimming the memory.
On opposite sides of the room, we each feel it,
the truth, so that when her sister flicks on
the harsh fluorescents, we’ve already accepted
his presence at the head of a table and a family
that we don’t eat with anymore.

Tags | poetry |
"Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere… off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."
— Carl Linstrum in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913)

Song of the Week

Artist: Telekinesis
Track: Please Ask for Help

Telekinesis’s new album 12 Desperate Straight Lines is amazing, as expected. This song stands out as the most stylistically different from their usual stuff, but it’s resonating pretty well with my post PMDD episode self, regretting doing things like this:

Now you go to shut the door and I can’t see shit
And when you start I can’t stop, nothing for me to grip
And when i try to get away, you always give me the slip
Oh, oh! Please ask for, please ask for, please ask for help!

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