After We Saw What There Was to See - Lawrence Raab

 

After we saw what there was to see

we went off to buy souvenirs, and my father

waited by the car and smoked. He didn’t need

a lot of things to remind him where he’d been.

Why do you want so much stuff?

he might have asked us. “Oh, Ed,” I can hear

my mother saying, as if that took care of it.

 

After she died I don’t think he felt any reason

to go back through all those postcards, not to mention

the glossy booklets about the Singing Tower

and the Alligator Farm, the painted ashtrays

and Lucite paperweights, everything we carried home

and found a place for, then put away

in boxes, then shoved far back in our closets.

 

He’d always let my mother keep track of the past,

and when she was gone—why should that change?

Why did I want him to need what he’d never needed?

I can see him leaning against our yellow Chrysler

in some parking lot in Florida or Maine.

It’s a beautiful cloudless day. He glances at his watch,

Lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.

Untitled - Unknown

When you finally forget her,

she’s standing in the kitchen.

She thinks it’s something in the water, and it is.

Her hands stop moving,

coming to a standstill in those rubber gloves

she seems to wear like armor.

And she looks out the window.

And she takes a breath, turns off the water

and goes to sleep.

And in the morning,

she wakes up

and makes you breakfast without a word.

Even when you break the plate.

Because you don’t remember the last time you were sober

and the lines between desperate and despise

start to blur come sunrise,

so you’re never awake to see it.

And it’s her fault, really.

After all these years she still can’t cook the eggs right,

still can’t shut up the baby.

Still can’t cover up bruises quite right

so it’s her fault when the questions come, really.

What were you supposed to do.

For her, it was a quiet affair,

she washed the dishes and made you dinner and

poured whiskey till her hands shook.

And she let you slip away.

Put the baby to bed and just let you slip away.

You’ll never forgive her for that.

But what about the kids.

They all say it, they all knew before either of you did.

But what about the kids, and all the time,

what about all that time,

and wouldn’t it just be better to stick it out.

Just hold on.

Just til Christmas and then we think about the broken glass

and the doors that don’t lock. Just wait til Christmas.

And what was she supposed to do.

Let the devil keep writing messages in the mirror?

Let the kids find out?

Let her traitorous hands burn the place down?

So she just pours you a whiskey.

And she waits til Christmas.

And the kids don’t find out.

And the house stays unburnt.

And she wears her rubber gloves like armor.

Like maybe you can’t touch her

if she’s washing the dishes.

And eventually you forget her.

She takes a breath.

And puts the baby to sleep.

And she lets you.

The Sign of Saturn - Sharon Olds

Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an

amber black look, like my father

about to pass out from disgust, and I remember

she was born under the sign of Saturn,

the father who ate his children. Sometimes

the dark, silent back of her head

reminds me of him unconscious on the couch

every night, his face turned away.

Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother

with that coldness that passed for reason in him,

that anger hardened by will, and when she rages

into her room, and slams the door,

I can see his vast blank back

when he passed out to get away from us

and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,

to coal. Sometimes I see that coal

ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,

trying to persuade her toward the human, her little

clear face tilts as if she can

not hear me, as if she were listening

to the blood in her own ear, instead,

her grandfather’s voice.

1988 - Andrea Gibson

It was the year your mother

put her cigarette out on your arm.

The year you forgave her so hard

you stopped crying for good.

I was on the other side of the world

watching my father shine his knives.

I was trying to get the nerve to tell him

who to kill.

But he never figured out

there was someone to kill.

Collected knives like art

and hung them on our walls.

That autumn I made a person

by stuffing a pile of dead leaves

into an old pair of clothes.

Maybe you did too. Maybe

you found a pumpkin for a head

and dug it hollow with your hands.

Friend, if memories had been seeds

we could have chosen not to plant

do you think we would have ever found each other?

Do you believe in the magnet of scars? I believe

people who have been through hell

will build their love from the still burning coals.

Our friendship is a well-heated home

where we always agree on what is art

and what is something to sharpen

and hold in our ready hands.

VOLUNTARY - JR Walsh

My little sister said why a lot. Why this? Why that? Why everything.

My father said, Stop trying to answer every question every time.

So I said, She wants to know why so I’m telling her.

My father said, She doesn’t care. It’s involuntary.

She’s two years old and wants you to talk to her.

I’m tired of both of you. 

I didn’t ask why. 

My father left for work.

My sister wanted to know why.

So I said, To get away from you.

Then my mother said, Why’s your sister crying?

I didn’t answer why.

Maybe my father was right.

The Fear of Oneself - Sharon Olds

As we get near the house, taking off our gloves,

the air forming a fine casing of

ice around each hand,

you say you believe I would hold up under torture

for the sake of our children. You say you think I have

courage. I lean against the door and weep,

the tears freezing on my cheeks with brittle

clicking sounds.

I think of the women standing naked

on the frozen river, the guards pouring

buckets of water over their bodies till they

glisten like trees in an ice storm.

I have never thought I could take it, not even

for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,

to stand between them and pain. But I come from a

long line

of women

who put themselves

first. I lean against the huge dark

cold door, my face glittering with

glare ice like a dangerous road,

and think about hot pokers, and goads,

and the skin of my children, the delicate, tight,

thin, top layer of it

covering their whole bodies, softly

glimmering.

DAUGHTER - Lisel Mueller

My next poem will be happy,

I promise myself. Then you come

with your deep eyes, your tall jeans,

your narrow hands, your wit,

your uncanny knowledge, and

your loneliness. All the flowers

your father planted, all

the green beans that have made it,

all the world’s recorded pianos

and this exhilarating day

cannot change that.

The Witch's Story - Lawrence Raab

Everything you have heard about me

is true, or true enough.

You shouldn’t think

I’d change my story now.

A stubborn, willful little girl

comes sneaking

around my house, peering

in all the windows. She’s disobeyed

her parents, who knew

where the witch lived. “If you go,

you’re not our daughter any more.”

That’s what they told her. I have

my ways of knowing. All pale

and trembly then, she knocks at my door.

“Why are you so pale?”

I ask, although of course

I know that too.

She'd seen what she’d seen—

a green man on the stairs, and the other one,

the red one, and then the devil himself

with his head on fire, which was me,

the witch in her true ornament, as I

like to put it. Oh, she’d seen what she needed

to send her running home

but she walked right in, which is the part

I never understand completely. Maybe

she believed, just then,

that she was no one’s daughter any more,

and had to take her chances, poor thing,

inside with me. “So you’ve come

to brighten up my house,”

I said, and changed her into a log.

It was an easy trick, and gave me little pleasure.

But I’d been waiting all day.

I was cold, and even that

small fire was bright, and warm enough.

a wild, fresh wind blowing... - Charles Bukowski

I should not have blamed only my father, but,

he was the first to introduce me to

raw and stupid hatred.

he was really best at it: anything and everything made him

mad—things of the slightest consequence brought his hatred quickly

to the surface

and I seemed to be the main source of his

irritation.

I did not fear him

but his rages made me ill at heart

for he was most of my world then

and it was a world of horror but I should not have blamed only

my father

for when I left that... home... I found his counterparts

everywhere: my father was only a small part of the

whole, though he was the best at hatred

I was ever to meet.

but others were very good at it too: some of the

foremen, some of the street bums, some of the women

I was to live with,

most of the women, were gifted at

hating—blaming my voice, my actions, my presence

blaming me

for what they, in retrospect, had failed

at.

I was simply the target of their discontent

and in some real sense

they blamed me

for not being able to rouse them

out of a failed past; what they didn't consider was

that I had my troubles too—most of them caused by

simply living with them.

I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even

stupidly happy almost without cause

and left alone I am mostly content.

but I've lived so often and so long with this hatred

that

my only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from

them, when I am anywhere else, no matter where—

some fat old waitress bringing me a cup of coffee

is in comparison

like a fresh wild wind blowing.

The Forms - Sharon Olds

I always had the feeling my mother would

die for us, jump into a fire

to pull us out, her hair burning like

a halo, jump into water, her white

body going down and turning slowly,

the astronaut whose hose is cut

falling

         into

              blackness. She would have

covered us with her body, thrust her

breasts between our chests and the knife,

slipped us into her coat pocket

outside the showers. In disaster, an animal

mother, she would have died for us,

but in life as it was

she had to put herself

first.

She had to do whatever he

told her to do to the children, she had to

protect herself. In war, she would have

died for us, I tell you she would,

and I know: I am a student of war,

of gas ovens, smothering, knives,

drowning, burning, all the forms

in which I have experienced her love.

The Clasp - Sharon Olds

She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,

we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,

I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his

face, again, and when I had her wrist

in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple

of seconds, to make an impression on her,

to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost

savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing, the

expression, into her, of my anger,

"Never, never again," the righteous

chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very

fast—grab, crush, crush,

crush, release—and at the first extra

force, she swung her head, as if checking

who this was, and looked at me,

and saw me—yes, this was her mom,

her mom was doing this. Her dark,

deeply open eyes took me

in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment

she learned me. This was her mother, one of the

two whom she most loved, the two

who loved her most, near the source of love

was this.

HEAVENLY CREATURE - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

For Missy

I remember the day you showed up at the bus stop:

quiet, pale, a thick veil of dark hair, we stared

at each other through overgrown bangs. We were just

beginning our dry sentences at Baldi Middle School.

In those days, our jeans would be tattooed weekly

with the coded names of every boy who flicked

his eyes our way. The backs of our hands became

necks and lips for practicing on. I once even

doused my backpack with my brother’s cologne,

a sad effort to at least smell like I’d had a boyfriend.

Walking around your housing complex, we’d stare

through the windshields of every man who drove by.

We thought of our bodies as dangerous chemicals,

our breasts as match tips waiting for love’s flinty gaze

We were sure all the boys around had firecracker hearts

just waiting to explode. And look, I know I know I know

I am not telling the whole truth. Things in your house

were different, were not right, were accepted because

maybe no one knew any better, or maybe they did

and didn’t care. And whenever the whole dark truth

would spill out, I remember I’d gather my features

into the center of my face, unable to figure out

the right combination for my concern, for fresh alarm.

I’d forget how to sit, how to blink, breathe. It’s true,

sometimes you look back and all the things

you should have done rise up like volcanic islands,

whole civilizations, whole existences, whole lifetimes.

But what did we know then? Fourteen, I took

the hammer of my dumb tongue and tried to tap

comfort into your impossibly small ears,

your impossibly small fists. We were kids,

and the future was our dependable escape plan.

We’d be gone soon, so you had just better suffer through

it all now. We’d be gone, so until then, I tried

to make you laugh. I’m sorry I never realized

I could’ve unlocked your exit earlier, that I

could’ve released your story from the shogun

of my own throat. The letters you send me now

are like postcards from that hopeful future:

you are okay, you are alright, with no return address.

So this poem is a telegram to let you know that

I still think about you, that I’m still proud of you,

that when I remember you, I always remember you

as beautiful.

BROTHER - Richard Shelton

you still carry

your guilt around for company

I will not deprive you of it

but I have an empty space

where my hate lived

while I nursed it

as if it were a child

brother my only

brother it was too late for us

before we were born

it was too late

before you learned to be brutal

and I learned to be weak

your childhood

was a hallway of doors

each closing just as you

got to it

but I was younger

and all the doors were closed

before I could walk

how could I have expected you

to save me when you could

not save yourself

brother my only

brother if not from you

from whom did I learn

so much despair

I went in search

of a father and found you

with a whip in your hand

but what were you searching for

in such dark places

where I was searching for love

Cousins - Louise Glück

My son’s very graceful; he has perfect balance.

He’s not competitive, like my sister’s daughter.

Day and night, she’s always practicing.

Today, it’s hitting softballs into the copper beech,

retrieving them, hitting them again.

After a while, no one even watches her.

If she were any stronger, the tree would be bald.

My son won’t play with her; he won’t even ride bicycles with her.

She accepts that; she’s used to playing by herself.

The way she sees it, it isn’t personal:

whoever won’t play doesn’t like losing.

It’s not that my son’s inept, that he doesn’t do things well.

I’ve watched him race: he’s natural, effortless—

right from the first, he takes the lead.

And then he stops. It’s as though he was born rejecting

the solitude of the victor.

My sister’s daughter doesn’t have that problem.

She may as well be first; she’s already alone.

Mirror Image - Louise Glück

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as

the image of my father, whose life

was spent like this,

thinking of death, to the exclusion

of other sensual matters,

so in the end that life

was easy to give up, since

it contained nothing: even

my mother's voice couldn't make him

change or turn back

as he believed

that once you can't love another human being

you have no place in the world.

My Father - Yehuda Amichai

The memory of my father is wrapped up in

white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.

Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits

out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,

and the rivers of his hands

overflowed with good deeds.

Beauty - Warsan Shire

My older sister soaps between her legs, her hair

a prayer of curls. When she was my age, she stole

the neighbour's husband, burnt his name into her skin.

For weeks she smelt of cheap perfume and dying flesh.

It's 4 a.m. and she winks at me, bending over the sink,

her small breasts bruised from sucking.

She smiles, pops her gum before saying

boys are haram, don't ever forget that.

Some nights I hear her in her room screaming.

We play Surah Al-Baqarah to drown her out.

Anything that leaves her mouth sounds like sex.

Our mother has banned her from saying God's name.

Downhill - Julia Vinograd

I don’t have a home

and I live there

all the time.