invisible ink

i find a girl the height of a small wail
living in our spare room
she looks the way i did when i was fifteen
full of pulp and pepper
she spends all day up in the room
measuring her thighs.


her body is one long sigh
you notice her in the hallway
later that night while we lay beside one another
listening to her throw up in our bathroom
you tell me you want to save her
and of course you do
this is what she does best;
make you sick with the need
to help.


we have the same lips,
her and i
the kind men think about
when they are with their wives
she is starving
you look straight at me when she tells us
how her father likes to punch girls
in the face.


i can hear you in our spare room with her
what is she hungry for?
what can you fill her up with?
what can you do, that you would not do for me?
i count my ribs before i go to sleep.

- Warsan Shire 

And the woman said, The serpent
beguiled me, and I did eat.
— Genesis 3:13

Beguiled, my ass. I said no such thing.
You say I lost the gift of Paradise.
I couldn’t lose what I never had.

You say the serpent tempted me to eat.
You omit that he entered the Garden
on two legs and walked like a man.

And here’s what your story always ignores:
I had pure gold, rare perfume, precious stones,
but Adam hadn’t touched me all those years.

Perfection in the Garden didn’t mean that way.
Not having it and not wanting it
was God’s idea of perfection, not mine.

So when that serpent strolled up to the tree,
all upright and fine, he threw off the balance,
and I began to pray, Oh, let him be mine.

When he held out the apple, so round and lush,
when he stroked it to a keen red glow,
I didn’t fall to temptation — I rose to it.

I ate that apple because I was hungry.
I wanted what lay outside of Paradise,
a world without the burden of perfection.

Now you call all sinful women my sisters.
I say, let them claim their own damn sins.
The apple may not be perfect, but it’s mine.

- Diane Lockward

A week after my father died
suddenly I understood
his fondness for me was safe – nothing
could touch it. In that last year,
his face would sometimes brighten when I would
enter the room, and his wife said
that once, when he was half asleep,
he smiled when she said my name. He respected
my spunk – when they tied me to the chair, that time
they were tying up someone he respected, and when
he did not speak, for weeks, I was one of the
beings to whom he was not speaking,
someone with a place in his life. The last
week he even said it, once,
by mistake. I walked into his room
‘How are you’ and he said ‘I love you
too.’ From then on, I had
that word to lose. Right up to the last
moment, I could make some mistake, offend him,
and with one of his old mouths of disgust he could
re-skew my life. I did not think of it much,
I was helping to take care of him,
wiping his face and watching him.
But then, a while after he died,
I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed – he was dead, dead!

- Sharon Olds

Ah, Love

you expert
knifethrower, outlining my body

with your gleaming blades
as I stand trembling here

against the bedroom wall.
I was distracted

for months by the color
of your flowers,

by all your flowery
words, for where you come from

it is always tropical.
Now I am ready for you

to do your worst. Look,
I am opening my blouse—here

is my uncovered heart.
Just aim for it.

- Linda Pastan

For Ellen

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn’t shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who’d gone away.
What my motives were I can’t recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she’d moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she’d stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I’d just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.

- Jeffrey Harrison

I thought I couldn’t be surprised:
“Do you write on a computer?” someone
asks, and “Who are your favorite poets?”
and “How much do you revise?”

But when the very young woman
in the fourth row lifted her hand
and without irony inquired:
“Did you write

your Emily Dickinson poem
because you like her work,
or did you know her personally?”
I entered another territory.

“Do I really look that old?”
I wanted to reply, or “Don’t
they teach you anything?”
or “What did you just say?”

The laughter that engulfed
the room was partly nervous,
partly simple hilarity.
I won’t forget

that little school, tucked
in a lovely pocket of the South,
or that girl whose face
was slowly reddening.

Surprise, like love, can catch
our better selves unawares.
“I’ve visited her house,” I said.
“I may have met her in my dreams.”

- Linda Pastan

I wanted to write “stay”
on your sides, surround
your bed with oceans
of salt. I hope he folds you
into a fox, loves you
like a splintered arrow,
brandishes the kill
of your lips. May the bouquet
of your hips wither.
May the wolves
forget your name.

- J. Bradley

You do not want me to answer that,
for it would mean peeling back my skin
splitting open my chest bones,
revealing a heart that still beats
though it is half the size it once was.
It would mean sawing off the top of my skull
and shaking out pieces of my brain
which hardly functions right, left
are memories, the latest ones first,
like daguerreotypes nestled in a velvet lining,
you dead on the bed, your head to one side,
mouth open, an image that is with me always.

How am I doing, really? Really well
on the outside, so that everyone seeing me
murmurs, “So brave, so astonishing,”
while inside I am climbing onto that last bed,
spooning my body around yours,
and dying even more slowly than you did.

- Jane Yolen

I went home and climbed back into my mother.
Origami was involved, I was a crane for the first time
in my life, but my older brother was already there,
claiming dibs. In the desert of her womb, he was dressed
as Peter O’Toole dressed as Laurence of Arabia
admiring his robes in the mirror of his knife.
I left with an understanding of why I failed
the essay portion of my sex-ed final. The question was,
is your mother’s vagina an escape hatch, to which I replied
yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes,
since it was an essay question. When I pointed out
to my teacher, who was also the football, wrestling, debate,
intravenous drug use, and jai alai coach, that this
was a yes or no question, not an essay question,
he made me do three hundred thousand squat thrusts, I finished
when I was thirty nine. My mother used to kiss my forehead
as I left my school, put her mouth to my ear and whisper,
you can never go home again. Every day the lock
was changed, or she had moved to another state,
or there was a different little boy in my room, his chakras
more clearly aligned than mine. Still, when things get bad,
as these clouds tell me they’ve gotten now, these clouds
of puss and anthrax, these gray sacks of dumbbells,
this lament whipped into a paste and smeared across our tiny
window onto the universe, I think of myself
inside her, no job, no lovers, no waist line, no fault line
no noise but the oompa of her heart, and feel
the tiniest bit better, like .0001 percent better,
maybe a tenth of that, maybe a tenth of a tenth
of that, which is still, as they say, something.

- Bob Hicok

I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.

A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.

From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.

I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.

Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.

- Richard Siken

I’ve always pictured him going strangely—blowing up
in a truck somewhere, laughing too hard just before 
it happened, his tiny beer gut fueling the inferno.

But this: the dainty hospital gown, his unsocked feet
pointing out the end of a baby-blue blanket. 

He doesn’t move when we walk into the room, doesn’t
stir when I call out softly. I wonder if he’s already dead. 

I touch his arm, the hastily inked army-tattoo of a mushroom 
on his left bicep. I look down at his pale face, 
press down on the tattoo, hope hard that nothing happens.

- Brett Elizabeth Jenkins

I went to the worst of bars
hoping to get
killed.
but all I could do was to
get drunk
again.
worse, the bar patrons even
ended up
liking me.
there I was trying to get
pushed over the dark
edge
and I ended up with
free drinks
while somewhere else
some poor
son-of-a-bitch was in a hospital
bed,
tubes sticking out all over
him
as he fought like hell
to live.
nobody would help me
die as
the drinks kept
coming,
as the next day
waited for me
with its steel clamps,
its stinking
anonymity,
its incogitant
attitude.
death doesn’t always
come running
when you call
it,
not even if you
call it
from a shining
castle
or from an ocean liner
or from the best bar
on earth (or the
worst).
such impertinence
only makes the gods
hesitate and
delay.
ask me: I’m
72.

- Charles Bukowski

Make use of the things around you.
This light rain
outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
these feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
the red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
drunkenly around in the kitchen …
put it all in,
make use.

- Raymond Carver

Suddenly nobody knows where you are,
your suit black as seaweed, your bearded
head slick as a seal’s.

Somebody watches the kids. I walk down
the edge of the water, clutching the towel
like a widow’s shawl around me.

None of the swimmers is just right.
Too short, too heavy, clean-shaven,
they rise out of the surf, the water
rushing down their shoulders.

Rocks stick out near the shore like heads.
Kelp snakes in like a shed black suit
and I cannot find you.

My stomach begins to contract as if to
vomit salt water
when up the sand toward me comes
a man who looks very much like you,
his beard matted like beach grass, his suit
dark as a wet shell against his body.


Coming closer, he turns out
to be you—or nearly.
Once you lose someone it is never exactly
the same person who comes back.

- Sharon Olds

It’s said it takes seven years
to grow completely new skin cells.

To think, this year I will grow
into a body you never will

have touched.

- Brett Elizabeth Jenkins