Notes On the Confessional Style
when i wrote the poems in which everything was my fault, i was given awards. when i wrote the poems in which nothing was my fault, i was given awards. i never learned the truth: i was given several awards. to understand my whiteness, awards. to understand my disability, dialectical materialism. when i wrote of my whiteness and my disability i wrote of two clay people remaking each other perpetually. when i tried to imagine the clay people, all i could imagine were clay foxes. they moved like scenes in a stop motion picture, my foxes, their necks arcing back in shows of vulnerability i had seen before, in swans, their limbs reaching out and vanishing inside of one another, a pair of manmade selves, a plio-pleistocene impression of red clay struggling before bursting into a cloud that cast its tint upon the day. sometimes the kindest thing you can do is disappear. instead my foxes kick themselves back and forth across the lawn like a soccer ball that’s begun coming apart from overuse and hardly rolls right anymore. they wait and wait but no one ever comes on a mission to forgive them, though whether this means they are unforgivable or in need of no forgiving they never get to know. all they know is it’s just like a fox to wait on a missionary, so that’s just what they do. they also somersault in the dirt and kick the air and kiss the earth, enjoying the ours while they can, shrieking about until language grows tired and begins to drift like a satellite or a starfish the tide carries invisibly out of reach.
Memorial Day
at the end of what you believed to be the end of the story you chopped two pounds of carrots on the plastic cutting board and scraped them into the blender along with six cups cups of water cups of sugar a lemon voices outside go to them hungrier than you were a little brighter in its chemise of blackthorn and nail life looked up and down your dusty room and packed up everything you didn’t need you couldn’t believe excarnation you cried charnel house you said hasty generalization life replied we left the glasses inside your friends say by mistake you once were a waiter you carry them in hand all nine of your friends unstacked to table through the screen door who were you to beg in your old clove pink in a life you do things no one can know or understand or laugh and hug you or forgive you and if they do there must be something wrong with them there must a cloth hangs from your shoulder juliana pulls it down on the table a surrender of rabbits whitens the monochrome television set a hero came to town and they found you and they killed you and they missed smile the twist is over you’ve been sent to replace the straw rotting in the stable your friends are waiting for you to serve them meagerness sure bitterness sure the trail is long and sweet potato and cypress vine and water spinach your rucksack clinks with baubles you need but could no longer carry by hand if you tried you were a waiter once the doors are closing please stand clear of the doors