by Wendy McDowell
GLOSSARY OF WHAT YOU'D SOONER FORGET
aporia
HOW TO BEGIN, WHEN I don’t even know
when a substance becomes a figment?
Should I start with when she kissed
his sunburned lips on the platform
and his breath was musty
as her grandmother’s attic?
Or should I choose a still point
of desire, like when she rested with him
in the garden after planting geraniums
and they said nothing together
as the flowers bobbed in the summer
air like red kayaks do in water?
brachylogia
Pearl, drip, kiss, sweat, frenzy, once
religion, now rotten, bent, vice,
limbs, phantoms, what gets left behind.
chiasmus
If there was no desire, there would be
no regret, but I’ve seen grief redden
the lips and, soon enough, part them.
dialysis
Either you believe in iceburn
or you might as well be fingerless.
erotema
Just what did you think would be left
behind for me, a shroud and cedars
like in biblical lands?
And how did you remain
so unblemished? (my patina is a sign
of the dead in our midst, greenish
like lichen, unadored but esteemed).
frequentatio
In conclusion, you never did
have a meticulous sense of place
or gravity. No wonder you left
behind your husk like a snakeskin:
familiar, remorseless, dry.
gnome
Better to be a phantom than to be of the elements
but forgotten.
homiologia and homoeosis
Little Catholic boy, you were shiny
as an icon of Jesus, everyone thinks I’m
a good catch you said again and again,
you were blue-eyed like the Jesuses
we were all force fed as kids (Catholic and
not) and your hands and feet were cherry-red
like Jesus’s that time you got sunburned real bad
on the river, your blisters were shiny as icons
but still you were a good catch, you still had all
your hair and it was shiny like an icon of Jesus
and once you spilled cherry red on your hands
like Jesus, an icon, blue-eyed and shiny.
inopinatum
Hard to believe
how soon hands and feet
can be replaced.
litotes
It wasn’t so bad, my little lost
limb, it wandered in the fields
like a figure in a biblical
parable and the stump left
behind was not at all appalling.
No
worries the way you erased
the landscape with your cute,
dimply mushroom cloud,
after all:
maxim
The fewer legs you have,
the less ground you need.
noema
Listen: they were together for what seemed
like a prolonged hot day, long enough to form
a lexicon but not to shed a skin.
Their lips and eyelashes met
on a platform, in a garden, in an infrared
land. They did nothing but together.
ominatio
When the fields are dried
out as snakeskin and
the thickets are quiet
as eyelashes or communion wafers planted in hands,
when the minerals are hot
and liquid like melted butter,
when every limb is stiff
and white as a starched
collar. Then will the world
blister and be hurled
to its blood-red end.
parrhesia and repetitio
Forgive me my gimmicks and for using the word gimmick to begin with
Forgive me my killing fields, not to mention my faulty comparisons to Jesus
Forgive me my hot, my sluggish and my lopped off
Forgive me my hope for crushed red petals in the hands
Forgive me for having the stomach of a bastard and the blare of a saxophone
Forgive me my greenness and my blackness and, above all, forgive me you
synthesis
Her pant leg was up but still, it felt
like it was down. The limb was real;
the pant was the phantom.
topothesia
There is no gravity in this immaculate land, but better yet,
no grace. The phantoms have bodies here, they only appear
to be ghosts because everyone floats when there’s no gravity
but no one needs to leave or leave anything behind. There is
a stubborn peace. It doesn’t matter how many limbs you have
because you can always find a still point not to mention endless
wafers and everything bobs in the air like it’s water. In this
meticulous place, there is no sunburn or iceburn and yet everything
glows like an icon of Jesus or a saint, or better yet, the Perseids.
verborum bombus
He told her I know
how hard it is
comparing the rest
to me. I am
and will always be
your best.
zeugma
As regret glows like a glow worm
in the frenzy of want, so too
the figment in flesh.
HOLOCENE WINTER
Only the moths to keep me company, their wings
like peeling enamel
This is my nth goddamn death-trap
capeesh?
You went and now my body doglegs in the cool sheets
in the ragged hem called “dawn”
Numb watching sex and fun, I can’t pick up
instruments
anymore. Imprecision: the subject of this
and/or ice-bitten windows
and/or wet boots. They excavated my feet
each toe blackened, one by one
I remember losing my wallpaper dress to gradual soil. Flatness
embarrasses
us. Impotence: the old modernism, twelve steps,
the new realism,
etc. Dukes and duchesses all over the
goddamn map
Piano-legged and ransomed all love
is.
Have I convinced anyone yet?
Epochs matter!
You will name your new baby nothing
reminding you
of me. Frost-bitten toes know how
emptiness does ooze.
THEORY OF LUPIN
To be serrated as a
Sunday. To hear the beating
spleen in fields.
How many colors
of withstanding can
we withstand?
To see our cousins
lockstepped for a
borderline. To dance
and stand by, still,
as light pilfers
all royalty.
To reject purple
before it can.
To drink the East-
West chorus
of the putrid.
How soon sounds
of misbegotten
are misbegotten.
To be the teeth of
borders. To be nippled
and bruised. To be reunified.
VIRGINIA
It’s one of those lucid noons when
wood sparrows off themselves on
sliding glass and the tatted
hyacinth, so as to avoid
the bird underworld or witness
relocation, refuses to witness.
There is an urgency to the steel
wool and her memory is sheer
and crisp, greedy as an autopsy,
orthodox as snow.
It is that hour.
Often she has tried to regret
the stencil of her affections. Just
as often, she has seeded red pepper
on the windowsill but the cornice kills
it. The doorjamb aids and abets.
She means to believe in reform,
but who can devote when dust
on the needle keeps mugging
the piccolo’s double-tongue counter
in The Stars and Stripes Forever?
Dust is the inside man.
She knows it’s wrong, but chain stores
pitch tents inside her. Scouring
the glove bins she might forget
what’s been ladled out, the most
endangered list, the actual hour.
Still chimes break and enter,
pellets meant for cuckoobirds
riddle the sliding glass. She is too
crimeless and annelid. A useful worm
given useless prescriptions: a woman.
WENDY McDOWELL is a poet, playwright, journalist and editor. She lives in the Boston area.