Improvs, Weeks 11, 13, 14 & 15

Week 11: Entry 1:Entry 1: from Jillian Weise's “The Body in Pain”
“Dear Lucy, You do not know me. It feels wrong/ for me to know about the heroin, the bags/ of mail you kept, the bolt in your face./ For what it is worth, I have a bolt in my hip,/ a hook along my spine. I don’t want to talk/ about any of this. Tell me: what was your last/ good thing.? Can we stay there?”
Dear June 6,
You do not remember me, I bet, but I know about your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles towel you’ve had since the first time your mom bought you ice cream sandwiches, maybe you were six but since then you figured out they always taste better from the truck. For what it’s worth, I remember everything you never knew how to say out loud, how you tasted after our first dinner and a frozen slushy we started to share in the backseat of that blue beast I’ve had to tell all my secrets to since I lost your number. I remember every hook along your spine, all the bumps of bone I could feel through skin no matter how much you eat. I know we have forgotten how to talk about any of this but tell me, can we stay there? Not boyfriend or lover, not a friend with benefits even, even though there were the benefits and we were friends, you were my first step, the only one between me and my new good thing. Before there were words, there were our fingerprints on fogged windows, paint stains on trampolines, and always that smell of old donut glaze in your hair, the smell from the hallway that morning before that german test I didn’t fail, the smell that brought me back to you in the woods holding hands talking about a marriage neither of us wanted, how we were too small to feel this big, how the trees were green like the flecks in your blue eyes, the ones nobody gets close enough to see, how they would have been green somehow, we’d say, we’d say nothing and know everything nobody else could talk about. Do you remember the good thing? Tell me, can we just stay there?

Entry 2: from Jillian Weise’s “The Gift”
“We fly home/ with new parts. We tell everyone it was/ an accident in the Ford Escape and should/ be normal in a few days. Now we can be happy./ I always wanted to strip at the Kitty Cave/ on South Elm. Holman always wanted/ to drop pants in front of several women,/ lights on. We have affairs. We are in love.”

We tell everyone it was an accident, one that needed to be
put into a pocket like rocks, like any other raised-in-Tennessee
boy, just hidden away unseen and untouched we just needed
to think about it for a while, think about erasing names from notebooks
that would have ever made it seem like something we wanted,
like we wanted anything , but I swear we didn’t. I only wanted
you, your face against my face or thighs or anywhere that wasn’t
elsewhere, as long as you were somewhere near me – I didn’t
cry when we found out because I don’t care. I just didn’t want you
to fly home without leaving something behind for me to remember
your smoke where I would’ve forgotten any other affair. We left
the lights on, can you believe it? I guess you would have to, since you
were there, were not interested in taking time off or closing windows.
There is no time when you are in love to do anything but complain
about how you wish certain parts were different, not bigger or
better, but maybe less functioning, less determined to follow
their anatomical properties, because when you are in love,
you will not have time to think about how your body will do
whatever it wants, no matter how many sixth grade health
pamphlets taught you that you will get pregnant, and die.

Week 13: Entry 1:from Melanie Jordan’s "Parenthetical"
“I’m watching/ a woman’s shadow overwhelm the red/ interior of her second story while/ the white curtain like a minidress/ obscures her waist, ruffles her thigh./ She changes…”

Overwhelmed by the red that frames the window
when the sun is setting on the third floor, all I see
is a woman’s shadow. This is the first time I’ve noticed
but I wonder if she’s noticed, seen me not-staring,
not-noticing, not clothed or conscious sometimes,
towel damp and in underpants, ironing pants or white
hair that happened on accident (Bonnie told me I should
try.), and I wonder what would happen if I invited her,
this shadow, for tea, not that I drink tea, but I would
for her, for you, I’d tell her, tell her I have seen her
on my wall, ten feet tall or more, less overwhelmed
by the real thing but more in love than I am with
the shadow. I wonder if she would dance slow like
with me by the light of the setting lampshade,
wonder if she would kiss me slow or kiss me at all,
if I am even her type, if she is even that type,
to kiss without asking where these lips have been
which is nowhere lately, I’d tell her that. Tell her
anything she did or did not want to hear, not here
to lie but here to fall in trouble with the girl with the most
beautiful shadow I’ve ever danced with. The music
would slow and I would ask her back to the room,
which she looks into every night, I’m sure of that now.

Entry 2: from Jordan’s “Charlie Brown in the Dead of Night”
“I’ve danced with girls before, swaying lightly back/ and forth, just on the edge of what it means/ to fill my body, of being poured in like wet cement.”
I’ve danced with you before, girl, swayed
with you light like cloud head, like light black,
like the edge of meaning or the edge of a fresh
haircut, soft body to fill you with, soft lips to kiss
your mindcult, man can’t touch what you own
or need, nothing can do anything better than we
can’t do them. I am swaying with you again
in smoke rings and blush puffs, this night mean
knowing it will end us because there is no end
of us or end of anything but we are not allowed
to think or learn because we are only allowed
each other, allowed to say real words when drunk
is on our breaths, between our breaths, between
our breasts, between any and all things where beauty
is born, the words you came from, the words
you were born from, words like brunette and ovary,
words that you blow in my ear, scented pink like
how it feels to wake up next to you sober.

Week 14: entry 1:From Bridgette Byrd’s “After Gazing at the Rain”
“About the scar he said It’s right here and the story was written on his side like a flower. She watched their slippage like an inward astronomer on the evidence of pain. She woke up to feel their fingers locked…”
I woke to find your fingers broken by picking flowers on repeat she loves me loves me not she loves me loves me loves me but nothing belongs to the lost cigarette behind green plumes. I was or you might have been drinking cherry coke in faux French and your accent was music a sexy metaphor to ears that did not know better or did not know anything. music is not talkative though not gracious or hard. Do you have the power to light a diamond? to flash like a disposable camera? to be a cigarette without a filter like the last one? Where did the hunger go? Behind couches next to Jesus hiding because he never did want to be found only remembered like baseball players like Paris Hilton like everyone I never wanted to get to know any better. You need never turn to the lollipop guild, the lollipop guild, the lollipop guild. They never answer the phone. They only attend frat parties.

Entry 2: From those last one-line poems of Byrd’s – “On hanging onto a denounement she said If there is no end to this story I shall tie another flower to the narrative.”
There is no end to this story so I shall tie another razor blade to the window. I know you are attracted. A quarter of weed will buy you a tall cup of skim milk in this one-trick-pony town but you cannot buy it here and if you do it will not fit into the shopping cart because there are no wheels. Her shorts in the cereal aisle rode up her shorts rode up her shorts to show the sweat stain in her butt crack. The boy said I will dry clean your heart but I told him to stop to not say so much to the man behind the curtain. I told him not to brush so hard after flossing that way that his teeth would never be white anyway that he was stained with the love of exhaustion. I was comfortable rolling the shopping cart filled with your cement clogs into the piles of boxes overpriced what they call snacks but what she calls disgusting. Why is it so dark and the floor is made of clay? I melted with Artax. He was a white horse. And now I have killed him.


Week 15:
Since we didn't have a specific poet this week I am riffing off Kim Addonizio since she's my favorite. Evah.
Entry 1: from Kim Addonizio’s “Forms of Love” - "I love everything about you except your hair./ If it weren't for that I know I could really, really love you."
I broke up with my first boyfriend ever because
he got a haircut. All I remember is coming to school
and seeing this boy look wrong, look like he a problem,
like a mistake, like the haircut gave him away, no more
mystery or charm, no more wit or good handwriting-
which was, of course, my favorite thing. His hair
probably did not even look good long but I don’t think
that was the point. When he cut his hair, I passed him
a note, made him cry during lunch and that was the first
real heartbreak I caused, first boy I hated when I saw him
cry, first time I never wanted to see somebody ever again,
and for good reason: tears make people turn to trolls,
warped faces and he already hated all the music I liked,
his eyebrows in a frenzy of furrow, wrinkled forehead
and puppy dog eyes- I am not going to feed you, Fido,
not going to entertain you with flushing the toilet fifty
times a day just so you can watch, I will flush it once,
when necessary, and I will gladly watch you squirm.


from “Happiness After Grief” “feels like such a betrayal: the hurt not denied, not pushed away, but gone entirely for that moment you can’t help feeling good in, a moment of sudden, irrational joy over nothing of consequence, really, which makes it all somehow seem even worse. Shouldn’t happiness be the result of some grand event, something adequate to counter that aching, gaping chasm that opened when… But, no: it’s merely this: there goes our little neighbor, running barefoot, no pants, fox stole wrapped around her shoulders.”
Around my mother’s neck is her dead mother’s string of
leftovers, the things that weighed her down. My grandmother,
the thoughtful woman she was, left my mother these things,
bills and molding cheese in her fridge, and a cat, Tiger, who
was too old to learn to love anybody but my mean old grandma
who is dead now, because she died alone. Her funeral played
traditional Swedish music that I nearly choked not to laugh at,
but my dad cried even though I think he used to hate her
because she locked my sister up in a dark bathroom but of course
there are monsters and toilet paper is not nice but she was
not a nice lady, and I mean that. She liked me but she
forgot how to love my mom, never loved her maybe, at least
not as much as my dumb uncle or rich aunt, good people
with bad intentions, but when my grandma died only my mother
cared, only my mother listened to her dead wishes, only one
with a gaping chasm where she should’ve been given a heart
but I think the wizard forgot, forgot like my mom never will
like my grandma never forgave, like people can only do one
or the other, never both, the good feelings like pants that
are too tight or too loose or missing a button, like the ones
my grandma knew how to push on my poor mother, like to tell
my mom she was going to be okay one day, like my mom was
still not enough, like she was still in middle school, the first kid
with braces in her whole city almost, crooked teeth to ruin
an otherwise perfect smile.