April and Abril

At 16, we called ourselves the Triple A Express. Of course, no one ever rode the Angela, Abril, April train. We wanted to be like April: virginity lost at 13, first miscarriage by 14. Teenage Miscarriage Mamas; Next on Maury. Even though Abril woke up early on Saturday mornings to watch Ricky, Jenny, and Maury, she never really wanted to be an unwed mother. I’m sure Abril and April wear just as much make-up as ever although they’ve always had clear skin: Abril bronzed and April rosey. We lost touch. I remember being on my mother’s bathroom floor with April after we’d had a threesome. How my mother didn’t know we snuck 18 beers into my closet drove me nuts. On today’s Oprah, a woman blinded by divorce. When Abril left the bedroom, April and I started kissing. Before Abril came back, we stopped kissing because she might have been freaked out, or felt left out. Missing scene: April and I coaxed Abril to get naked, kiss us, lay in the bed. That night, April was crying as I was puking in my mother’s toilet. I couldn’t have been that quiet, saying between barfing, “This is so rock and roll; Motley Crue Behind the Music.” And April’s sobbing, saying something between panicked breaths about being abused, or neglected, or something else young girls are affected by; perhaps her anorexia, or her abortion. I was too drunk to be anything but obnoxious as Bjork’s voice vibrated the wall connecting the bathroom to my bedroom. How we both got from the bathroom back to the bedroom didn’t make much sense. Abril was left unconscious on the bed. The next day she said she felt pressured. That didn’t make much sense either. She said three fingers were too much because she was a virgin. I just wanted to be close to them. I wanted to feel the weight of a woman for the first time before I ever felt the weight of a man, just to be sure.

Rainforest

My canopied pussy
is a mystery to men
who can’t find the split:
fear of the feminine spreads
as hands get lost down my pants.
Unearthed is a thatch thicker than his.

Friends with Benefits

We had a deal. No cuddling. No terms of endearment. No possession. No tender words. Well, maybe Good head. Friends with benefits. It was half day; his mother worked until six. Still, I gave my first blow job on the checkerboard floor of his roach-infested closet. He was the dirtiest pop punk with the biggest sixteen-year-old dick. Although sex was the intended benefit, what I reaped was much different: friendship. Long phone conversations into late school nights: from family to sex to dreams to silly things. Free rides anywhere in a beat up 70s hand-me-down from his dad, a stick shift he could hardly drive. Someone to sit with at lunch, meet in the morning before class, go home and jam with after school. Company: a close warm body, a gruff hand in my hair, a contagious laugh, a shared cigarette. The blowjobs kept him coming. That afternoon in his closet, and thereafter, I stopped him from going down on me because my bush was bushy, and I thought of a story he told me about his friend PJ who reached inside panties to find a hairy peachfish and ran for the hills.

Little Cunt

Admittedly, I shouldn’t have flipped him
the bird as I changed lanes last minute, but that

was after he cut me off. I turned right; he go
pissed at my middle finger. The truck pulled

up alongside the passenger door. The young guy,
shirtless, tan, and on steroids, yelled into the open

window to my boyfriend beside me (like I
wasn’t even there): I wanna know why the fuck

that little cunt gave me the finger! I stared through
the thick windshield imagining a shattered jaw:

little cunt little cunt little cunt.

The way he followed us made me think
of the trucker traveling I-10 on the 4th of July

who peered in my window as he jerked off
against the setting sun. Outside the restaurant

built cooks tattooed with tear drops and more
names than a graveyard stood smoking. Reluctant,

he sped away. I thought of his girlfriend,
or any girl he’s fucked: his knuckles pressed

into the small of her back; his cock shoved
through her teeth; his bicep jerking her head as he says:

little cunt little cunt little cunt.

Harbor House

I got my period at 11. My mother said, “I hope you don’t leave bloody underwear on your bedroom floor for the dog to chew.” I would have to wear crotchless rags to school. I grew up never wearing panties. I’d bunch my knickers in corners, but the dog would always find them, lured in by unwashed towels, cheerleading socks, cups, pens, dust, paper, purses, make-up, sneakers, flip-flops, bathing suits, bras, pictures, magazines, weed, bong water, beer, chips, cookie crumbs, clay, fake silver, head bands, pajamas, cigarettes, and old coffee. Now, I own the house. The front door’s key reads Defiant, the master bedroom’s Fruitless. Odd embossing for unlocking in the dark. Renters get wordless copies. I pay the mortgage, but I never learned to clean the tub. What began as an act of defiance-the clutter, the dust, the bloody rags-kept me a child who can’t care for herself. Morganne, my roommate, 22, two years my junior, taught me to clean my tub with Ajax and a sponge and rubber gloves because I’ve never trusted anyone over 30. Tenant friends, lovers, drug users, aliens, magicians, artists, shape shifters, and pedagogues move in and out around me. They leave TVs-I have six!-broken microwaves, power tools, shoes, mirrors, school projects, knobs, lamps, chairs, empty bottles, dressers, coffee pots, ceramics, street signs, paint, CDs, desks, movies, clocks, and cook books. My house is a harbor for their abandoned possessions. Unable to decide what’s worth keeping, I cling to it all. If I dump the junk lining the garage walls, I’ll stop getting yeast infections. I’ll put my face to the cold, clean cement floor and for the first time feel this space for which I am responsible.

Let’s Flee

Your feet make me want to slow dance
               in socks     on our wood floors
your hands    a clam around my waist.

Your fingers make me want to fuck
              in broad day light:     a church lot      cracked
car windows peeking skin     to passing strangers.

Your mouth makes me want to rob a supermarket,
             kiss through stocking caps     grab cash
from each register       empty revolvers into the afternoon.

Your voice makes me want to hot wire a car,
             an El Camino     drive it high to a marina in Palm Beach
sail a stolen yacht stocked with food, booze,

water, weed, and sun block into international waters
            catch     cook      fish we find
on our way to a tropical isle    three miles wide. Your love

makes me want to eat kelp     when the cargo runs out
           sun ourselves until we’re native:     mermaid     merman-
the island’s only inhabitants.

It Begins with Our Mothers

Good girls don’t make scenes; keep your mouth, legs, and eyes shut. Listen, but not too well: men like their women agreeable; nod, like you’re giving a blow job. Don’t sleep around, lose virtue, the sacred gift. The perfect woman has a baby without ever being fucked. So keep your second mouth closed tighter. The only thing it should speak is babies. Did Mama forget the blood of 20 or 30 years? How confused I was to see spots on my panties, like someone snapped a picture. Blinding light circles. Mama caught me using a tampon and said I’d break my hymen. At dinner, proud as a pimp, she told my father and brother: Today my little girl became a woman. They had no congratulations. I sank lower under the fork-to-mouth silence. 

vodka

as your morning shot
went down
                        the blood came up
thick as the whole milk you drank after work,
red-blue like a bruise.

in the ER, your male nurse believed in Jesus:
you are so young, hijo.
with the patience of a saint, he
tried to feed a tube
                through your nose.
slithering like a body-cavity serpent, it was looking
for a home in your blood-flooded   stomach.
you teared and tore the snake away.

i’d seen you cry many times,
but never so pale.         i expected
the I.V. to redden your skin as the clear
fluid filled the tributaries.
                                            you were being cleaned
where i could not wash.

when we met,               you
were searching for     something.
i said, “look
                                here is a mirror.”
you blurred passed your reflection to mine.
i thought, am i not a bodhitsattva,
the soul    motivated by compassion
                to enlightenment      for the good of all?

                                                                 you
were all the fatherless sons          you
were every abandoned dog         you
were what i could not accept about
                                                                myself:

somewhat of an addict,
                                 a sun’s fire in my
solar plexus, such a hot, searing circle
burning for touch         i could not be alone,
like the year-old pit bull we adopted.
                                  her downward brows
were yours in our window                        at 4am
i left you across town.
                                                     for the time being you’d
stopped drinking on doctor’s orders
amphetamine, benzodiazepine, diacetylmorphine
instead.

i always wanted to be in love with an addict,
                                            and half become one myself.
i ingested half of what you had, though your half
was                           whole                                      to me.

on the third day       you were released. we
fought before you even came home, over
the phone:
                i cried on the porch in the first week
of march                                     saying, you’ll
trade it for meds!            you           were just thinking
about coming home. let’s leave this alone.

coming close to death wasn’t going to cure you,
                 i knew. love has to come from the desire
to be alive: i wanted you to have mine.
a poisoned well,                                              the fumes
were words you spoke: puffs of                i love you
too noxious to inhale,                                  the gaseous
self-loathing suffocated every syllable.
finally, you swallowed a lit match.

all your years of
                calling to God
                               requesting death
must have helped the vodka
burn through your throat,                       separating
trachea from esophagus.

Gay Marriage

This election year, I wonder
if my mother voted
to ban gay marriage.
I imagine her standing
in the make-shift booth
thinking of her wedding:
how her mother wasn’t alive
to see it; how after my father left,
the photos of her father in a suit
holding her white-laced hand
still hung in the bedroom.

I imagine she thought of infidelity:
how she told someone’s mother
that she and her husband
weren’t having sex anymore;
how towards the end, one Sunday
morning at mock family breakfast
(that she was still cooking)
her only daughter asked
her soon-to-be ex-husband,
“When are you going to get out
so my mother can stop sleeping
on the couch?” How she felt responsible.
(Mama, you are not responsible.)

Would she go to Papa’s same-sex wedding?
He would invite her: the mother of his children,
the woman who put herself second
(giving him the new car and taking the old-
It’s for his work.), the woman who
mopped marble floors, worked
and fed two kids while he
figured out just how much he liked men.

I imagine her imagining
the ceremony: gaudy, with showy
silver-cuffed suits and more made-up
men than women; how she would
go for the sake of her children,
for the sake of conversation;
how she would joke in Sicilian
with his brothers and sisters (those who would go)
that she never thought she’d see
her ex-husband marrying a man;
how it would be hard to tell what she really felt.

I imagine her marking “NO”
because that way she can let the state decide,
washing her hands of a marriage
that, aside from the children she loves,
should have never been.

Rot

Part of me likes to see fruit rot-
to keep it until it’s brown like dirt, clumped
like mud. It is the same part of me
that ends a relationship long after it’s over.
It’s easier to trash the thing I wanted-
green in the store, forgotten in the fridge-
when it’s patterned with worm holes,
oozing sour juice, no longer the ripe,
sweet apple I imagined.

Edit: This poem is featured in the September 2009 issue of Eudaimonia Poetry Review. To view, follow this link:http://www.epoetryreview.com/aprot.html