Working Class

How often in my presence someone’s used
that term and I find myself being discussed
in the third person, everyone in my family
maligned as an illiterate subtext. The foundry
where my grandfather worked, where he held
in his head formulas the chemists had forgotten,
would have made him foreman if only he’d learned
to write in English. He was too proud to stumble
in public, through years of night classes declining
verbs, tight-rope walking the faint blue lines
of a student’s notebook. Once he’d swung
out on the cantilevered bridge he’d crossed to work
every day, wild, hatless, to impress the woman
who became my grandmother. He risked falling
into the dirty industrial river to cry out “I am”
just as, later, he drove his cars recklessly
through all intersections, leaning on his horn
and shouting, in Polish, “Get out of the way. I am coming.”
And he was. And they were. And we have been.

The Nuns

When our nun drove the idiot’s head into the blackboard
it went so far, it went to the other side of God.
We watched her do it, too little to stop her,
mute as tiny, glass-eyed foxes around the necks
of the women at Mass who were thinking
of the piss stains their old men had left on the sheets
for them this morning and not of the wafer
raised aloft, like a third Ace in poker.
This boy was stupid, he couldn’t do something—
five times nine or the capital of Peru. 45. Lima.
Oh God, why don’t you give him the answer?
I knew the answers. They’d never hurt me.
Besides, I loved the glimpse of linens on their supper
table, the glass goblets for water. I loved the chime
of the convent bell ringing against the waxed
corridors, the way someone had gone down
on her knees to make tiles into mirrors,
and the fact that they dressed without any.
How deftly, with straight black pins, they kept
their habits together. If I bent down, retrieved
a pin shaken loose from the layers of black gauze—
the wedding-portrait’s negative—she smiled at me
and pinned a layer closer to her breast.
And the boy, he was shaking and crying when she cuffed
him again—this time, for shaking and crying. He cradled
his head in his arm, loped back to his desk
near the windows where lilacs other girls brought
from their paltry gardens surrounded a shrine
to Mary, if it was May. Our roses were always so slow
I could bring them only at month’s end
when we stopped having processions and started
exams. Overnight, they blew from buds into faces,
displayed their grizzled yellow cores. Then
it was summer, and the boy heaved rocks
at the smaller ones who passed his vacant lot,
the boy rode his bicycle over the legs of a little girl
playing alone in the alley. Years later, in the grip
of a lover, I walked onto the forbidden beach
at Cape May where it’s said the nuns spend
their summers, where they lift off the starched
wimple cutting so deeply into their brows,
where they reveal their arms and their legs to each other.
And because it was winter, the wide porch
was silent, the long skirts of the wind swept
the floorboards, rocking chairs upended and stacked.
That night, I kept coming—his one finger a miracle.
I wouldn’t stop, not even when the maid rapped
at the door softly, then harder, to remind us of check-out.
Not even from thirst, or from hunger.

Literally

Abortion was merely a metaphor
for the nothing left in my life, the hollow
I had been trying my best to ignore
or fill up with politics and sex. A more
compelling choice didn’t follow.
Abortion was only a metaphor
and that made it easy. Then I’d restore
myself to my original state and swallow
what I’d been trying my best to ignore:
the whirring machine, shudder at the core,
deep sucking, reversed. Where does it go?
Abortion was simply a metaphor
for real pain, maybe a little like labor.
I asked her: the nurse claimed she didn’t know.
I have been trying my best to ignore
paradox in the word “aspirator,”
the work of unmaking. I need to show
how my abortion’s turned into a metaphor
I am now trying my best to ignore.

Poems pressed into your palm with your fare receipt.
Poems inspected by No.53.
Poems stacked at the end of the trash man’s pointy pole.
Poems on subscription cards falling out of magazines.
Poems stuck to the theater floor beneath your seat.
Poems the ticket taker rips in two.
--Poems blowing like laundry from a tree
Papier-m‚ché poems glued back to back.
Flour-dusted poems buried in an old canister.
Tea-stained poems floating on a cracked saucer.
Crumb-laden poems sullen under the cake.
--Poems blowing like laundry from a tree
Hard candy-button nipples pressed onto strips of poems.
Silver foil, jagged-edged, spearmint wrappers backing poems.
Curved spill of vanilla slithering down cones into poems.
Pale saltwater taffy tugging at the edges of poems.
Glazed apples-on-a-stick bibbed with thin layers of poems.
--Poems blowing like laundry from a tree
Cantilevered work lamps dangling post-it poems.
Poems left in pink piles while you were away.
Mail slots silted with laser-printed poems.
Poems exchanged on cards with raised lettering.
Filofax poems jammed into the broken binding.
--Poems blowing like laundry from a tree
Poems running along the bottom of your television screen.
Poems on the coaster lining your drink.
Poems left behind when tearing the dotted line.
Poems pasted on the amber bottles of prescriptions.
Poems clipped and filed with family recipes.

2

Poems (the smell of mothballs, of cedar) pinned to wire hangers, last season’s dry cleaning, at the back of the closet, unrecognizable, someone else’s clothes, you don’t remember the shrug of shoulder, hemline grazing the knee, where you wore it or for whom, what offending part of you it was meant to hide, what it was like to feel the garment from inside.

All of the above poems appeared in Flesh (Helicon Nine Editions, 1999)

Winter Coats

The first layer of snow still clings to the tall
grasses as if to a mare’s winter coat,
that shaggy horse in the photo you pinned
up near your desk. I never understood
the image, why it moved you so – creased, rough-edged
icon among so few in your spare but
messy room. Was it “cold comfort,” clichéd
oxymoron you’d revel in, in secret?
I learned to miss you while I lived with you
and visited that photograph instead,
like the child who leaves adults to their bright,
brittle dinner talk, and buries her face in piles
of the cold, wet fur they left behind on the bed.

(First appeared in Texas Review)