Now We're Getting Somewhere by Kim Addonizio (the read aloud family txt) 📗

NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE

POEMS

KIM ADDONIZIO

FOR THE MAKERS

Everybody knows the captain lied.

—LEONARD COHEN

Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.

—ELIZABETH TAYLOR

CONTENTS

I.NIGHT IN THE CASTLE

Night in the Castle

Black Hour Blues

Fixed and In Flux

Animals

Comfort of the Resurrection

Grace

High Desert, New Mexico

Signs

The Earth Is About Used Up

In Bed

II.SONGS FOR SAD GIRLS

Wolf Song

Song for Sad Girls

Résumé

Telepathy

Small Talk

Ghosted

August

Winter Solstice

All Hallows

AlienMatch.com

To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

Ways of Being Lonely

Guitar

III.CONFESSIONAL POETRY

IV.ARCHIVE OF RECENT UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTIONS

People You Don’t Know

Ex

The Truth

Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions

The Miraculous

Arrival in Italy

Still Time

Happiness Report

I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats

Art of Poetry

Babies at Paradise Pond

Little Old Ladies

Death & Memory

Stay

Acknowledgments

I

NIGHT IN THE CASTLE

NIGHT IN THE CASTLE

I’m not sure what to do about that scorpion twitching on the wall

Maybe I should slam it with this book of terrible poetry

or just read aloud to it until it dies of a histrionic metaphor

bleeding out on the ancient stones in a five-octave aria

If I get a little drunker I might try to murder it with my sandal

I gave up on mercy a while ago

That’s what happens when you live in a castle on an artist’s grant

You look at the late-afternoon Umbrian light smearing itself over the tomato vines

& feel entitled—like an underage duchess whose husband has finally died of gout

leaving her free for more secret liaisons with the court musician

She might even have poisoned the duke, the lecherous shit

It’s hard to remember what life was like before this

& I don’t want to, I want to stay here & poison the king next

I want to be a feared & beloved queen ordering up fresh linens & beheadings

locking up bad poets in their artisanal hair shirts

torturing academics with pornographic marionette performances

Meanwhile the scorpion is still there twitching slightly

reciting something about violence & the prison of ego

& I can hear the clashing armies on the wide lawn outside

sinking down into history & then standing up again

BLACK HOUR BLUES

Nothing is the new black’s shit soundtrack.

The elk’s black blood leaks from the roof rack.

Black the prospects of the destitute sick.

Blackberries suppurate in the pie tin.

Green cards burnt black in the gas-lit oven.

Black mold loitering in the privacy of prison.

Black Deepwater Horizon pelican and dolphin.

Through Standing Rock a black worm crawls.

Black Baltimore Mali Iraq Sudan Cambodia Sinai Selma Uh.

The darkling beetle raises its black back and runs

through the black Ghost Ship and Grenfell Tower ruins.

Black Syria Somalia Ferguson Uh Attica Gaza Yemen Huh.

Black heart weighed against an ostrich plume.

Blindfolded goddess, long sword drawn

nowhere in the Oh come down come down.

FIXED AND IN FLUX

The cicadas swarm the pines all summer,

the males flexing their tymbals to make

the horrifying sound that will attract a mate.

The new people are fidgeting in strollers,

running on little piston legs

hard toward the street, toward the breast

and then the beer can, and soon

the breast again. When one door closes,

another floats downriver

under the night sky. Nine planets

seemingly forever and then suddenly

Pluto’s demoted. The king is dead!

Long live the king! Existentially,

we’re either crawling toward

a top-shelf margarita being perfected by

adorable six-winged angels, or else

getting puréed in a food processor

on a decapitated mountain.

Meanwhile, a sea worm slithers through a mortgage.

72% of Americans believe in angels,

no wonder that parasitic amoeba got elected.

Meanwhile, a lake comes to realize

it’s now a grenade.

ANIMALS

I think I could turn and live with animals

—WALT WHITMAN

O Walt you were wrong, they aren’t placid or self-contained

I just watched a spoonbill make carpaccio out of a frog

& crocodiles dining on wildebeests trying to cross the Maro River

It’s wrong to say O in poetry these days

which makes me want to have a loud orgasm right here

in an unashamed animal way

You must have been looking at some cows on a farm but who wants to live like that

standing around in a shed with sore tits, shitting claustrophobically

or standing around shitting & being tortured by flies & eating grass

I know you like grass but it’s no fun to be a pricey pre-hamburger, ruminating with no TV

If you’d had a cable subscription maybe you would have felt differently

watching NatGeo Wild & those exhausted herds on the Serengeti

Walt, I still love you even if in this instance you might have been a victim of the pastoral tradition

Let me tell you about animals: The green anaconda swallowed the young capybara whole

O o oh oh oh OHHHH Walt

Capybaras are the largest rodents on earth

I don’t think I’d survive as an animal for long, even a large one—Look at the elephants

Imagine being murdered & becoming a doodad

or furniture inlay

Walt, I actually like sweating & whining about my condition

Hot flashing & bitching in my cream satin sheets, lying awake drunk & weeping in the dark

I’d definitely like to own more things

An electric knife sharpener for instance would come in handy

for carving up the less fortunate on special holidays

I want to be lucky as long as I can

Walt, Walt, I don’t think death is luckier or leads life forward like you said

I don’t think I’m going to grow from the grass you love

I’m just going to have one last blackout in a dirty pink lace dress

& be eaten by tiny ugly legless larvae

COMFORT OF THE RESURRECTION

One day everything that’s over or dead

will come back, oil painting & God,

chivalry & the kings (even the mad

old rotters, why not, while the heads

of the plotters are removed

from their iron spikes & carefully glued

on again)—why not believe in the miracle—plaid

has already come back so why not the starved

& flooded corpses, why not fresh bread

from charred toast, aren’t the grubbers in the cupboard

constantly churning up from the charnel the old

ingredients, holy seed, holy blood,

nothing is ever destroyed,

but tell that to Marianna whose child

lived for three days brainless & blind

close by cheap factories on the filthy Rio Grande,

tell it to all the ruined & annulled

residents of the earth, everything

& everyone will