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

with 4 a.m. dread

Beds are for living! Beds are for life . . .

& for memory, as you lie between cork-lined walls

writing very long sentences in French

Sometimes I’m so happy

I want to kill myself first thing in the morning to make sure I die . . .

under my white organic ruched duvet cover

like a marmot burrowed deep under the snow

who can’t wake up from hibernation

while others crawl out, ravenous for spring

II

SONGS FOR SAD GIRLS

WOLF SONG

At the party they’re all wearing swan suits.

The fur on your back thickens. You’re slicked

against the wall of the flow-through kitchen

between your ex and his girlfriend.

You’d still like to devour him as you once did,

but you are trying to become human.

Though also you are starving,

sick of scavenging nuts and berries,

gnawing the occasional biscuit.

You want to take down a caribou!

You want to tackle a moose and rip open

the flap of skin swaying beneath its throat

and share it with the next wolf

to trot by. But here there are no wolves.

Through the kitchen window fangs the moon

to fuck you up even more, to send you slathering

away, past the condo community,

past the lit houses, into the deep woods;

where there’s a moon,

there’s always a deep woods.

SONG FOR SAD GIRLS

Right now I feel like a self-cleaning microwave about to malfunction.

My friend texts from the east coast, I smoked so many cigarettes in this chair.

She’s in some bar. Do people still even say, old haunts? She’s sitting there with a second beer,

haunted by a sad girl. Now I feel more like a burn hole in a cushion,

still smoldering. A set of plastic curtains. Whoosh, I could go up any minute.

Sad girls, sad girls, you’re everywhere. Sick on the snake oil

of romance. Blundering in and out of beds

and squabbles with roommates. Scalded by raindrops.

Hating yourselves with such a pure hatred.

Loving the music that makes it worse. This is that music.

There’s a low piano part in here somewhere, sinking under a wave

of minor thirds. There’s a plastic guitar with shitty strings and you think

you’re that guitar nobody wants even for a weird art project. You don’t know

that your trash and dead birds can cast beautiful shadows. You don’t know

anything and I love you for that.

Right now I feel like a menthol filter. I float face-up in the toilet,

my lipstick dissolving, as crowds of girls swirl by. I creak like a rusted-out insect

trying to fly. I spin around and around

for you and you only, scraping out this old, sad song.

RÉSUMÉ

—after Dorothy Parker

Families shame you;

Rehab’s a scam;

Lovers drain you

And don’t give a damn.

Friends are distracted;

Aging stinks;

You’ll soon be subtracted;

You might as well drink.

TELEPATHY

I don’t know if telepathy has ever been proved or disproved

but when I go out with a friend & there’s a man by himself . . . I feel . . . him . . .

Something goes out from me, little threads of energy, my invisible feelers begin waving,

my third eye on its stalk turns slowly . . . & if I’ve entered the circle of his awareness

where his pancakes are shrinking from his bacon . . . or his beer is wetting itself . . .

what messages are drifting into his hair . . . like cat dander . . .

like oversharing fortunes from insecure fortune cookies . . .

I am not a strong, independent person experiencing life to the full . . .

I never learn from my mistakes . . . Maybe you could be one of them . . .

Men like to say they’re not mind readers, but the ones I’m drawn to aren’t readers at all . . .

Their thought-balloons are full of dick pics . . . floating toward the ceiling

& slowly deflating, like their interest in me . . . Maybe telepathy is bunk, but magic sure isn’t . . .

I remember a man who liked to dress me up . . . then saw me in half

& I stood up smiling & bowing . . .

SMALL TALK

Let’s skip it and get straight to the rabid dog at hand.

This is some weather we’re cowering from.

Would you please touch my face like a blind person?

I feel like a giraffe in a parking garage.

Let’s skip it and get straight to the death smell

coming from behind the refrigerator.

Can I offer you something more subtly evocative

of the underlying theme of your life story?

How many self-important wounds do you have?

Everything you say is tiresome.

I’m going to walk away slowly and not look back.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

GHOSTED

I guess you realized how worthless I am

I myself am just beginning to discover it . . .

Nothing is being named after me

A planet would be nice . . . or a star system

But I don’t want to be anyone’s sunbeam

Maybe a black hole . . . I just saw a picture of one

& oddly you weren’t in it . . .

I don’t care what you’re wearing right now

as you don’t think of me at all . . . I’ve already disappeared

like a dead girl in a police procedural

but you’re not the detective . . . & I’m not dead . . .

Darling, there are plenty of nameless alleys

& I intend to walk down one late at night

howling at the trash bins until a light blinks on

& someone sets out a nice dish of gin . . .

AUGUST

What I want is to slice open its stomach and watch

its toxic sun uncoil into the sea.

Cicadas seething in their asylum in the trees.

All this frenzy and scorch

and at night music hammering from the outdoor bar

where the dancers blindside each other

with longing, and the long tide slopping

in and away, barnacles on the piers clinging

in the littoral drift. Whatever it is in me

that crawls like a wasp over the remains

of a picnic, used napkins blown

over the senseless grass—tell me

how to kill it. How to let it go out like the last

disaster of love, last boat guttering in the wave-swell.

WINTER SOLSTICE

I can’t think about the black slick on the river or the deer

corpse at the base of the tree or how one lover is

too young & sometimes indifferent & another is

lighting candles with someone else neither

ever mine for more than a rare evening the days will

lengthen now but so slowly it will still

feel like darkness is winning the battle between

it & what people call good or God a few fallen trees

are always there in the woods turning back

to earth rump torn open a kind of caul

over the