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

eyes maybe a coyote thick

film on the river a lover’s hair lit fallen

trees lengthen now but so slowly I can’t think

indifferent base God between either darkness

ALL HALLOWS

It’s bad to be alone on Halloween, worse than spending Thanksgiving with a Styrofoam cup of Turkey Noodle

or a sober Christmas after a breakup, surrounded by happy lesbian couples discussing condo timeshares

You have to turn off your lights & hide from the doorbell

You have to cover your eyes from knife shadows on the walls

& your ears from sinister music scores, smashing window glass, & terrified girls

You have to remember that time as a kid you vomited all over your fairy outfit at the shopping center

& then peed out of shame, with your ripening talent for making things worse

You had a talent for singing, too—twice you lost competitions to boys playing the drum solo from “Wipeout”

You should have just stood up in the auditorium & done your retromingent trick in front of the entire school

Now you do it in poems, laying a golden sheen over the paper, inviting people in

to the dirty gas station bathroom of your performative loneliness

Princess, French maid, ladybug, cowgirl, zombie

It’s the Night of the Living Ex-Husbands

The souls are pouring out of Purgatory or steaming up from the animals they were trapped in

My father wants a fresh beer, my mother some Fritos with a single bourbon-and-Coke

My brother just wants to go fishing one more time

Cheerleader, angel, skeleton, witch, imago

Round about the toilet go

In the fatal kisses throw

Oh my weird sisters, we’re not bad, just lost—look at Anne Sexton swirling overhead

behind Plath & her impeccable broom, look at all the blottophiliac girls

longing to faceplant in Mr. Death’s crotch

Ladies, women, darlings, bitches, you

Stop it right now & pay attention: Virginia Woolf is rising

from the river, sloshing home to Leonard in her Wellingtons

nothing in her pockets but bread

You have to take out the stones & put them back where they belong

You have to carve the names of the dead & then let rain & years destroy them

The moon weakening like a cheap flashlight while your heart blinks on

ALIENMATCH.COM

I am trying to center my spacecraft

over a volcano. I am six trillion years old

but am often mistaken for an asteroid.

My body type is indeterminate.

Sometimes I resemble a white marble floor

on which stained glass light diffusedly falls,

at other times an aortic clot.

The first thing people notice about me

is the caul over my third eye.

I would like to engage in heated conversation

about which is the dish sponge

and which the counter sponge.

I would like to date you

if you would acknowledge my special qualities

without my having to exhibit any.

After six trillion years, my spacecraft

is a little tired. Sometimes I spend

whole nights trying to phone

my dead parents, running from tigers,

looking for a condom. Mostly I feel

confused as a daffodil who didn’t get

the memo about fluttering. I keep trying

to wake up in my dreams. If I didn’t

know better, I might think you were in them.

TO THE WOMAN CRYING UNCONTROLLABLY IN THE NEXT STALL

If you ever woke in your dress at 4 a.m. ever

closed your legs to someone you loved opened

them for someone you didn’t moved against

a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach

seaweed clinging to your ankles paid

good money for a bad haircut backed away

from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled

into the back seat for lack of a tampon

if you swam across a river under rain sang

using a dildo for a microphone stayed up

to watch the moon eat the sun entire

ripped out the stitches in your heart

because why not if you think nothing &

no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

WAYS OF BEING LONELY

Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over.

Like a taxidermied grizzly in the Student Union.

You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear.

That time with him in Houston.

Sometimes you flame into a scary flower.

An eruption of coherence in the post-modern seminar.

You stand in a shallow creek & your reflection floats slowly downstream without you.

Alcohol is your emotional support animal.

The fan hums erratically.

An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the baggage carousel.

Like an amoeba without an e-scooter.

An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-equity horse.

You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel.

A Zen koan blooming in the White House Rose Garden.

Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of an abandoned friendship.

You’re the queen, but you’re a bee being sucked into the pool’s filtration system.

Like a version, touched for the very last time.

Spooky piano music rising from the dishwater.

You wake up alone to a bird reciting Keats.

GUITAR

Sometimes it sleeps in its case all day like a stringed vampire

In the store down the street its friends are hanging like hams

Guitars, like hearts, can be anything

If you really want to break your lover’s heart it’s simple

Just immerse yours in tepid water & walk out of the kitchen

Go call someone you always wanted & play them a song on your new guitar

Don’t break your own guitar unless you happen to be a guitar god

in which case go ahead & smash it with the impunity befitting a god

Also feel free to smash your chosen people while reminding them how much you love them

My guitar is often depressed because it takes itself seriously

as the instrument of a few generations of sensitive singer-songwriters

The ukulele has lately grown in popularity but a uke is so babyish

Playing it is like trying to placate a god by ritual murdering a sacrificial blankie

When my guitar is sad it glows eloquently & goes berserk

thinking of light thinning in a hospital gown

& the sound of paper slippers on gray linoleum

like a voice being mopped off the tiles

A guitar, like a heart, has a hole in it

It heaves out its music like a twerking volcano

like a faucet leaking bluebells in a gutted