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

house

Heart like the last Red Wolf

in the decimated population of eastern North Carolina

looking for a mate

Heart like a target

Hole like an exit wound

Play on

III

CONFESSIONAL POETRY

Writing it is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror

or slowly shaking a souvenir snow-globe of asbestos & shame

to quiet an imaginary baby

It’s like sewing rhinestones on your traumas so you can wear them to a pain festival

or beating a piñata selfie with a pink rubber bat

so you can pet the demons that fall out

No, the confessional is a mode among other modes

Right now I’m getting fingered in a museum bathroom during a Cindy Sherman exhibit

while discussing Susan Sontag’s “The Pornographic Imagination”

& live streaming it on Instagram

Why don’t you follow me

A beef-witted male critic is indexing my sins

in a highly regarded literary publication

Supergluing my clitoris forever to the pillar of historical irrelevance

It’s shitting your fancy gown in a home movie & everyone who loves you recoiling

while you shrug because it’s only a movie

Doing a clever impersonation of roadkill in glitter eyeshadow

then lifting up your dress to show everyone your invisible dirty panties

Not wearing waterproof mascara while you’re being tasered

Staging your copycat suicide, leaving lipstick on your noose

You open a vein of hematite & convince everyone it’s blood

then bleed out on a white shag carpet

All over the world, depressed, narcissistic little bitches

are filling notebooks with their feelings

Sloppy, boring, grotesque, unfuckable feelings

I really like feeling something when I stagger into a poem

& having a place to lie down & cry

I woke up this morning from uneasy dreams & put on three pairs of tiny high heels

Embed me in plastic, pass me around

Put me onstage so I can stand over a grave trap

& a man can explain what’s wrong with me

Rape me by the light of the moon shining over a nuclear reactor pool

Is there a single idea in my pretty little head?

Let’s have another cocktail & find out

while I remove these sticky bandages

IV

ARCHIVE OF RECENT UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTIONS

PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW

You have no idea what’s inside them.

Slipped gears and downed wires, rotted-out floor planks.

Maybe anemones.

Maybe a billion spiral galaxies.

There’s the famously beautiful famous poet you once saw through an open bathroom door

projectile vomiting into a sink before the door swung closed again.

You’re afraid to open that boxed case of wine, certain a mouse got trapped inside

but it’s only Styrofoam rubbing against more Styrofoam

like the sex you used to have with people you didn’t know.

Some people smile when they hate you.

Wracking sobs are usually a good indication

they’ve been gutted by fire.

Liars are supposed to be betrayed by the direction their eyes dart

but good liars know this, so the truth is anyone’s guess.

Eye contact may be indicative of rudeness

or the early delusional phase of love.

The early delusional phase of love.

The early delusional phase of love.

When a woman at a party says, I like your necklace

a multiverse of possible interpretations yawns open like a meat-eating plant.

Sometimes it’s better to stay in the lobby, where the bar is,

so as not to discover the creeping mold in a room with a parking lot view.

Then again, if that stranger absorbing vodka a few stools down

would only glance your way, and give you a sign,

you just might go there.

EX

When I think about him now I think about the money he stole from me

I remember the mice in his couch & the dying fish in his aquarium

& also feeling like a gilded royal barge was ceremoniously moving through my blood

while LED snow fell theatrically in the folds of my brain

I remember thinking nothing could ruin our love which is what everyone thinks at first

but it turns out everyone is wrong

Some things are destined to be ruined

Cheap dresses student housing self-esteem romantic projections

Ice sculptures of dead jazz musicians turning to mush in the rain

Some of the fish did themselves in, leaping out past the filter & over the edge

Others just flipped over & floated up & started looking kind of shredded

Mostly I think about how little I think about him now

like he was just some decorative saltwater display in an overpriced lobby

or a hangover I sweated out in a single low-impact cardio-weight routine

when once he was the creature who swallowed me whole

in a huge religiously significant way

THE TRUTH

You could spend all day bored and unhinged,

counting to a thousand, closing the windows,

terrified by leaves. Look at your hand, it won’t

open to reveal what’s coming. Nothing

changes but everything has already and that’s what

you hate, prodded forward with a stick, stumbling

after some elusive, half-imagined creature.

Studying its entrails. Bending over its scat.

When all the time it’s stalking you. When

all the time it’s got you by the throat.

Below your window, some little kids are walking in

single file, roped together, through the intersection.

Their teacher—or minder—yanks them along.

You watch them without any feeling. Or with one that’s wrong.

ARCHIVE OF RECENT UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTIONS

The this haircut makes me feel ugly feeling

The however much I drink I can’t pretend it’s love feeling

The strangled by the foul and ugly mists of vapours in iambic pentameter feeling

The everything I write is shit feeling

The I’m sorry I gave you those blow jobs and did you not understand the meaning of “reciprocal” feeling

The it’s not my birthday anymore I’m just older feeling

The looking at X-rays of my teeth feeling

The something died in your eyes and I can smell it feeling

The literary recognition might be just another shiny object feeling

The darkling I listen and right now I think it would be kind of cool to die feeling

The Keats is dead feeling

The Leonard Cohen is dead feeling

The ______ and __________ and my __________ are also quite dead feeling

The I am Jean Rhys getting blotto in a dismal room in Paris with black specks on the wall feeling

The maybe