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

I’m just getting blotto feeling

The trees are no longer my friends feeling

The my friends are no longer my friends feeling

The once I was a nineteenth-century Russian novel but now I’m a frozen chicken entrée feeling

The I can always return this feeling in the prepaid envelope provided feeling

The I am the prepaid envelope feeling

THE MIRACULOUS

The band starts the song over,

the rhythms still wrong, sounds that will never

alchemize to music. My brother’s

new liver is failing. There’s someone’s loud lover

swearing to Christ and the bar to get sober

but the moon is being smothered

by the trees and there is no ladder

far enough. I go down to the mouth of the river

ugly with waste. Yellow foam and trash. A tanker

crawling the horizon. What does it bear—

oil or chemicals. I was taught a man could walk on water.

That if I listened, and unhinged my heart, I’d hear

a presence stirring the air. And I do: God, the murderer

making things perfectly clear.

ARRIVAL IN ITALY

The train winds north, sounding like an accordion.

Here’s where the poet’s heart refused to burn.

Here the god killed a white bull who became the moon.

Robed martyrs are floating into everywhere heaven;

sheep are shitting gracefully in the sunflowers,

and Piero della Francesca has solved the equation

for Beauty. She opens her tent, inviting you in.

You’re a long way from gleaning dinner

from a freezer bag. Have some drizzled figs.

Cocktails will be served in an hour

in the castle hall, under the skull chandelier.

STILL TIME

in Severn’s letters Keats is still alive, though coughing blood,

one day he’s better, then things look very bad and if you stop

reading he’s still lying there, calmer again and clearer

before they take his body out and burn the wallpaper.

In books you fall in love with, you always slow down

a few pages before the end but then there you are

with only the back-cover blurbs that say

This story will make you cry and maybe an outdated photo.

When you photograph the famous fountain the water

stops moving, but water never really stops moving.

Your plush lion swirled away, your parents floated off, okay but also

that wine stain on your shirt only looked permanent.

After the horrifying bats in the cenote, little gold-flecked fish appeared.

You finally stopped sobbing in the bathroom at weddings.

You can’t go back to 1821 and invent streptomycin,

or stop the poet’s kindly doctor from bleeding his patient,

but you can climb the stairs to that room in Rome

and see the flowers on the ceiling, the same ones Keats held

for weeks in his fevered gaze. That’s as close as you can get.

Go home. Your miserable bitch of a neighbor is gone,

carried out and never to return.

HAPPINESS REPORT

I was happy when I was drunk one night in 1985

squatting in the already pee-wet grass next to Jill Somebody

outside the graduate student poetry reading

And in spite of going off my medication

I was happy today under the hot shower, and again licking cappuccino foam

in front of the air conditioner before I went outside

and sweated through my new shirt like a lying politician in a TV interview

I felt happy while buying the shirt though it wasn’t a pure happiness

stained as it was with a price tag

It’s hard to find a happy artist because art

requires suffering, goes one theory nearly everyone buys into

getting free subscriptions for their friends

On the wall of the museum, patrons could finish the sentence

Before I die I want to ______________________ .

and someone wrote be happy

and another eat KFC

but a third wrote cancel my life and I bet that person was an artist

or at least more sensitive than the one with a bucket list

that included tortured chickens

I hate the term bucket list

which sounds to me like molded plastic instead of stainless steel and pocked

with little holes your feelings fall through

Some artist said it’s better to fall from a great height

but I don’t know about that

Maybe great happiness is an abyss

Maybe looking down all you see is a big lake and your own face floating there

looking back self-righteously

so it’s probably best to crawl under a sympathetic rock

I don’t know why the Declaration of Independence talks about the pursuit of happiness

when Jefferson originally wrote property

Life, liberty, and property

Maybe I would be happier if I owned some

Some of my ancestors owned slaves

and some were impoverished Italian peasants

Maybe all freedoms are stained

Before I die I’d like to see some changes made

but it’s probably too late

just as it’s too late to drink myself to death at a young age

That day at the museum I thought I want to climb to a great height and then fall through myself

the way a man falls through me when I’m happy and in love

Now I only want espresso and a little foam

To stay in bed all day, Christmas lights blinking against the August heat

Pigeons landing outside on the air conditioner walking around making soft noises

and then fucking off

Someone screaming in the street who isn’t me

I CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU JOHN KEATS

Even though you’ve been dead for almost two hundred years, I feel like maybe

I could fall through a wormhole or get knocked on the head or go through some stones in Scotland

& somehow make my way to you, wearing a complicated bonnet of feathers & ribbons

with medicines sewn into my pantaloons under my white muslin dress

You’d fall for me & forget about Fanny Brawne & the big difference in our ages, because

well, because that’s what I want to happen, John Keats, not the part where your brother

grows pale & mist-rising-from-a-shorn-field-under-a-sky-of-whirling-swallows-thin & yes I’m sorry dies

but the part where we lie on the grass & drink French wine & you lay your head on my breast

I can feel your eyelashes against my skin even here in the twenty-first century

like the legs of a fly as it lands on a musk-rose while a tiny chorus hymns around your head

That’s how much I fancy you, John Keats, like you’re an Amazon fulfillment center far out in space

& I have a Groupon code for an intergalactic shopping