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

spree

like you’re the star of a miniseries about a Romantic poet unsullied by mycobacteria

& I’m a woman from the future changing literary history forever

writing your name in my diary while you steer our little boat out of Lethe & into the lilies

trailing my hand in the canonical water

Please take me away in my tight corset & wedding dress of sand

I don’t want to stay in this world watching Truth bound & gagged on the railroad tracks

feeling like a fish trapped in a European pedicure spa while the tiny, whining violins of privilege play

& Beauty slowly backs away

ART OF POETRY

Between coffee & fentanyl, between Love Me & Go Fuck Yourself

there’s so much life to be gotten through

So many mirrors to challenge in your ragged robe & collagen essence Korean facial mask

Eventually you have to go out & walk around in the world like you belong there

You have to smile at work, & buy things

when you just want to crawl into a closet & live in an old cowboy boot & write witty unhinged verses

which sometime before the death of the sun

an advanced civilization will discover, etched into the ancient leather, preserved in a rock formation

& display in a luminous floating interdimensional sphere

Q: Ever notice how many writers write about writing?

A few centuries ago Horace wrote approvingly of a poet

He intends not smoke from flame, but light from smoke

which I think is good advice if you can follow it

but he also said that to paint a dolphin in the trees or a boar in the waves

is an unnatural distortion & I thought about how much I’d like to see that

& how unrealistic it is to expect things to stay in their places

Why not someone’s grieving widow consoled by a nebula

A suicide vomiting flowers

In the twentieth century Pablo Neruda wrote his own “Arte Poética”

lamenting all the things that called to him without being answered

& reading it, I thought about that time in a tiny fishing village in Mexico,

a third mangorita waterfalling through my liver

the waitress coming toward me in a white T-shirt with black lettering that said

I HAVE NO TITS

which was clearly a lie although her stomach was kind of big which had the effect

of making them appear to recede

like the single taillights of two antique Model A Fords sputtering together toward obsolescence

Q: Does she even know what it says?

I HAVE NO TITS

What is the message, is this perhaps a code, could it be from the future

Is it a “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” situation like in that painting of a pipe

or a new far-reaching campaign from the U.S. Ministry of Enlightenment & Propaganda

The thieving president wearing a golfing shirt that says I HAVE NO CLOTHES

Q: Who killed poetry again & who cares?

Between false flags & homeless laundry lines

Between long-lasting eyebrow gel & little-known destinations profiled in the New York Times

I don’t know where anyone is going or where there is to get to

The days & nights keep drunkenly arriving, the guests are all dying

& I’m starting to feel pretty sick

BABIES AT PARADISE POND

from a lithograph by Sandy Skoglund

I don’t know what to make of these scary babies

Pale babies naked on their backs flailing in the grass

crawling & staggering baldly around

like abortions swarming in a dream, full-grown & seed-eyed

like newly molting cockroach nymphs flushed out of hiding

like a medieval brochure for Baby Limbo

on the Banks of Pristine Paradise Pond:

As Close as They Can Get to the Beatific Vision!

They look like dolls dropped from outer space

by a giant petulant girl creature with twenty-six arms

throwing up her twenty-six hands all at once, then running out of the galaxy

& slamming it behind her

A picture of so many babies should be happy & maybe it is for some people

if they don’t look too closely

which is the only way I know how to truly be happy

Things look so much better in the subaqueous glow of the bar on a third glass of wine

I love the world most when I can barely make out what’s going on out there

The little dog down at the edge of the pond might be licking that baby

or eating it

Even the grownups are scary, gazing out over the water

toward the dispirited trees & the invisible source of the light

Creepy pre-birth or post-death light

Spaceship tractor beam of the many-armed mother

picking up all the toys

Oh as usual all I can see is time & death

Everything is already lost

& not coming back

LITTLE OLD LADIES

We know we’re supposed to shut up now & tremble off

into the wilderness of a golf course on the edge of a retirement community

& fall down crying in a sand trap

moaning about the sadistic hurricane of time

that’s flattened our downtown & ruined our hayfields and barns

We’re supposed to stand out in the rain-starved pasture like cows about to get tipped

& no good for milking

Some kids are vaping in their truck at the edge of the field, getting up their courage

Those pink clouds have moved off to the east & night is wrapping the world

in a crappy torn sweater

The pharma companies are drawing near, promising many indelicate side effects

in a soothing voiceover

Young professionals lining us up on city view balconies to be shoved off

Internet scammers lasering targets on our foreheads

Light flashes in our eyes

the vitreous gel detaching from the retina

our skin loosening & separating from our weak little bones

It’s just like a fairy tale, we’re turning into birds—ortolans

about to be dined on in dark institutions

Soon we’ll be pissing vodka in our bedpans

pulling the fire alarm, wandering out into traffic

No one will know about our epic journeys down the hall

sailing to the dining room & back

or the monsters we had to bitch slap to come this far & survive

So we’re telling you now in our little old voices

while we wait to be scraped away

like worn paint, while you turn from us to the window & open the plastic curtains

not wanting to breathe