The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Moira Egan PUNK ROCK GIRLS
I didn't say
that our phone call came later; it was ten.My sister in Shock Trauma, Wilmington; they'd flown her in a helicopter there. An accident on 95, she flew into the windshield. She was Critical. I told my parents I would drive, I knew that highway blindfolded. Just let me drive. It was the summer she had run away down to the beach and I was just as glad. I used to find her boyfriend's spattered blood on the bathroom ceiling when he came around. They lined up empty bottles of JD. One night, so far strung out on PCP and coke she didn't even know her name, she tried to kill me with a butcher knife. You've heard it said, "My boyfriend saved my life"? Well this one really did: he got the knife away from her and her away from me. She's lying in the ER like a corpse. Her feet are Boardwalk-calloused, bits of glass are sprinkled in her hair. I see the ring she must have stolen from my jewelry box -- the opal glowing in the harsh green light. I want to love her just then, but I can't. They say those stones are bad luck if they're worn when not your birthstone. Maybe if they're stolen it doubles up the bad luck?
We're both drunk,
a party four years later. She comes inthe bathroom, where I'm peeing, and she sits across from me, perched shaky on the tub. I was fucked up. I'm so sorry. I love you. We're both a messy flood of tears and then she says, That guy you're with, he's really cute-- you wanna trade? We laugh, like sisters again. Not everyone gets to have this conversation. ELEGY for Sionna, in memoriam Georgie My little sister's little dog has died. I didn't know him all that well but cried because he was her favorite, puggish, sweet and always snuffling joyfully. He tried to run with the bigger dogs in all this heat. My sister's daughter found him in the barn. You'd think that after all the deaths of pets we experienced as kids (I used to think our parents gave us pets so we could see, up close and personal, the chilly hand of Brother Death. See how you learn to think when Dad's a poet?) we'd grow used to it. I never have.
I still go into grief
when someone dies "before his time"; I shakemy recently freckled fist into Death's ugly skinny face and still can't take the awful fact of it. I've watched them die, my best friend at sixteen, my grandmother, my grandfather, my uncle, then my Dad, then his mother (and speak of truly sad, to see a woman lose a second child some fifty years after her baby died). Death sucks. He isn't fair.
And when I go
to any funeral now, it's like the worstand deepest death replayed, again, again, that bright and lovely day in February, the astro-turf for green around the grave. I turned in time to see the awful crane begin its work of lowering my father in. I hate funerals; I cry; I'm just a mess. I'm grateful for the bright sun at the graveyard and hide red eyes behind prescription shades. But when the lady poet died, I drove through dreadful storms and downtown Baltimore to find the tiny chapel. It was cold. I looked around. The poets all were there, the priest seemed gentle and the Catholic prayers came back to me like reflex, and I said those words I used to know; I spoke in tongues. Surprised myself, I rise to stand in line to take the sacrament, body and blood. At times like these, I think the dead can see how much we love them still. I taste the bread, a sip of wine, whose sweetness startles me. LA GRUTA for Reetika
In water warm as amnion we float. She says it looks like San Pellegrino and it does, the Mexican sun sparkling down like lemon. We're laughing about the worst lines ever said to us by men. --You have the most beautiful shoes. --Your eyes are such an incongruous blue. And these from Famous Writers. She asks, But are there any good lines? I tell her about the red-headed Englishman on the train with us from Constance to Florence. As he left, he said, I hope you live forever. Of course, I never saw him again. At La Gruta, you swim into a cave where the water crashes down on you, a force shot straight out and hot from the earth's volatile heart. But you can't stay in the grotto very long. We swim back out and rest for a moment, our hands on the concrete island in the center of the pond. We shiver in the ladies' changing room, chilly out of the sun. She smoothes back her black cascade of hair and passes me the towel. POETS & FISHNETS
Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful
--Adrienne Rich I'm telling my new-found friend Fiona that in your forties you figure out things that'll save your life. My girlfriends all must own a wicked pair of pumps and fishnet stockings, for example. Superficial? Au contraire. I want to know a woman friend's been down some scary alleys too, come up for air and seen the beauty in the heart's wild pound. These are the women who would never shake their heads as you divulge your reddest shame; they'd be the ones to join you at the stake while prune-lipped puritans kindled the flame. So I was happy when we three girl poets, upon confiding deepest darkest things the night before, all showed up in our fishnets and cockroach-killer heels for our reading. And peeking through the net, our crimson nails, the way we hide and show ourselves in poems. So, like the wily girl in that old folktale, we too arrive "not naked and not clothed." AT 3 A.M. And when my cell phone vibrates in the dark, its alien green eye blinking me awake, I hardly start. My past, both near and far, at these hours never lets me get away. He's drunk and lonely, wants to hear my voice, although I'm guessing he could wake his wife and do to her in person what he enjoys explaining he would like to do to me. Night can come on heavy, I'm first to admit, the sheets twisted around you like a noose. But I'm getting too old for this late-night shit and being his 1-900 number muse. I tell him I can't talk; I'm not alone. Truth is, these nights I'm sleeping with my poems. © Copyright 2006-7 by Cook Communication |