12/7/2017 0 Comments Poetry by Julie HartTristan Loper CC
Advice for Tiffany 1. Stand here; hold this sign; try not to get hit by a truck. $15/hour. 2. Why are you shaving your legs? Don’t shave your legs. 3. You should be trying to find a guy like Noah; that’s the type who will be rich some day. Get in on the ground floor. 4. And then if this poetry gig doesn’t pay off, you can always fall back on your education degree. 5. Nobody likes an angry woman, Tiffany. Nobody. 6. You’ll see, I’ll love you even more if you say yes to this. 7. You’re going to have to keep your opinion to yourself. Take it to the grave, maybe. 8. Steel your heart. 9. The trees dance in the high wind, tossing their leaves like glam rockers agitate their brain tissue for some kind of sensory solace in a season of turbulence. Hold still. Keep your neck straight. Listen to the signals from your heart. Go toward the light whatever its source. Do it. Do it now. 10. And then we can all go to the lake together, like we used to. My Mother is a Tardigrade She can withstand such temperatures, pressures, radiations, go without food or water for more than thirty years, then rehydrate, forage, reproduce. Though not extremophilic, she may as well be. She hangs on. She is still friends with her best friend from high school, with people I consider problematic, people I would have given up on, people I have. My mother has survived six pregnancies, four live births, two ungrateful daughters who moved far away to live their own lives. She is directed ventrolaterally, while her hind legs are used primarily for grasping the substrate. Her rhabdomeric pigment-cup eyes are blue, but one has a brown spot on its edge. Her sensory bristles are sensitive, artificially curled. She and her sisters wish they were parthogenic. Eggs left inside her shed cuticle attach to nearby moss. Her young are born with their full complement of cells; then by hypertrophy, each cell enlarges. She has molted now at least eleven times. My mother survived despite her children’s colic, croup, crankiness, cruelty even unto laughing at the ball on the end of her nose, her not reading French, her Sears Roebuck modeling pose. My mother is a tardigrade; she has been reported in hot springs, at the top of the Himalayas, under layers of solid ice, in ocean sediments, at the bottom of bogs. She can suspend her metabolism, entering a state of crytobiosis. Due to a unique disordered protein which replaces water in her cells, she adopts a glassy vitrification. She becomes a tun. My mother has survived hate mail handed to her at a dinner party she was hosting, from her oldest daughter and quietest critic. Even in outer space, after exposure to a hard vacuum, my mother can be revived. Earth’s hardiest animal, tardigrade, moss piglet, kleiner Wasserbär. My mother is a tardigrade, and I am my mother’s daughter. Titles without Poems: A Portmanteau Confessions of a Secondhand Smoker Forensic Listening for Beginners Where I Went On My Last Masturdate On Finding Out Angelina Jolie Had An Elective Double Mastectomy The Year of Having No Opinion Wildly Gesticulating Monkey Arms Monetize This! Wet Sonnet Contest Battered to Death by Anecdote Elegy for Espresso How To Deal With Your Pleonexia On Being a Stereotype Threat It’s a Bug for You, A Feature for Me You Want Me to Have Sympathy for the Overdog Your Borborygmus Keeps Me Up At Night Who’s Loading the Label Gun? What I’m Supposed to Be Ashamed Of, But I’m Not Sorry, But Your Soul is Substandard Things About You I Will Not Miss You Are the Anti-Rapist I Can Only Cry When No One’s Watching My Arms Gone Stiff Holding Myself Away from Your Unassuageable Unhappiness On the Map of Hurt Feelings You Are Portugal Bio: Originally from Minnesota, Julie Hart has lived in London, Zurich and Tokyo and now in Brooklyn Heights. Her work can be found in PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology and at juliehartwrites.com. She is a founder with Mirielle Clifford and Emily Blair of the poetry collective Sweet Action.
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