7/19/2017 2 Comments Poetry by Jane Rosenberg LaForgeHands to Gasoline In the Baltimore winter I was pumping gas when the nozzle exploded, and I lost my only pair of gloves to a shower of stink and flammable properties. I spent the remainder of that season naked at the palm and fingers, having affairs and looking for a job, smelling of panic and consequences. I begged men to make of me their lantern, their torch, a geyser marking the casual nexus. My stained boots and blue jeans became my uniform, my public face, my bomber jacket dangerous, clothes that had the woman feign courage beneath the delicate. On a visit to New York, I bought wool tights from a street vendor at a bargain that fit my narrative. But no gloves as my flesh came to revel in rock salt and black ice contact, to the dampness that chilled sinews and tendons to a spindly rictus: I was invincible. My knuckles at the keyboard were precisely scabrous. A dancer keeps her brains in her feet, but mine were bereft of arches and confidence, so everything took to my hands until I took them for granted; just as my mother ignored the subjugation of hers to arthritis and skin conditions she picked up from handling other people’s finances. I never wanted to be like my mother. Who does, when there are so many more limbs, so many more options, until the pull of springtime, the paring down of layers and protections, the setting of my mother’s searing manias and indomitable depressions. Too many dilemmas, kids and husbands, the mind wanders into stories and dead calms, the halcyon, and albatross, a feeding frenzy once the predators are done. My shallow, rapacious hands, separated now by years from their misdemeanors and excesses. It’s called symmetry, the arrangement of mammalian characteristics, what makes us imperious despite the reeking quality of our coarse charity and of our innocence. Source They have found where it hurts but what does it matter when the hurt has drawn a cavern for the hurt to travel along: multiple patterns subrosa, subterranean to the dome that is muscle and fat, and electrical trenches where answers fall to impulse and environment. The normal formation is, in its profile, much like a man on horseback, delivering on a quest, while the disease, cross-sectioned, produces a pair of wonders, stifled yet moaning: penitents obscured by sackcloth, you could mistake them for lepers in a filmed version from Hollywood, where else? I rubbed my face on my roommate’s blanket and I looked just like that! A character in a biblical epic. She flipped out, said I was spreading what I merely imagined. You might not always go back to the beginning, the first hurt, in extremis or at rest. The source becomes vestigial, the originating injustice unaddressed, because it is the recurring sensation by which we are romanced, offense giving way to symptoms and pity we do not know if we deserve, and yet we instinctually demand. Comparing Tragic Siblings Her sister looked up at squirrels to find snow in her eyes. Mine looked down and couldn’t locate her toes, lost in the catalogue of her fatty anatomy, but not the brain, it turns out; that's all that counts. There is no margin of error in assembling samples here, just lipids and membranes and the signals that move them, sometimes too fast, sometimes not at all. It’s all relative, I guess, if you don’t know the actual martyr up close and personal. She told me to focus on what I know, and she knew better than I did what I knew and how I came to know it, but what I really tell people is to think before they dream; not to dig holes and expect their enemies to jump in them. Also, the birth of a star cannot be distinguished from the death of another no matter where you’re standing. We comprehend forward momentum as fantasy. Pearls are dust, rain is nacre, and the desert must have a great deal of patience, to see its contents transformed into the opposite, its sibling in the salt water with the same tragic results. Bio: Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of "An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir" (Jaded Ibis Press 2014) and the forthcoming novel "The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War" (Amberjack Publishing). Her next full-length poetry collection will be "Daphne and Her Discontents" (Ravenna Press.) jane-rosenberg-laforge.com
2 Comments
8/24/2017 08:41:39 am
Hey, thanks for reading. Sorry I didn't see this earlier.
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