Poetry by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Hands 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

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