6/7/2017 1 Comment Poetry by Julie RouseJUNK HISTORY I have a safety plan. I have undine hair. I have empathic babies all over the place. I AM NOT YOU. I live in panic, I said in love to my body. I said no. I love my great-uncle for his hands around his wife’s throat in dreams, and I love him for his awesome shame. Do I want to grow up? Do I want nooses of my mother’s ironed hair? I walked her into the back yard and said I want you to have no more children. To listen to a girl of eight or beget. Were the needles in the yard from dog breeders or men? Animal veins strung about the living room. Look around you. I dreamed of the dead turning to leather. I would love to cuddle up to the animal- heavy dead, the soft, permanent dead. I wanted to be you. I died also that time, but I am getting well. A parallel of lace curtains waving gently in an empty room. In 1978 I bit my father for the last time and on my fat cheek for the first time he bit me back. POEM WITH DARNELL If you hear a terrible rumble, don’t worry. This is the sound of all of my money. It’s warming behind the walls of my small house. Breathe. I can wait because I am kind. It takes great patience but I am becoming a millionaire. I’m thinking of how to spend my money. I have the craziest thoughts. Breathe. Whale in the Arctic. She is eating the krill bloom. I will buy her but let her live there, just so she knows she can have everything she wants. I’ll buy a beer for my alcoholic friend just so you know. It’s here, but you can’t have it. I’m buying everyone’s problems now because people don’t let go of them easy. Breathe. Take this little cash and hold it in your hand like wind, or newspaper, or fiberglass. JEAN RENO I had a dream about painfully being unable to come. Every time I half-woke wet I was afraid that I was grinding in my sleep, but if I had been wouldn’t you have slyly, sleepily, entered me from behind? I find you strange, your needlessness, when did you discover how to do that trick where you open your mouth like a boa constrictor and swallow nothing? When I am a salmon and my mouth is hooked and my back bent in lust, in spawn. There was a family, I could tell you and we would trade stories of deprivation; Darling, it always makes me angry. Everything in the end is mother and father. We are somehow fused. I cannot separate the dream from the never-present moment. Take the thorn and pierce my tongue and run the long twine through. When do I peak, when do you peak? When do we return to the beginning and run and run, barefoot on concrete, just to prove we can? If we have no children, are we always? I cup my breast into your lips and that’s the best I’ve ever had. My favorite movie was The Professional. I was a child who wanted a grown man to love me who wasn’t my father. I wanted a gunman to free me from my family and another gunman to rescue me only to declare his love for me in his last minute on earth. I bleed and I press you into the blood. This is the only time we are free from the fear of making something, not a mistake, but a drought we can’t wake up from. BY TIME MACHINE, DISSOLVING the body back to the original, how familiar, how estranged from my present self. The different affects when I recalled my mother and then my father made me feel like I was possessed in speaking them. All of my words are haunted. Now I am calling them up. And they are still alive, but not the same – not their previous selves. We are meeting once again not knowing we are ghosts because we are not. I might be a danger to myself after these sessions. Am I a victim? Do I love my? Do I live there? How do I care for myself afterwards, how well I do. How do I make known my wounds, how do I wrap them? I am tired all the time. Sweetheart, that is okay. Okay seems tender. I think I’m missing. I am a dedication that preservers, active, not passive. Tearing my hair. But lovely. How I do. AMANDA, WHERE ARE YOU SLEEPING TONIGHT? I am not your mother, your sister or your girl. I asked you to and you wrote about your father, our father or the father. I love you but I am not in love with you in the shelter or in the wood. And when I am in love we are sisters or daughters. Wretchedly, I saw our father look at us. We turned our heads, we shaved our heads, we broke like eggs all over the floor. I am not a mother, my stomach is a girl’s. I am a witch, I bend at the waist, bent backwards as grain Amanda, as corn in the field in the t-shirt I sleep in. By my man. I have no daughter. Let him take me by the throat and bend me back. Amanda, you are not my him, but if you were I would ask you to break my face and then mend me. Bio: Julie Rouse is the author of Boy, a chapbook published by Dancing Girl Press. A graduate of the MFA Poetry program at the University of Montana, her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Arsenic Lobster, and decomP, among other journals. She is a poet and visual artist living and working in Iowa.
1 Comment
Matie Leaves
6/9/2017 09:16:52 am
Oh, Julie .... these poems are going to haunt me for a long, long time. Bless you, dear one.
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