How are you holding up?

Right now, you’re probably at the bar that doesn’t I.D.

Probably crying over pop to a bartender who doesn’t want you there.

Telling a stranger how you actually loved me.

I never got the appeal of that, the intimacy bull you’ve always been obsessed with.

No one ever asked for your life story, you know that?

No one ever gave you the OK to call in the middle of the night,

come running about your problems. But you’d beg to differ.

You’d always thought prolonged discussions              

about the origins of man and how to say what in Spanish

when I only wanted to know how to translate a poem into the language

invited all that. It didn’t.

It just so happened I needed you for something.

I don’t know what, don’t ask.

Do you remember how, for your birthday,

I gave you an ode for a present? (You had really crappy self-esteem.)

It was blackout poetry in one of your biology textbooks,

about your “living . . . guts”

and your “simple . . . spine”

and “hollow . . . mouth.”

That was an entire course you learned about ecosystems and life,

and you let me carve it all up into something you’d remember me by.

You never said it, but I know good and well you thought it-

that everything I did was, at the core, a vain attempt

at leaving some sort of legacy.

Babe, that’s true of every artist. How can you make art without it being exactly that?

And honey, I also make art to destroy it.

Prime example, you are.

Bawling in a public space, pathetic.

Before me, you only ever cried about colonial slavery,

so stupid you knew only how to villainize and heroify.

Still unclear as to how you see me.

Thinking of you crying, I get the guilt of knowing I did that.

The guilt of pride and of accomplishment,

self-worth knowing I, as a human being can inflict pain like that. 

I made that.

Created that.

Broke that.

No one could’ve done it but me,

or like me,

the way I did.

My advice, love, is to feel it. Because soon,

it’s going to stop hurting, and you’ll forget all about me.

Cleansed is what they call it.

So feel it now because the next time this happens,

you will have built walls that someone will have sneaked through.

You will be broken in a completely different way.

You will never be broken like this again.

So curse me, and talk to strangers about it.

(I’ll continue to send you my best wishes

through poems published in our favorite literary magazine. 

See you next issue, Wednesday, May 15.)

When you have a miscarriage, do you bleed?

“Let’s have lots of babies

and name them after civil rights heroes.”

You could’ve been Rosa, Linda, Mary.

You could’ve been Martin, Malcolm, Henry.

You were an idea,

breakfasts in bed spent wondering what to name you.

We couldn’t fuse ours to make anything but an inside joke.

We considered legends, apostles, poets, predestined artists.

You were the size of a mustard seed in me,

something that turned and sent me hurling.

You were

afternoons spent on the mouth of the river where we created you.

You were an imagined boy with bug eyes, wagging his finger to the orchestra,

with whose ears,

and whose mouth and nose and toes?

You were

possibly a princess, but with whose irises?

Whose eyebrows and laugh lines?

Whose unblinking honesty? Fatal vanity?

You were spots on my underwear,

how could you?

You were a bellyache and a trip to the doctor’s

before I ever got to feel you kick,

how could you?

I never got to play Jimmy Soul to you,

never got to name you,

never got to hold you,

how could you?

We wanted you!

You were an unfinished prose poem,

a series of journal entries about how I already loved you.

You were

a crochet blanket I let my grandmother finish before I told her.

You were

a set of values we’d promised each other to instill,

a list of places to take you to play,

the idea of ballet, of baseball, of tae kwon do.

You were pale yellow walls and a half-assembled crib.

You were how many weeks along in me,

and we had already made our worlds revolve around you.

How could you?

Let’s be pretty

Skip the transitions, why don’t we.

Let’s go from sex to embryos to infants and straight to becoming

Long legged bean pole girls with hula hoops in perpetual orbit beneath our echoing rib cages.

Let’s go then to teenagers with orange lips,

smacking bubble gum, going around in roller blades in skating rinks.

Let’s go on lots of dates, break lots of hearts.

Go around with college boys, roll our eyes at high school boys.

Let’s kiss everyone in our circles at one point or another and drink after each other.

Ponder the looming question: Do we want to be mothers?

On to the next thing: If we’re gonna grow old, let’s do it graceful.

Let’s be elegant old women.

And when we feel like dying,

let it be with trunks of our finest jewelry

and all the proof of correspondence with boys before our husbands,

let it be with emeralds and papers from sweethearts tied around our delicate ankles,

drowning. Let’s try not to struggle, and breathe deeply under water,

as deeply as when we were dancing girls.

Pray no one finds our bodies, our lifeless remains,

Or we’ll have to haunt them,

Wailing beauties in their attics,

Roaming their halls and gazing out their windows.

Hallelujah, we have overcome!

We never wanted translucent skin over varicose veins,

Or to be trivialized as the ones who coo over babies and make fusses over nothing.

We were never anybody’s prudish grandmothers,

We were never placed in any “homes.”

Hallelujah, we are immortal!

No film over our eyes, no dimples or wrinkles or old age spots.

We’re pretty, pretty, pretty!

Dead! But pretty!

You’ve changed, and I don’t approve

Sitting across from me, you are talking like a grownup. You are making references to philosophers and authors I’ve never even heard of. Wearing that gray suit, shaving your face, emancipating yourself from your parents, referring to them as if they’re just your landlords- I could’ve forgiven you for those. Real easy. All you had to do was catch me when I ran into you. This is truly, truly the worst betrayal I’ve ever known. Sitting across from me, pompous, pretentious. What, trying to diagnose me? Do you even remember who I am? Do you know who it is you’re talking to? Do you remember who we were when we liked each other. Look, can we just, for a second, go back to that? Can we cut the crap, go back to that?

You wore white, beat up Chucks. Tube socks. Zebra print shorts and a lemon yellow windbreaker. You walked up to the punkest girl in the room and told her she was incredibly . . .  pretty. Christ, you were already doing a thing with your eyes. You knew exactly what you were doing, but why were you dressed that way? I hoped to God you weren’t actually queer. You introduced yourself as a friend of a friend, the band’s tambourinist, asked if that was even a word.

During the course of three hours, we learned all there is to learn about a person in the intimacy of a large party only beginning to die down well past our parents’ bedtime. We talked about how you scraped up your knees: rollerblading at a skate park last week. We complained about our friends, and about our parents, and listed all the places we wanted to run away to. If we had the means, if we had the guts. Of course we discussed books, and movies, and music, and fell half in love from shared interests alone. 

How did we get from there to here?

You have had exactly one semester of university, and here you are, completely changed. I don’t approve at all. Just in case you were wondering where we stand now. Just in case my approval means anything at all to you. Just in case you were thinking of me when you had tea (TEA?) with the Psych major. Just in case you were wondering how you look in that suit. 

 

 

 

 

Something unspeakable

I took you to the house I grew up in.

The weeds had eaten up my mother’s flower beds,

and vines clung to the picket fence.

We laid supine on the trampoline

as I told you what happened,

and I loved how you cried and my cheeks stayed dry.

Having recently found freedom in graffiti,

you had with you a convenient can of black spray paint in the glove compartment in your car.

You left me to retrieve it,

and in the seconds you were gone, I went back to six year old me,

queen of this trampoline, trying to touch the clouds,

and victim of gravity, always,

always landing in a heap,

weeping when I finally got it:

they were too far away for me to reach.

You asked me to take you where it happened,

and so I led you up the creaking staircase I spent nine years ascending,

and descending,

and down a hall that wasn’t so dark anymore,

all the way to the door of the room I spent nine years becoming.

My old bedroom,

still painted pale pink from when I was a princess,

ceiling still plastered with glow in the dark star stickers,

was an evacuated shell.

With my head in the crook of your elbow, you painted words across the wall with the windows.

I kissed you to boast of what I had become,

in the walls of the space that told me I was nothing.

I kissed you in the face of my history,

and told the walls that a kiss could be more than innocent.

I spent nine years of life there, and this was the epitome of it:

Something unspeakable happened here.

In your own writing . . .

and I’d only known you so long.

I couldn’t thank you enough.

another poem about a picture

Look at us, photographed laughing, we’re happy. 

Where there once was sadness is now throbbing like a heart pumping blood, flushing my ears out with the sound of life continuing. 

When we stopped trying to make everything beautiful,

when we stopped distracting ourselves from the sinking feeling,

we found everything we had ever wanted.

We were still, and we were cleansed.

And we were better from it.

Then,

then,

we could feel whole without being face to face.

We honored each other without looking at each other.

Look, you are real to me even when I am not with you.

Feel that for a second because it is not always the case with me.

I am happy, 

happy.

We are photographed laughing,

and even if it doesn’t show everything-

the fact that you got tired of me, the fact that I couldn”t stand your family-

it is not a lie.

We’re happy people, aren’t we?

You are long legged, suntanned, eleven years young,

counting out loud,

chanting, rather,

the numbers of revolutions that noisy sparkly hula hoop is making around your waist.

You hit a hundred before you begin mouthing instead,

and in Español. 

Your skinny arms are suspended like folded wings,

elbows jutting out at your sides,

fists facing each other in front of your chest-

you are dancing.

You are dancing with one bare foot slightly in front of the other.

Every time we pass by the sun room, you are there,

and we can’t help that the rhythmic rattle of revolutions 

is what we step to.

We hear you all the time,

but counting backwards.

We are all so sorry, darling.

In our memories, we will keep you eleven years naive,

queen of hula hoops and trampolines,

empress of diving boards and the deep end of swimming pools.

You have conquered everything except the last thing.

The bravest apology I can muster

Hopefully when you read this, you will have chilled the beans a little.

But today, you are so angry with me that if I told you I love you, I would be met with hostility. That’s fine; I don’t even care. I won’t say it to your face, then. I’ll say it right here. On this paper, I’ll say it right here: that I love you so much, and I want you know that I’m not afraid to say it when you’re like this. When you’re like this- when you’re explosive, you’re impulsive, you’re mean, and you’re hurt. You are so beautiful.

If I tell you “I love you” when you’re like this, you’d be red as a tomato. You’d be pissed on another level. What right do you have, Mikki Antonio, barging in here in my state of anger, telling me something like that? What makes you think you can just do that? And I get it. It would be a low blow. It just wouldn’t be right, given the circumstances. It wouldn’t be playing fairly. That is not what I am about. I have already offended you, and a clumsy apology like “I love you” would be a slap in your face.

So know that I’m sorry, and know that I am wise enough not to say it to your face right now. Know that I’m a smart enough girl that I won’t weigh you down with that kind of honesty. Just know that I mean it.

Me, who seems to find something to love in everything and in everyone.You may ask, and what makes you any different? Well, for one, nobody would stutter so bad after being told they’re loved by someone who means the whole world, even when they’re the one mad. Nobody would say it back after having had done to them what I have done to you. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.

I love you.

A poem about myself

Micah and Ella fused to make Mikaella; Mikaella broken down to make Mikki.

Short legs, chipping purple nail polish on weird toes.

Mikki Mouse with wild hair, the choked giggles laugh.

Baby face and baby faced knees. What can you do with this girl?

Queen of trampolines,

catch phrase “Cool beans,”

claims she likes the sting of needles through her skin- tough kid, cool girl

getting that chicken pox shot. What a trip.

Writing a poem about herself.

Writing in the third person because if she won’t,

who will tell her honest, like it is.

Writing by Bukowski’s doctrine (not really).

And Mikki,

Mikki “so fine” they wrote a song about her.

What even!

 

 

 

Portrait of us on the beach

We experienced that moment in color. Now it is immortal in black and white, and nobody can tell the brightness of my yellow dress or the specks in your eyes. Look at us, fools on the shore. In the background, a child is picking up seashells. There are seagulls forever suspended in the speckled gray sky. Do you remember who took the photograph? You wouldn’t. You’re not the type to remember, but I am. It was a frozen lemonade girl, who rang a bell, walked all the way down to the pier, all the way back, back and forth for however long her shift lasted. She wore a skimpy bikini, and I told you that that should not be allowed. You said “Whatever sells.” As you fished for a dollar in the pocket of your khaki shorts, she asked if we were tourists. I said yes the same time you said no. I asked her if she’d be so kind as to snap a photograph of the two of us. She was. I didn’t ever tell you, but I felt that she was genuine. Just, she had a bigger bust, narrower thighs than I did. Well now that photograph is gray. Now we have forgotten how to be young and dumb. You have probably become the sort of old man who believes in old photographs. But I know better.