by Mara Jebsen
Part one, with photos by Syreeta Mcfadden (thebellepoque.tumblr.com)
- I like the sound of poetisa!
2. Louise Bourgeois drove a screwdriver
down through my skull at the Guggenheim.
3. I am so proud to be une poete, the sun
makes a raging silver shape
out of a car, flips it
onto my retinas, shouts it there
incandescent, a good knife.
4. This café hum of fans and clatter of plates
is very nearly the sound of bathwater running
at 8 o’clock simultaneously
in all the bathtubs of my childhood.
5. Here the angry bird in my chest un-tenses,
drops feathers, is become
sweet again.
6. Now there is the wilderness of Virginia Woolf,
the fishing line of her sentence, that suddenly
catches. I’m caught. The bones in me
rock, mercurial. Eyes wide
I’m blinded, all spine. I count the lives
I border. I count the lives
I swallow. My shadow mixes with their shadows
to form a jagged skyline.
7. Martin is crumpling an Ikea catalogue.
His customer teases, she’ll bring another one tomorrow:
It’ll be like, you know, in that movie.
Where the guy is God. And his beard
keeps growing back. No matter what he does.
More and more Ikea catalogues!
8. Martin is Irish, and has a terrific sneer.
9. Tennessee Williams. I am grateful for Mr. Williams,
And for my friend R, who wrote a very good play
And for our poeta N, whose quick Queens brain
Disallows most of our bullshit.
10. Across the street there is a brick wall
Painted pale beige, that slopes
Like the whole neighborhood
Slopes
And yawns for light with a terrifying openness.
11. Someone fixed it in the night
With cherry-red spray-paint.
You can almost understand it.
It sort of looks like tosay
And sort of like nosay.
12. To say or no say. I love this question.
