January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
i. April, 2005
The week before, his hands in the seat of my jeans.
The lake before us is low. The exposed shore reaches
under the beached docks, spread open to coming rain.
He said he’d wait for me here.
Hours after I leave him, he calls.
His voice nods slow through affections.
I never shot the shit. Never saw it,
either. I refused to see he still did.
After five days, the phone rings.
His mother found him, a needle in his arm, seven a.m.
He ran into the woods outside his house, screaming
that he wanted to die. He wants to die.
A Friday night, dark at 4 p.m. I close my window.
Spring ends with him in prison. The air thickens
as the lake is slowly filled. The first waves
splash against the docks, finally afloat.
ii. May, 2007
We sit on the porch of her farmhouse
at her stepdaughter’s college graduation party.
We watch the two dogs roll under stars
on the field of her front yard.
She pours two shots of silver
tequila like a blessing. Salut.
She toasts the lumps in her breasts
as we soothe agave fire with champagne.
I’ve come to this farmhouse since before
my breasts. She sobs as I light
a cigarette, insisting on silence
until a date for surgery is set.
Through the kitchen’s window,
her stepdaughter’s laughter. We hear
the cork shoot from the last bottle
of champagne, a glass shatter on the floor.
iii. August 2005 – November 2007
Six months after she died in the Iraqi desert,
he and I meet. We start against hallway walls.
We build between train stations,
all-night trips up and down the coast.
He leaves Lajeune, moves north. One night,
wrapped in the same blanket, he shows me pictures.
We come to her, naked, the vital parts censored
by an inner tube. Her wet hair. Her laughing face.
I end it shortly after. I watch him
do coke for the first time, watch walls.
I watch the walls, too, to find what he sees.
More blow, booze. Weed to balance.
We still go to bed together. He usually
falls asleep just as dawn seeps through
the window by the ceiling. His length warm
at my side, her memory curled at our feet.
iv. May, 2008
I received the summons, but the addressee’s name was incorrect.
I sent it back. I haven’t checked the mailbox since.
In the morning, they call because I have to be retested,
the initial test positive. I find a ride from a friend, leave
my brother a message. Outside my house, I tug
on my hair, scalp from skull, to know if I feel it.
I get in the car, can’t answer questions requiring
explanation. I twice light the filter of the cigarettes
I quit. Fiberglass sparks, singes in a crackling burn.
I get the third to light, swallow smoke.
In a tiny room, they ask me about drugs about fucking
about where a white suburban girl could pick up HIV.
They say I’m not in the risk group. With my blood,
they close the door. I stare at a Parenting magazine.
When they come back, they don’t shut the door. Negative.
I check they tested the right sample. The doctor nods, slowly.
In the parking lot, my brother waits, weeps into my hair.
A stoplight turns on Main Street, horns blare. No one moves.
Stefanie Botelho is a recent graduate of Western Connecticut’s MFA in Professional and Creative Writing program. She has been published with The New Verse News and has writing in the upcoming Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetry.”
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Paris
Our paths cross as they have before
greetings exchanged upon a hint of recognition
though unable to place when or where
I was thinking French class, or maybe
we were lovers in another lifetime.
Perhaps Paris…
expatriates sharing café au lait
and stories of home.
Strolling down the Champs- Elysees
I remove my chapeau and
bowing deeply, I ask you to dance.
Your cheeks blush, desperately
trying to match the perfectly pink
parasol you twirl above your head
in the sun- splashed boulevard.
Mass
Random thoughts,
like slow- moving, hungry beasts
forage through the meadow of my mind
the tireless shepherd of my consciousness
drives them on lest they consider
this range of gray matter a home
still they graze and consume
every grain- do they not know
they too will perish
when all is gone
can they not see
what fate lies ahead
and the shepherd; tender of the flock
simply walks behind these creatures,
not minding the foreboding clouds
forming a dark malleable mass
not yet raining
but always threatening
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Old Memories
Between wake and sleep in the hour
Of silent noise of dust and clocks filled space
There are old memories both brittle and tender
Like the fingers of a palm leaf and the shade it spins
On our sunburnt faces, so we bury our cheek on the beach sand
Into another half dream sunk up to our knobby knees
Deep and wet in the riverbed where we collected things
That took shape of arrowheads, or marbles crystallizing planetary nebulas
And sometimes atop the feather-grass knoll we sat cross-legged
To hear the thunder, a sound of steamroll shot from a pistol
Then we’d hear it taper off into the low tides of a cove
Barely whispering into our ears like blown leaves mingling in autumn red
When the day darkened the hour deader than sullen, outside on the curb
The dull warmth of the suburbs, in our throats hummed a Sunday proverb
Imprinting my brain with silent lips
Imprinting my brain with silent lips was only a woman
We casually met in the metropolis
We were together of the nontraditional sense
She was shapely and wan and from her mother’s bath of birth
She was born out of wooded flesh and metal bone
As we strolled along the museum pretending to loiter in profound thoughts
She’d read the veins from leaves of grass pressing a finger against the leaf
It had a pulse and it told her its life story how it lived in the divine soil
The same divine soil grew the pine and oak, the lemon and fig,
The sugar and rice, the white potato and the sweet potato,
The orange orchards where we picked the fruit, and drank its delirious juice
Running from the left corner of her lip, tracing the curve of her bottom lip
Then down, dripping off her pointed chin, and to the moist ground
Her head tilted to the side. Her long neck exposed, darkened by the shadow
She wiped the sweat with a veiny pale hand
The honey odor she radiated surrounded us in a golden and pastoral aureole
Close beside me she clung to me one minute a lasting hour
Stepping over the doorway’s threshold we separated again
Insomnia Cured
When my mother takes her sleeping pills
She thinks she’s drunk
Then like a spinning top ending its spin
Leans over like the tower of Pisa
And topples over me and my brother
Landing on us like we were pillows
Our soft bellies stuffed with feathers and cotton-balls
And stitched up with a gold thread
In her sleep she’s also walking, staring
Talking, stumbling, fumbling
Waking up into a stupor to the infomercials or static of the T.V.
But at 9pm she remembers to go to work from 10pm to 7am
And at 9am, like a shot of liquor, she drinks up the sleeping pills
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Umbilicus
“What cha doin’, kid”,
Your living voice spirals over telephone wires.
“Nothing, what choo doin’?”
“Nothing.”
You sound as thin and reedy as a child.
Cancer is rocking you backward, backward,
Undoing you
Soon you will be an infant
Suckling at your mother’s breasts
But they were dry, as I
Am dry, a dry sea bed,
Replenishing my waters by
Drowning in a vat of Brandy while your bones,
Ghastly in hospital whites, are
Busily being devoured.
Faithful to your science god you fear
This is all there is-
That we go clod-like back into the stupid dirt,
Our life force snipped off like some dead rose
Beheaded not by an vengeful God
But by hollow eyed evolution
And the betrayal of your own cells gone amok
I do not want to follow you into the grave;
We do not belong to some ancient tribe
That buries its living wives as
Tribute to their fallen dead.
You’d like to take me with you, I think,
Into the fire that purifies
Not for you the grave with her dark secrets
The moldering body,
The worms that fatten on the scent of putrefaction,
The dissolution of the eye, with its illusion of control
No, you go into the fire,
As you have burned all your life,
Burned brightly, brightly
As if aware you had but a short time
To do all that needed to be done.
As you frantically filled your hours
With the accoutrements of modern life,
Afraid of silence, afraid of stillness, afraid of absence.
During the day, the hospital takes my oxygen,
Squeezes my lungs dry and arid as a desert.
There, I am merely a bit player,
Held together with tenuous wires of tendon and silent screams,
Breaking apart in a high carnivorous wind.
Sinner I am that I cannot bear the dark with you
For it swallows me up in nightmares
Like the nightmares that ate me as a child
Though at the end I will suffer them
As a woman suffers rape
Twenty minutes and a million light years distant
As Andromeda whirls and wheels in my backyard
The umbilical cord between us quivers
And I shiver.
So here I am alone,
As you are alone in your hospital whites,
Each silently telegraphing fathomless need
Over indifferent wires
Our voices a flickering filament of light
In the steepening night
Look Before You Leap
Grandpa’s barn was for the corn
That fed the chickens.
It was dark and musty with
Rolls of yellow piled up to the ceiling
Our job was to shell it, cob by cob,
Young arms would crank
Until they fell off,
Little white sticks
Mute testament to labor
Grains would slide into the bucket
Hissing like snakes
To then be poured,
Sweet and dry and dusty,
Where the golden mound would
Rise throughout winter
Until at last, there was corn enough
To dive into, like seals
On some gold rimed beach
Silvery dust motes flying
In the slatted sunshine
There were rats and snakes
And one year, an errant pitchfork
My sister launched out from the rope
Icarus spiraling down into the sun,
Missing the shiny prongs by a breath
Teaching me anew
All that glitters is not gold and
Look before you leap
Advice that ill suits poets
Who must often leap blind
Into radiance
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
A man came to my door
claiming witness to atrocities
committed on my behalf, but
in places I had never been.
He said I was duty bound
as a citizen beneficiary–
whether on hillsides of poppies
bodies explode, or not–
to stand behind our rightful leaders.
He offered digital images for sale,
un-enhanced, if I preferred.
If I preferred, guilty charges
made first in ancient texts
illustrated by monks, could be had–
actually his biggest seller–all certified.
I sent him away.
I alerted friends to his scam.
But, I checked local news in case;
published articles did appear,
but made no local accusations.
In fact I inferred implicit guilt.
Amazed,
I could not disprove any atrocities
on any dates cited
by any surrogates
killing thousands in my name.
Confused, I went to the mountains.
Heavy snow fell, drew me in,
quietly deep. I shook, although relieved.
The National Geographic
reports deprivations in deep
snow abet atrocities.
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
i
Past
images of vulnerability dance
naked eyes blink, shut out
ageless tormenter
held captive on stomach
a small child begs for help
big room no adults
sadist rages human victim
soul broken bones intact
held down sat upon
“I’ll tell Mom” you laugh
my cries unheard despair
When will he finish?
worse when he leaves
unwanted by anyone
even the tormenter.
ii
Today
gentle words embrace
compassion flows as
I face my younger self
Hi, you don’t know me but
I am you all grown up,
we survived.
Eyes wide you whisper
I knew one day you
would awaken.
