Chorus (4 page)

The earthquake hit

Your husband gives you
a
bit of water

Poured through a small hole

You see light for the first time in over a week

That night

Dusty rescuers

Pass your stretcher

Carefully

Hand to hand

Over the hills of broken brick

You are one of the last ones found

Alive

Your husband would not give up

Stupid reporter at the scene

Shoves a microphone into your face

Asks you if you knew you would survive

“Of course, why not?!” You say in perfect English

And then to the amazement of all

You start to
sing!

An IV in your arm as you carefully

Get into your car

Your grateful husband

Drives you all away so

You can see for yourself

What has happened to your island

After two weeks

An 85-year-old woman is found

Under the rubble of a church

She is frail but alive

Stained-glass windows not shattered

And then another miracle

Under a house

A skeletal six-year-old boy

Is found

He is smiling!

His face dusty

He takes it all in

His arms are open wide

Everyone at the scene cheers

He cheers

He is passed to his crying father

Who never gave up

in spirit scrapping seafloor merriment

i arrive
wild
with
banshee reverie

seeking beyond

broken securities coveting access to my body

beyond

salvaged excrement

and fingers groping for self in mirrors of me

i stand in spirit ruling she body

shipping unseen

carrying burnt and ashen fears ogling to nest

wearing shards of smiles shattered yesterday

so flowers reach

i arrive standing here

spitting from bone black bones

chamber of
solar symphonies

hunting flesh's grief

i tell no tales

i tell knowings of wreckage and gold

so sing me, sing me

pursing dawn's reverie

in
spirit mourning
exhumed seepage

i stand keeping space for
dream
s undealt
release

and seek beyond

secluded safety

where communal sutures are necessity

when child is a dead field

none wants to turn nor cultivate

for fear incapability and that she won't harvest

i arrive rooted resilient

spiriting heart's burst against rooting timbers' sway

where presence barnacles low tides

surviving to sound of her
sea calls

in response she clings

a chamber of solar symphonies and bone black bones

hunting flesh's grief

i tell no tales

i tell knowings of wreckage and gold

so sing me, sing me tilling dawn's reverie

in spirit sucking sweet of bees, i stand predisposition

breaking decay,
drafting
nectar from my skin

and momentum of
wind
where ancestors keep

seeking beyond

padded throats hoping for something without claiming

what do i call her

whatever i name

here,
summoning
spirit of undoing

a past pattern mistress reading feelings for belief

i shine
existence
with an unbound rag

and seek beyond

suicide's repetitive plight

hunting flesh's grief from bone black bones

a chamber of solar symphonies

i tell no tales

i tell knowings of wreckage and gold

so sing me, sing me bringing dawn's reverie

in spirit feeding fury, i arrive hidden

a panther

carving
hymns of being and light

seeking beyond

shame housing secrets silently knotted in plastic

and stuffed in pipes of ovaries

growing beyond surgical cuttings

as above so i below

i pray to woman i know

in spirit tossing change

elevating broken hyperboles

misnamed conformities

seeking beyond

kneeling or prostrate

opening keys and shifting biology

i arrive here, standing

spitting from bone black bones

a chamber of solar symphonies

hunting flesh's grief

i tell no tales

i tell knowings of wreckage and gold

so sing me, sing me

i am dawn's reverie

They appear in the empty morning

thin blue whips, branching veins in their wrists,

the sweat and blood of Jesus on their tongues.

Suddenly everything is so comforting:

lakes frozen to the bottom,

a forest cathedral
,

a trembling
voice
that sings.

Frozen pop canticles,

written in wormwood tomes,

measured on moral metronome
,

played by the dollhouse quartet;

Little maiden blue, burqa blessed,

she holds
monstrous
stories told

in the spaces of her
lyre
; infantile,

how her voice is muffled by the cloth

Somnambulist siren
, she wonders

whether the screams or the carapace,

crunching shell splintering,

count as musique concrete

Cordial contessa, she sings blessedly

of cinematic corpses laid on silver platters

and how the cracked light reflects guilt

on the soles left by the entrance.

Salome,
come
twirl in furs from Venus,

complete this revolution
of love,

take a bullet from erotic submersibles

as they
come up
and over your plaid skirt

I cry every time I watch the scene where you burst

through
the
church doors

Singing louder than the choir hired to replace you, Hummingbird.

As if it were that easy to erase you like blackboards after school

You left permanent fingerprints on your father's heartbeat

The day you reached
through your mother's insides

and had to be pulled out arms first

What a peculiar melody you are

often mimicked but not quite duplicated

Gospel nursed you on her tit

But the gossip of church folk taste worse

than that of spoiled milk

Collection plates could never buy you the sequin gowns worn by Billie and Ella

So with the
passing
of each season you grew salty

borrowing the sharp tongues of

neighbors to butcher your

name Sugar

forever to be known as Shug

The beckon of Big cities never reminded you of your surname,

called you whatever you

saw fit

Detroit, Chicago, and New York found your southern

hospitality charming.

A foreigner
amongst family
when your flesh tones

mirror a crowded room

The first time you heard yourself on wax you were a puddle

on the recording room floor

The first person you rang, your father

When the butterflies
escape
d your throat the dial tone swatted them away

A Daddy's girl never
fully
recovers from heartbreak

So you sing the Blues

Bare yourself naked every time you step foot onstage

Belting each note from your abdomen
in hopes of luring back the winged creatures that

once belonged to you.

You've never been monogamous in your adult life teetering back and forth between Jim,

Jack and Jameson

Some might say you have a problem, call it daddy issues

But their words fall flat.

They are out of tune with your nature

How sad it is

To be revered by everyone except those your heart

bleeds for the most

Funny how you taught Ms. Celie every lesson you refused to learn

Forgiveness is a gift not forced but earned

One day,

a righteous indignation will rise up in you

and past-life yous will fill your shoes and walk down familiar roads un-traveled

the ancestor's spirits will cry out a Negro Spiritual that lines your uterus with rebellion

your guardian angel will deflect the darts

of those whose business this is none of

and when you walk down the center isle with no groom in sight staring at eyes that blinked

you into existence

Speak the peace that has finally returned to your countryside

Wrap the branches of your fig tree around that which gave you breath

and know, that you are finally

Home

I was born into a Disney menagerie with not a single goal.

It is 1967 anybody
with an amp
could have an ambitious hallucination.

When I wake from the cell of my dressing room, I feel the bird's flight

in my body. The wing pang, lifting heave, locating itself above

my slumped shoulders and shoveling vines with my single voice.

It's just
a voice
, brunette with bangs, floating, dirigible,

ready to explode

but can't. So I snatch a pair of drumsticks and love

their suspicious feel

in my hands. Secretly, I want to smash glass.

I hate the color of an obedient deed so why do I sing its octave?

Notes that open in compassion, ribcage propped apart. My heart

lodged
to
o close to my ribs. I'm a tree-limb steady in a high ball

generation of
acid
and Joplin slang.

From the surface of a mirror, my body emits hues

of yellowish orange. I hear the click of distasteful tongues

disturb my perfect
silence
. The motion of twirled knitting sticks

and the way yarn licks the air as it snarls towards me.

The crocheted mass,
an exquisite
dangle from my lap.

That's the music that's mine. I don't want sex, just synchronicity.

There is a stadium grace when I sing. Sand and the streets

breathe the same
cacophony
of sing-song jangle and station wagons.

I'm able to fill
a
cavity

with a 4/4 drum riff wedded

with the
throat call of longing
.

The camera adds 30 pounds. But pounds of what?

30 pounds of silverware

30 pounds of fan mail

30 pounds of stroganoff

My
heart beats
so fast I enter slumber. I hear

the
winged timpani
in my chest. I enter a sleep . . . A black note

floods the swollen roof of my mouth, an empty beehive home,

a Los Angeles suburb . . .

If only the skeleton of
a
girl like the white key of a withering

piano

could sing. An ambulance siren . . . that
bird's contralto
.

My mother picks me up. Karen, I'm sorry . . .

The clock of attachment stops.

Having been a child-star actress is a
double-edged
dildo.

(Insert a metaphor about getting fucked here.)

No one should have to look back to see

the bright future
ahead of them
. The future holds

then pushes you
a
way.

So I'm done

trying to muzzle the
sterilized bevel of
a best friend.

I'm gonna tie those pamphlets for
cures
around this needle

and wave the white flag.

I just want to lean into the duct tape

this vial is holding up to my mouth.

Cut
creativity's circulation
off.

Get some rubber nooses together and gang-bang my arm.

Growth has out
grown
me.

I
'd rather
n
o
t
be a w
o
rd

associated with weeds and dicks.

I'd rather spend all that
future brightness

looking up L
a
Brea's
sparkling
skirt at
dawn
.

Hitchhiking up that boulevard's famous slit,

catching a ride with some opiates and trading spit.

I've heard Junk is starring in Scorsese's next movie.

This syringe knows people.

Forget my Mother and Father in all this.

They are
a language
that died on
an ancient tongue
.

I'm going solo now. I'm going to floss my teeth

with the pubic hair of the Hollywood night air,

memorize my lines before I snort them.

I w
an
t to know what it feels like

to die in the
arm
s of missing limbs.

T
o f
ade to black,

then fade
th
r
ough
tha
t
.

To get on my knees and crawl

on all fours into character.

To end an act in my own skin,

covered in
someone else's
skeleton
.

I used to live with a bottle of whisky and my panties crumpled on the floor of some man's hard wood. That is not to say that I was always drunk or that he was just a man and not Billy, Jim, or Ben, sometimes Kathy, Mia, or Beth when I was twenty.

I used to remind myself that I was living,
a modern goblet cradled in
my palm like messiah-made Vermouth; Or, as if the glass were a
breast
waiting to feed me.