"upper-lower class or lower-middle" - can i say i grew up poor?

Mostly I want to use this site to post my poems. Today I just want to share. I probably won't do this often - which most of us will be thankful for. This thing is part memory, part rant, part cliche. I wrote it about a month or so ago.

______________________

I just re-read the letters between Dean and his sister in Without a Net. I remember reading them on the plane back from OB and calling my mom later to talk about growing up poor – how the most she would say was how much (little) she made: around $20,000 a year while raising my sister and me. How she had this intense need to disassociate us from the “really poor” – which I get because we did have some privilege, we are white, we have family to lean on/live with. But how she wanted to rewrite history – how she kept saying, “we always had food to eat.” And how that is true. And…

I wonder about her (our, my) need to erase the ways that what we ate was our pride. The trips to the places her checks had bounced; the way we had to go there and actually apologize to some dumb manager for being poor. How we had to try to buy more time to pay the overdraft fees – the way she had to take us with her – how embarrassing that must have been. To see her crying outside of the grocery store, afraid they would eventually take us from her; moving from apartment to apartment to Granny’s house when she couldn’t keep up with the rent. Wanting an easier life so getting married to LaVaughn and then later to Tim.

What would my mom have been if she weren’t always struggling to get by – always submitting herself to shit jobs and shit treatment so her kids could feel like they were going to win.

I remember going to her boss’s house for some holiday thing. Maybe we were actually at her office. I don’t know. I just remember the old, rich man sitting in a nice leather chair. Was she flirting with him (fucking him?) to keep her job? He took out a 1 dollar bill. Maybe it was a 5. Either way I remember thinking that it was a big deal. Then he’s giving us some dumb pep talk about money, about how we should work hard and then we can make it and then he takes the dollar bill and he rips it in half. He gives half of it to Julie and half of it to me. Fucking paternalistic joker. I was awestruck by this fool.

Here is this thing we’re always, and I mean always, in need of and he’s got the gall to tear it in half and think he’s done us some favor and now isn’t he so cute.

On the ride home I asked my mom if we could still use it – if Julie and I taped our halves back together could it still be spent. I remember wanting to give it to her. Knowing that whatever she was doing with this creep, however many times she had to say yes sir, the money was rightfully hers and it wasn’t mine to keep.

I think the hardest part about remembering money trouble – because that’s how my mom phrased it – we had “trouble with money.” Like it was the rear driver’s side tire that had this tiny nail in it and so every few days we would come out to go somewhere and find it flat. The hardest part was the hiding. The way I tried to space my few outfits apart so that the kids at school wouldn’t notice I was wearing exactly the same 4 or 5 things every goddamn week. The way “vegetables” meant instant mashed potatoes and canned peas. The way we’ve stuffed it all down – made it a ghost past because now we’re outta there. The ways we silence ourselves. The ways we make nice. The way it wasn’t that bad – the way we can’t comfort or talk to each other about it because we can’t really acknowledge that it exists.

the palinode

It is your birthday and you are a beautiful boy. We are beautiful boys on a motorcycle. You wave to other bikers and the other bikers wave to the beautiful boys. Beautiful boys on a motorcycle waiting for a train and your gloved hand reaches for me. We laugh and your gloved hand reaches me. Your gloved hand and the motorcycle are missing. Your gloved hand waves to other bikers. Beautiful boys, your birthday is over. Your gloved hand, beautiful boy. Beautiful boy, your gloved hand. How beautiful. Beautiful. I’m cold.

~


Part of it is that we are at a gun show.
Part of it is that we are at a gun show
but we have not come together. The danger
of not coming together. Put the gun down, dear
and take the bullets out sweetly. Push them
one by one. Marry them
to the muscle that sits between our bones.

~





Let’s just say I remember everything. Eating a ham sandwich for the first time in your living room. My leather belt and the way you loved its smell at eye level. Markered up lids of olive jars. The gentle way the linoleum gave beneath you when you begged your knees into the floor. (New ending: I am the red-winged monster curled inside you like a fist. It is not so much the darkness that concerns me. It is the loose thing, the clambering thing I imagine inhabits your chest.)


~



As of October 21, 2006 I will officially be becoming a new kind of man.

You won’t forgive me for taking me away from you.

When, for the last four days I’ve dreamt about you, I’ve woken

up close to the ugliest thing I’ve ever known:










~





I love you and you are out gun shopping.
(Forgive me for taking me away.)
I love you. You. No longer. So I’m told.

a love note for my breasts

(abridged)


Thank you for the joke about Tokyo. I’m cutting you off now. For my grandmother and the way she talked about my grandfather. She said he liked her for her big brown eyes.


~

Thank you for protecting me from straight women. I’ll miss that. For making me think long and hard about why there was a marriage I was leaving. For the 1997 I never had.


~

after rilke

(I think, who somewhere said something* about defending against mosquitoes, periods, Lazyboys and other indoor furniture relegated to the nearby outside:)


I give you curtains.

Paper clips, a tripod, the dictionary:
love, here is a deadbolt. It wasn’t a pearl
we were chasing; it was cinderblocks.

In your mouth slept a vacuum of stars.











*We are unutterably alone.

the complete and normal failure of art

Leslie Feinberg’s face was held down in a toilet
full of cop shit before she was anally raped, plain
and simple, because she looked like a man.

I don’t know how to make this beautiful.

I don’t know how to take the image.

To fold the ace bandage she used
to keep her breasts down in a way
that doesn’t remind me of broken knees.

from passing...

I believe a line set down
at any point in space is
infinite. The body is a collection
of linear. Crepuscular. Dumb.


If I believed in little arrows
shooting off the end of every i
I’d be asking for it.
I’d be taking over.

The body doesn’t need that.
The body is retractable.


Touch me.
We’ll become less one.





































I say nothing / about my vagina
and nothing stays. Nothing stays
saying it. Nothing vaginas.
Vaginas stay nothing. Nothing says
vaginas in the room.











































I keep thinking I want to
fall in love with you but love
is so much constancy and.























I is too many words.

paper crane

If I begin any day with a pronoun, a foot slips off a barstool crossbar and, because the bar is a bar and not a foot stalking mecca, the consequence is minimal. At best. No one mispronounces shorthand. No one forgets their drink with its soggy napkin in miniature. In short, the show is decent. No one leaves misunderstood.

If I say I and you begin to doubt me. I’ll go back to the bar and bring a footstool. I’ll go back to the crossbars and what could. There will be mirrors there and you will think you are shrinking: 1 foot, another foot.

Gin and tonic and soda water. Brown eye blinking. (You begin to disappear.) Good.



~



This is not about the gender of soda water. (People kill for that shit.) This is about origami. The gender of soda water is simple: it’s lampshade. It’s irretrievable. It is your body, folded like a pillow behind me. The lock broken and the dog goes on sleeping.

I I (and I notice)
I’m unattached.