MY FIRST BOOK OF POETRY WAS LIKE MY FIRST BABY
since I don't plan to have children. I wanted people to love it
and make a fuss, and, in turn, tell me what a great job I'd done.
My book wasn't reviewed in that many places, and when it was,
one reviewer even called it sloppy. The grandparents weren't as doting
as I'd expected. They went on with their own lives
and didn't buy the book any presents. No one took a picture of me
holding the book in my lap. My husband wasn't jealous
that I was spending too much time with the book. My dog
sniffed the book and walked away, unthreatened. Other books
were getting cooed and fussed over, books cuter and more enchanting than mine.
There is no greater pain for a mother--seeing her child left out. Soon I knew
I had a book that would never accomplish much with its life,
that it wouldn't win prizes or be displayed in prestigious bookstores.
That my book would probably be a drop-out, that I'd have nothing
to brag about when my cousins showed me graduation pictures of their kids.
That my book wouldn't buy me dinner or take care of me
when I grew old. I tried not to let the book sense my disappointment.
I tried to love it for the book that it was, but it began to have the telltale signs
of depression, hanging out with the wrong crowd,
dressing like a rebel. The book reminded me of myself as a teenager,
but when I told it that it shivered in disgust, blaming me
for bringing it into this world in the first place.
- Originally published in Gargoyle magazine, 1995.
A CROWN OF SPELLS TO WARD OFF SUSANS
1.
Stop crying. Bring all her costume jewelry
to the oldest corner of the dark house
where rats are gnawing. Take cheese, five ounces,
preferably moldy, and write her name backwards
on a soft-shell crab. Eat it while farts
waft past that time-honored Szechuan dish,
the creamy casserole that made Susan ill.
Eat it by fistfuls, your stomach hers. Say:
Sour Cheerios and cesspool Smoothies, gray
chopmeat and the gums of old llamas.
May the double l's double over Susan.
May the pink raw meat and mouth rip
her into puzzle pieces that tip
like a Rubic's Cube in the fat hands of God.
2.
When she denies she's flirting, slit open
a pepper and gather the seeds. Then spit
into a waiter's ear, eat rarebit
or Egg Foo Young, release doves. Now circle
her shoe which you've stolen, its purple
laces and lime-green sole. Take the tongue
of your ogling boss and, to the far-flung
noise of Nine-Inch-Nails, wave it high and yell:
Goddess of Toe Nail Clippings and Bad Smells,
pluck Susan from each potential suitor
and stick her with a corsage pin saying: "For-
ever clumsy." May she wander dazed
through malls where she works for minimum wage
in stores where my lover would never stop.
3.
Razor the bristles off her wet toothbrush,
collect her saliva and plaque in a pouch.
Throw a carton of organic eggs, loud
and unfertilized, into her pancakes.
Now pee on a lamb's tongue then into a lake
where your power will do the most harm. Lick
the crispy raisin moles that dot your sick
mother's stomach and you're through. Ready? Say:
Goddess of Wheatgrass, keep Susan away
in the state of Kentucky where lovers
sleep in slop of pigs and fowl. May she hover
over the Jersey turnpike at rush hour
as she spends her years alone. May admirers
find her breath bad and her clitoris lax.
4.
Cull the sickest-looking fruit from the scarred bowl.
Mashing, drip something green from your mean face
into a stew of awkwardness and baste
until Susan is the shade of your eyebrows.
Stir until she is the shape of five cows-
never before has broth tasted so bossy!
Walk into a forest, bicycle or ski
where you can spin near wild mushrooms, singing:
May the angels toil for you, Susan, ring
creepy Alleluias into sex and dream.
May your days be dark and stained as red beets
as you crawl to find your dusty contact lens.
May the skinny ghost of Ichabod Crane
carry you, cashless, into K-Mart.
5.
Gather stereotypes who look like Susan.
Bring them, insipid and limp, to the cliff
where you saw her kiss your sweetheart. Don't mind if
the pain in her loins is stronger than rum.
Sing "Hey la hey la my girlfriend's back." Bum
a funny cigarette from a famous queen
whose danger is unknown. Saute a cat's spleen,
if you can find one, and while you're cooking, say:
May the half-moons of your thumbnails slay
your future offspring, may their sharp white teeth
bit the TV cord during Ricki Lake week.
May safety pins leap through your ears and tongue
and lacerate you, Susan, the thin rungs
of your career plans ladder you into hell.
6.
Turn on the ceiling fan and imagine
her neck cut off by each whirring blade,
her spine collapsing like a blanched and frayed
embryo in the clinic's light. Pour urine
into the mouth of a north-flowing river
while drowning five blue newts in the cream bleach
she used to lighten her moustache. Eat
the dandruff you snatched from her collar. Holler:
May your leather be stolen at Girl Bar.
May your pee be green, may your hair be cut
by untrained stylists who highlight your bald spot.
May everyone who meets you say "Who?" May
you grow as lonely as a rope. May you fly
into traffic begging my forgiveness.
7.
Now go to Penny's and hide in the smallest
dressing room until you see Susan's feet.
Stretch her toes until they resemble eels,
then bruise them with rocks or small furniture.
Take your brother's old odor-eaters,
the hair of a plucked nipple, and repeat.
Slip her photograph into a hive of bees
and as they sting her image, say out loud:
May you live to bowdlerize your proud
operas into fanny songs, your cinched
waistline into suet. May your rhinestoned hand
grow arthritic, and may your whiny voice
whine over the last prairie like a toy
airplane before it screams into flames and melts.
- written by Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton; originally published in Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press, 1997).
INTERVIEW WITH A COMIC STRIP DIVA
We sat down with Olive Oyl at her home in Chester, Illinois. We were struck by the graceful reserve with which she served us herbal tea, her quiet yet sparkling generosity.
MS: Ms. Oyl, you've been called the skinniest thing in boots. Do you find this interferes with your self-esteem?
OO: Did you ask General MacArthur that? Nancy Sinatra? Betty Boop?
DD: Are you concerned at all about America's obsession with the private lives of celebrities?
OO: I've never had sex with Clark Kent. But that doesn't mean I won't if I get the chance.
DD: Are you saying you've considered a career outside of showbiz?
OO: I am not monogamous. There are millions of monogamous people, but I am not one of them.
MS: In that case, would you like to respond to the Inquirer? I'm thinking especially of the front page spread with the picture of you and Bluto caught in an indiscretion.
OO: It's not as if Frank O'Hara were monogamous, right?
DD: Speaking of the New York School of Poets, do you align yourself more with them or the Beats?
OO: You can't imagine how boring it gets in all these little boxes, each strip's linear predictability.
MS: I'd heard you were a surrealist at heart.
OO: There are sardines and there are lemon trees--it depends what you're in the mood for.
DD: Are you as uncomfortable doing interviews as your publicist says?
OO: I believe in performance and page. My goal is to bust through genre restrictions-- strips, 'toons, feature films.
MS: Oh, are you double-jointed?
OO: Why can't I be it all? Pen and ink legs with human hair or Meret Oppenheim's tea cup covered in fur, the way art has sex with life and vice versa.
- Written by Denie Duhamel & Maureen Seaton; originally published in Oyl (Pearl Editions, 2000).
LEARNING HOW TO MAKE LOVE
This couple couldn't figure it out.
The man licked his wife's genitals while she stared straight ahead.
The woman poked her husband's testicles with her nose.
The man put his toe in the folds of the woman's vulva.
The woman took the man's penis under her armpit.
Neither one of them wanted to be the first to admit
something was off. So it went on --
the man put his finger in his wife's navel.
The woman batted her eyelashes against the arch of her husband's foot.
They pinched each other's earlobes. They bit each other's rear ends.
To perpetrate the lie, they ended each encounter with a deep sigh.
Then one day while the husband was hunting,
a man stopped by the igloo and said to the wife:
I hear you have been having trouble.
I can show you how to make love.
He took her to bed and left before the husband came home.
Then the wife showed her husband,
careful to make it seem like the idea sprang
from both. After all these years of rubbing one's face against the other's belly
or stroking a male elbow behind a female knee,
this couple had a lot of catching up to do. They couldn't stop to eat or sleep
and grew so skinny they died. No one found them for a long time.
And by then, their two skeletons were fused into one.
- Originally published in The Woman With Two Vaginas (Salmon Run Press, 1995).
