GETTING THERE III
She slept too much. She dreamed of little girls wound around her.
She thought about an elephant and whispered in her head I’m sorry.
Buried deep in the ground wasn’t Satan but a woman trying to dig
herself out with a hand glowing over her.
Her body was like a diving bell and the sea not infinite green
but just a back road with no one on it, not even trees.
Small towns depressed her but she lived in them anyway.
Always next to herself, she stayed until she knew all of the faces.
When the faces depressed her she moved away. Then like
Marie Curie’s coffin she grew too many walls to get back to herself.
Even the story of her life was about someone else.
THE DAY COMES SUDDENLY INTO FOCUS
Each grass blade, minute, and sleeping body
clear as the smell of containment.
I feel drugged and amazing, as though
someone ordered me in secret, made me count
like a part of a peak in the distance.
I may not have a family but I know I belong
to the family of clocks. The day moves its hours
toward the sleeping stage upon which real people
present to me their lives, somehow sexual and glazed
in seventies gold, vague dread, childhood.
At night God is back, Jesus has returned and I talk
to them in their tender cave. Our favorite bird is the cardinal.
Like wardrobes we don’t open every day. Like a heart
that confides in no one, Jesus says. God’s head
gentle on my shoulder in the cavelight.
To make others believe, we believe ourselves.
IN THE BODY
There was something like a bladder in my head. My
heart was hungover. My lungs were two livers.
My feet were horse feet. Against my will I went
into the Halloween store and stood in front of
the twisting robot zombie who was a man torn
in half. Twisting and turning and groaning while
the sun blazed outside; a soundtrack of cackling.
Sometimes I try intentionally to embarrass
myself: as I tried on the turquoise wig I thought about
when I spoke up at “Strengths Training for Support Staff.”
What were you good at as a little girl? Lego houses.
Aflood my heart expands to the size of a Barbie.
Wig off, my womb is a doll house that looks just like
a real house. I sit on the porch through all weathers.
Click here to read Julia Story on the origin of the poems.
Image: by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash, licensed under CC.2.0
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