Poet: Amy Lawless, Brooklyn, NY
Smalldoggies Poetry Feature #6: Amy Lawless, Brooklyn, NY
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Good point
Here is a little bud
to flirt with.
But it’s winter and it is frozen.
Faith is walking off a cliff
and getting caught by something that isn’t there.
For example
when you look up and see an air conditioner
coming toward your face
it’s cool to not believe
your body will be crushed.
I jumped down an airshaft and believed
I would live
That it wasn’t happening.
I lost the color in my face.
something is changing. whiskers grow. music tinny.
I still got to look at you. Three way streets: you, me, and the guy who wants to fuck
me.
A manhole in the floor we all fell down but I held hold to the edge.
And now, it’s time to recycle sexy news.
We are witches pulling out the men. There are men.
Oh so many men. Glass half full.
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THE OLD SHALL INHERIT THE YOUNG
after Baudelaire
The woods made me crap myself
You hear that, woods?
The silence, prolonged, hurts me
the way yearning for a giant building
ruined that rich sheik in Dubai;
A forest stifles itself
when no one is there.
M. Night Shyamalan
hurts his audiences,
hunts me the way the Vatican hunts for Vatican cash.
I am sentenced to hell.
The ocean made me crap myself.
I’m crying like a baby just
crying salt water
If I were crying for you I’d
cry mini versions of you.
This is an Irish Funeral in the Gulf,
which means there’s a party
in the dead person’s home.
Shotgun a beer next to a slicked gull
next to Ned the tuna’s fetid fin.
Night is ugly as all the other shit
I just mentioned.
I am holding a mirror up so you can see how
ridiculous you look in that outfit:
I can’t see any stars so how do I even know it’s night.
Still waters don’t run deep. They don’t run.
Shadows, even my own, stare at me
in the all-that-I-have-left.
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ROBERT FROST
Unable to digest all of his own children,
Robert Frost
would tuck us in again after we’d gone to bed.
He’d say
Here is warm milk.
Let it help you reconsider how
even this mug will eventually disintegrate
like my mother who used to bathe her
fake teeth in it
before she died of breast cancer.
Then he’d sit in his study
stealing essence after essence.
He even took my sadness and ability to mourn
my grandmother.
What did he do with what he took?
Once I saw him with a balled up hanky in his mouth
sucking his own spit as he wrote moaning into the cloth.
When I grabbed a log
to put it over the dying embers in the fireplace
to keep warm he grabbed it out
of my hands and said it wasn’t cold enough.
Robert Frost, you own December.
You ate all the children.
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ASSIST DEVICE
He made that tactile somersault to keep it down to an inside voice.
When my students whisper I don’t say use your I’m-being-raped voice.
I say use your outside voice. They have no idea
what that means. He said it was snowing outside but it was
not. He said there’s no justice. Just wounded injustice.
There are war criminals, I said. There is the unexamined life that is worth living,
at least for him to stay alive. At that point the vice president started to cry.
I told him he could sleep on my couch—just for observation. Just the night.
The kettle was doing its thing and I poured it and called it comfort,
called it “Gramma’s tummy tumble,” called it good.
He said, Fatty Boom Batty, Keats’s fat girlfriend. He said to quit the academic
life that it was making me insane. It was making me talk different.
He said there is a special kind of muzzle for a dog that bites others and an even
more special muzzle for dogs who bite themselves. And he said that I needed
this one, but for humans. He said there was a lot of work I could do:
Supersize Me, sodium, web sites about bootstraps and grants.
I said in Europe. I said in Europe things are better and worse.
I said this with no authority just that it let me lean back in my
chair like I’m a professor, which I am. It let me seem smarter
and in charge, which I am. I said the moon looks bigger
there and injustices seem more pronounced somehow. I said
race, class, and other magic words, assured of my internal R
sounds like someone not from Boston. Someone from the Midwest
where there isn’t the holding-the-breath in to make room for immigrants,
which I love.
There are people out there who like me, he said.
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THE MONA LISA REMAINS BEHIND BULLETPROOF GLASS
Mona Lisa’s face is so well protected,
Don’t even think about going there with
your semi-automatic shotgun
your Kalashnikov
your Thompson
your Glock
your .44 Magnum
your “Hitler’s Buzzsaw”
your .303 Lee-Enfield
your “Ma Deuce”
Somewhere there’s a guy thinking: “I’ll put a hole in that eye! Don’t you look at me that
way. You’ll be sorry bitch.” He’d love to knock her out with a suckerpunch carry her to
the bathroom of the Louvre hold the gun to her forehead & wipe that stupid grin off her
face She could apologize a thousand times but she needs to learn a lesson.
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Amy Lawless hails from Brooklyn, New York, where she writes and works. Lawless holds a degree in journalism from Boston University and an MFA in poetry from The New School. Presented here are five poems from her latest (still untitled) manuscript.
Her first book, entitled Noctis Licentia, was published by Black Maze Books.
Currently, she teaches at John Jay College and Rutgers University. When she can find the time, she also blogs for Best American Poetry.
Learn more about Amy Lawless at her blog, here. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York.