Poet: Melissa Broder, Brooklyn
Smalldoggies Poetry Feature #2: Melissa Broder, Brooklyn, NY
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VERTIGO
One minute Hollywood Boulevard
is a rotating field. Repeat
I am to get your knees below your head.
Afternoon hours feel fenceless.
The drugstore soda fountain drains
and all the other starlets are foxier.
You could murder them.
Now imagine a famous ghost
comes to kiss your crescent face.
Let yourself float, says the ghost,
and where there was only sidewalk
appears a constellation of stars.
Up above the globe? you ask.
In it, he says, twirling his moustache.
Watch a starlet on TV. Her lipstick
smells like almonds, flaking off your lips.
See yourself scream in a shower scene.
Eat bloody hamburgers. It’s a slasher.
You always wanted a witness
to lift you from the crowd.
Now you don't even need jewelry.
Watch your bracelets dissolve like tablets.
The Hollywood sign tumbles in your soup
and you gobble up the alphabets.
You are the breeze rolling down Topanga.
At sunset watch the ghost go poof
but you are him too. Watch grass glow.
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AUTOFILL
Ten days to live I thought I’d eat
everything. On the first day
there were birds in my veins
squawking empty. I was a phantom
with a breadmaker for a brain.
Its name was Henry.
When I got the news I went running
for the diner: butter and brisket,
peas and carrots. I wasn’t scared
among the pies. Nobody tells you
on day five your stomach turns
to ash. Go running for the ocean.
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RINGO
When the final Beatle dies
the president hits a kill switch
and all of our possessions
drift like eyelashes
through a crack in the sky.
Mr. Smith delights
to see his old Ford Thunderbird
in flight to heaven.
Our nerves are oddly oiled
no one cries over vanished dimes.
or even paper currency.
We lie in dirt; stray cats by fire.
It’s there, ungloved among roots
of ruined rose bushes
no suitcases or hair ribbon
that I invent the knife.
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EMOTIONAL RESCUE
What’s not great having dinner with you ten years after Altamont?
My hair is great, the steak is great, we're al fresco at Merwin McFly's.
Remember how we laid beside the speedway smoking Maui wowie.
The radio reported violence, booze beasts and a hive of knives
so we held on like lanterns, passing puff from lung to lung
until the valley crowd parachuted off our fingertips.
And that Micky-Mick filled our cup, he just filled it right up
with Jumpin' Jack, dancing honky chicken almost level with us.
Sometimes I wish my life would swell to fill our old photographs.
Mostly, I hope that you believe how happy I am.
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Melissa Broder is the author of the poetry collection When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, February 2010). She is the chief editor of La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series. By day she is a publicity manager at Penguin. Her poems appear in: Opium, PANK, Swink, Shampoo, Five Dials and elsewhere.
She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Find out more about Melissa Broder at her website.