Poetry Suite by Nora Brooks
“I had visions of long algae strands licking my ankles and sucking me down”
Poetry by Nora Brooks
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Under a Cloudless Sky, a How-To
1. Listing from right to left, the salamander drifts like a little golem over the lake. Alastair’s hands trace across my bottom, a knee suddenly jerks mine to the side. I blossom wetness. Grilling steak is simple, there’s almost nothing to it. He tells me these things are basic.
2. Fat lizard limbs shoot backwards as the salamander breaks the thin tension of the water. On the other side of the bed at night, my ex-husband’s body has not even left an imprint behind. He is so divorced. He is gone. Alastair told me last week that I don’t know who I am. Alastair crushed garlic, that much I know. The smell was all through his kitchen.
3. The one tricky thing with steak is gauging how well-done the other person likes it. Tell me, Alastair says, I’m observant but some things I can’t guess. The steak will yield under your finger just the right amount for what you want. If you let the steak rest, the juices will flow out naturally from the center. Walking down Sandy at the wrong time of night, alone among women in vinyl and macerated rhinestone, I don’t care if something happens. The lapping echoes of traffic reverberate against the freeway overpass guard, there to prevent suicides.
4. I could never get it right when I was married. Too charred, or the wrong amount of salt in the parmesan crust. The salamanders turn out to be everywhere, darting after their prey in little hectic whirls of motion, green tails protruding the more I looked. Just like the people suddenly popping up yards from our big rock in the sun. Alastair quickly withdrew his fingers from me. Medium-well, I said, Leave it a long time on the fire, but not too long.
5. I’d wanted to swim all the way across the lake but was afraid I’d get tired. I had visions of long algae strands licking my ankles and sucking me down. Alastair lifts a fork to my mouth. I chew. Garlic bursting, with a piney hit of rosemary. Alastair smiles, eyes cool grey around a glowing ring. You could have done it, he says, you could have gotten to the other side. I tell him, I know.
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Smoke, in White Light
1. This is how you make nothing. Shake a cigarette from the pack. I only smoke to watch the smoke itself, William tells me. I am six. William is my mother’s boyfriend. Plumes curl in on themselves, hazy, heat leaving and fading out. My mother is inside the party and doesn’t know where I am. My father is divorced in a rented duplex across town. Long yellowed fingers grasp the Camel between thumb and forefinger. Roughened, used to manipulating with tools, oils, lotions.
2. My sister sleeps soundly. She is in another room down the hall. Light a match, hold it to the shaking white end. My mother doesn’t allow us to eat refined sugar. My mother doesn’t allow us to watch television or play with toys that aren’t made of wood. William buys me ice creams and a long wooden box from India for jewelry. One day in a patch of carrot in the garden, he tells me he loves me. One day in the checkout line, me clutching a Charleston Chew, I tell him I love him. He tells me shut up. He looks around the store to see who heard me. Fill your lungs with thick white, choke. Don’t choke.
3. Purse your lips and allow long strings of heat, hazy and fading and light, to leave you. Purse them more and make the tight shape of perfect zeros escaping. I don’t remember much else about when and where, just two years, back rubs, louvered closet doors on my knees, Vaseline on his hand between my legs, on my back in mom’s bed. At Montessori school, I began to hide under tables, to run off into surrounding fields, became unable to take a joke.
4. Years later, all I have is a cock in white light, brown hood pulled back, pink tip exposed. Blow ever widening circles, growing broader and weaker until they start to fall apart.
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Blue Hawaii
1. Combine everything all at once: ¾ oz. rum, ¾ oz. vodka, pineapple juice and simple syrup. No bottled Sweet and Sour mix. If you want it to be good, don’t fake it. The pool was a shimmering aquamarine in the underwater lights. There was a bar off to the side that let me drink one Blue Hawaii after another. I was writing something about Pele in my little notebook, but it was really about Archie. Archie was asking to see it, and I was carrying the notebook with me around the patio so he wouldn’t take it. Over the wall, a cliff down to the dark ocean. If you plunge into the surf, don’t hesitate or you will go under. The foam will rise up to slap the breath from you. You just have to dive in.
2. Don’t relax yet. Shake the ingredients together hard with both hands and pour into a hurricane glass. Along the beach that morning, his heavy hand was so hot around mine. I was so much younger than him at that moment. He told me he wanted more than anything for me to be happy. He sat next to me and stroked my jawline. He told me I needed to go to the gym when we got back. The day before, we hiked with his 80-year-old parents along the barren edge of a live cauldron. Archie was better around his mother, less pushy. The guide told us this was the pit where Pele the volcano goddess lived with her sisters, deep underneath in the orange-red flow. He told us Pele had been in love once, but it didn’t work out because her husband was a pig.
3. For garnish, for something a little pretty, score a pineapple slice and place on the rim of the glass. This entire drink was made up to show off the pineapple. Pele’s husband was a pig, the Hog God Kama Pua’a, loved by farmers because he ground the jagged rock down into soil with his constant waves. Sometimes he took the form of a human with a hog’s head. Sometimes he was overcome and took on the shape of a hog completely. But the first night, he looked like a chief, a surfer-god standing along the crater’s rim in the dim lava glow. How could she have known he would drive her to throwing gusts of sulfur at him? They fought so badly that he tried to drown her.
4. Optional: Spear a maraschino cherry through its center with a cocktail umbrella and bury it inside the glass. This will make it stick. Alone for a minute on lounge chairs by the pool, Archie’s dad told me the secret to a good marriage was a bed that wasn’t too big. No more than four feet across. No matter what you want or don’t want from each other, your body will have to make small adjustments around the shape of the other, twisting and turning next to you in the hot dark.
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5000 Evenings of Myrrh and Doves
1. This is a year we are celebrating Chanukah. Sometimes we celebrate Christmas, but it’s latkes we always come back to. For a generous portion, grate approx. 1 russet potato per person. If you’re fancy, go ahead and peel them, or just let the long gold strands stay edged in rough skin. Our family is only my sister, me, and Mom since she doesn’t have a new boyfriend yet, so we need about four. It’s good to have a little extra for later.
2. Line a bowl with cheesecloth, or a dishtowel if that’s all you have. Twist the potato shards hard inside the cloth like you are wringing out something dirty. Mom tells us the story about how the Maccabee army rebelled against Antiochus Epiphanes, a Greek king who thought he was a god. Epiphanes and his army crept across the borders of Israel and grabbed control of the kitchens. Soldiers killed pigs on the Outer Altar of the Temple and forced the Israelis to eat the sacrificed meat. Most of them headed for the rough hills along the coast. Mom sets down her wineglass and opens a package of chocolate coins. Since we came to Dad’s house, we never get to do anything Jewish. Instead, we mostly keep Dad company in the living room with his Baudelaire and six packs and Rockford Files reruns. There’s a spot on the sliding glass door where he hurled the cat one late evening. The cat looked dazed but OK. Chop up ½ yellow onion very fine, the sharper the knife the better. If your knife is dull, just use more muscle. Onions will make you cry, so get used to it.
3. Unwrap your dishtowel and see what filmy mess is left behind. It’s the mess that makes the cakes stick together. Mix in the onion until you don’t tear up anymore. Mom says the Maccabees were the world’s first guerillas. She takes a sip of her third glass of Manishevitz, red hair crazy and curling around unfocused aqua eyes. Not even the Greek war elephants could get through the brush. She tells us the Maccabees sliced open the soldier’s bellies with ox goads as if they were butchering an animal, guts spilling onto the ground. When they entered the Temple, they only found one clay jug of sacred oil for the lamps, enough for a day. Somehow the flame kept guttering in the sanctuary for eight long evenings, enough for them to bless enough oil to keep going. Enough to get clean.
4. My sister lights the gas flame under the oil in the pan. Use ½ inch at least, a good quality canola. This is not a time to skimp. Thicken up the mixture with 2 tbsp. flour, 2 beaten eggs, and enough salt and pepper to meld the flavors together. The batter will become firm, unwilling to fall apart. In my house, my sister is the queen of the skillet. She is precise and nearly silent when working. She rolls out each patty quickly between her hands. She raises the brittle crunch along the edges of the latke and leaves the inside moist. My mom says Israel is a nation state of the mind. The Maccabees are gone, but we keep thinking about the oil lamps over the Outer Altar where offerings of myrrh and white doves burned. In the pan, the oil is hissing. My sister looks up and her eyes retract in the light of the stove, cool dark brown, not letting anything in.
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Nora Brooks is a poet and nonfiction writer whose work has been published in Poets & Writers, PopMatters, Monkeybicycle, Redactions, Alimentum, and The Best American Poetry blog, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an MFA student at The New School and research assistant to David Lehman. She lives in New York with her husband and a lot of taxidermy.