The Poetry Marathon

if the jaguar drinks enough lemonade
he will tell you a riddle
he will ask you how many times
you’ve crossed a bridge with a troll
underneath, he will ask
if you have ever plucked a pussywillow
and he will tell you that those
are his grandchildren’s tails
and he wants them back

if the jaguar drinks enough gin
he will smile wide and mistake you for meat
he will exaggerate his fangs and his
fancy for you, but he’s secretly
a vegetarian so the last page
of this nursery rhyme will say
hickory dickory dock
since when do jaguars talk?

the Robin perched on my windowsill
wonders if I am neckdeep in my terror
this morning? He taps his beak on the pane
and asks me my middle name
and social security number. Just in case
my next nervous breakdown
has a hell of a lot of caffeine
and my heart stops, on his watch. He wants
My life insurance and my best sweater
for his nest.

I tell him I’m fine,
he believes me and flies off,
A hawk takes him for hibachi

I walk heavy with a cinder block shoe
I feed the hummingbirds with my Aunt Ruth
She gave me twenty dollars for my first lost-tooth
I didn’t believe in magic then, either
I met a horse and was told he’d be glue
I thought animals should live forever
People, not so much, we all die, too
My Aunt was buried, so was my youth
It was then, the hummingbird flew

(This is a Magic 9)

Content warning: suicide

Bang! What a way to go! With all that dynamite!
There was no decline, no allay,
just his absolute and then his abolishment
and at such altitude!
I hope you stop going up. Will you be
high enough? Will you sip on the
helium of a balloon abandoned by a child
after a disappointing birthday party?
Your head inflates next.
Mommy grabs the bleach for his little hands.
Bang! What a way to go! With all that oxygen!
Who survives? The suicidal seven year old,
his ankles blistering from too-small shoes,
or you, the next door neighbor, drunk again
and again, and again? You blame it on
your alcoholic bloodstream, he
blames it on his father’s.
The both of you are unlovable, try this on for size.
The both of you are too high, try the ground for once.
Fetch the Barometer! Bang! What a way to go!
You both went high, your veins stuffed with
a casualty’s broth and he, six feet off the ground,
taller than he will ever be.
Crash! What a way to go!

I say goodbye to another carnival—
my childhood wrapped up in its
bassinet, my body rocking to its
commotion. Little girl on the Sizzler.
“Hush little baby,” it says.
I age into debt,
I age into hardship,
I age into photographs
and I age out of laughs,
but I am never too old for
the fair.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word,
if all of mother’s gifts one day break,
you can still pay eight dollars for
a funnel cake.

I am looking everywhere for you
I have checked
my emails,
The answers on Jeopardy,
The since-abandoned Spirit Halloween,
The hotel in which I was yours for the first time,
My best friend’s backyard,
In between my folded towels.
You are nowhere
and that’s alarming.

I am looking everywhere for you
I will check
The KFC that used to be an Autozone
Your grandmother’s apartment on Google maps
The zen garden you put lines in with a miniature rake,
The chorus of every song I’ve ever known,
My esophagus,
my DVD collection between The Shining and Mamma Mia,
Several Twitter threads
and the restaurant down the street.

If I haven’t found you in any of those places,
I think I will admit,
I made you up.

stop there
you’ve ruined it
I can’t find myself here
cabinets locked to keep ants out, too
you win

(this is the worst writer’s block I’ve ever had during a marathon)

you were thinking of ending things
you were thinking of ending me
you imagined all of the fantastic ways
in which I could cease to know you
and you loved me most in that moment
right before you snipped,
I felt it! I felt myself floating in the air
like a particle in sunlight
reluctant to make a new life on the carpet

I can’t even find the poetry
in the way in which we severed,
I’ve been out with laterns and lightning
bugs
and despite the borrowed brightness,
the pain is still blocking the sun

to love a woman
is to acquire new limbs, new
organs, a constant state
of inventing myself until
my soulmate’s bring their
tragedy
and leave me many-headed;
quadruple-armed
call me, kali, stupid to have
all these heads with no
woman to gaze at with these eyes
with no thighs
to grip with these hands

a mistletoe hangs between her
legs, a curious invitation but
one kiss leaves me amputated
human-formed again,
two hands, one head,
it’s hers now, though

We are going to the Promiseland
but Eli’s not invited.
You’ll be gutted to know,
you’ve went into battle for
nothing and now
all of your wounds are salt-soaked
with his crocodile tears.
You wear the disguise of a wise woman,
someone sewn shut, acquiescent,
not peculiar.

Bloody from one thing,
stinging from another, God is a
bully and a voyeur.
His spies lay among the weeds.
The man isn’t God’s apprentice,
he is barely even his creation—
a backwards Frankenstein,
gorgeous as sin
but all the prattle is malevolent.

He made a diorama of all of the
wonderful places you could end up,
should you oxidize for him,
should he breathe you in. A brilliant display
of What-If’s, held up in sound’s painful
memory where he is still glowing
and you are still proudly naïve.