“The Sea of Unforget” by Gypsee Yo

On By JennieIn Poetry, Spoken Word, Video3 Comments

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The Sea of Unforget

She answered my advertisement on Craigslist.
My name the only one who didn’t sound
Like crackle dry magnolia or menopausal peach fuzz lips
Snoring like the echo of the sewing machine’s murmur.
She found me when I was two years foreigner. A social security card
screaming in carbon letters “do not hire under the penalty of law”.
I was sewing for rich women with closets
The size of my old country, and nothing to wear.
They liked my silence. The discretion of my hands.
The thousand yards stare I wore for a face.
They paid me in leftovers, gas money, and last season shoes.
They taught me for their kind, unlike mine,
Starvation was a necessary choice.
She has the name of old steel money and golden plaques
On library and hospital lobbies all over Birmingham.
She says she wants…. just in case…. .A white noise replica
of her mother’s wedding dress…. And only if… it doesn’t fit…
She doesn’t shrink…. fast enough….. in time…. for the wedding.
When I tell her
I believe in making clothes for the body
And not the other way around
She turns her back to me, an angry ship
The mast of her spine protruding under designer sails of silk.
I am blasphemy and untruth. To say she doesn’t have to mold
bones inside the cavern of that dress. to unholy the garment.
To shun it as a cathedral of trimmed women’s voices.
What would I know,
Coming from burning bush,
what it means to come from evergreen bristle.
Southern girl been raised on that religion.
Duty to be pretty. Worthy to be seen.
Believing only in the gospel according to mirrors.
They wait for her everywhere, all clean cut and white shirt smile
Like a pack of Latter Day Saints, always ready to recruit.
Southern girl been raised only
To fit into the wedding dress
The way
The truth
The life
She shall be saved
In child bearing.
Her cross hangs in her closet
The way it did in her mother’s
And her grandmother’s before her
Vanilla bean color, surrender size.
She tries it once a week, asks me to zip it up.
My throat is a hot tub full of dumb bridesmaids
When I ask her to suck in.
When the zipper’s teeth still refuse to kiss
Her fear crawls out of her bustle
a roaring engine tearing through White County
Whistle full of frat boy spit.
She becomes closed door and running water.
I stand in the middle of her lime porcelain bedroom, trapped.
I do not understand her. I am unfair. I tell her to come out.
I threaten to shred the dress with the fangs of my shears.
I want to tell her, shut up. Like she already hasn’t.
I want to tell her. Rape Camps. Mothers and daughters in the same room.
Same men breaking into them. with hammers. Wrenches. Fingers of thick trees.
molding their bones into shame they will wear
Seven generations of shattered blood.
I want to tell her, two years means nothing in the sea of unforget.
I am two years of unwords, unpoems, undone. I want to tell her
I do not want to ever finish her dress.
I have seen how wearing shrapnel changes a woman’s landscape.
I sew for her at night, when the radio plays static to kill the unbearable silence
Of a city which used to fight people with bursting water and unmuzzled dogs.
A city ran by her grandparents. Their steel furnaces. Their luncheons with the governor.
I rip her dress in the morning, when the humidity starts creeping
through the screen doors like the memory of the violence neither one of us can escape.
The sound of the seams splitting apart makes me weep.
I am a lost narrative thread.
I put it together again. I am stalling, hoping to buy her time
to find herself. I wish I knew what to say.
My sewing machine cannot stitch like a typewriter.
It cannot master the dialect of my longing.
Its jaws are tight with tension. They were not built for words.
Its foot stomps relentlessly through yards lost in translation.
The needle is an unreliable tongue,
piercing through my solitude.
The day I handed over the dress, my silhouette
slipped a murderous quiet through the back kitchen door,
once used by her family’s black maid.
The last time I ever handed a woman
a weapon against herself.

~Gypsee Yo

 

 

“The Ballad Of Love And Hate” by The Avett Brothers

On By Christina's WordsIn Music2 Comments

Love writes a letter and sends it to hate.
My vacation’s ending. I’m coming home late.
The weather was fine and the ocean was great
and I can’t wait to see you again.

Hate reads the letter and throws it away.
“No one here cares if you go or you stay.
I barely even noticed that you were away.
I’ll see you or I won’t, whatever.”

Love sings a song as she sails through the sky.
The water looks bluer through her pretty eyes.
And everyone knows it whenever she flies,
and also when she comes down.

Hate keeps his head up and walks through the street.
Every stranger and drifter he greets.
And shakes hands with every loner he meets
With a serious look on his face.

Love arrives safely with suitcase in tow.
Carrying with her the good things we know.
A reason to live and a reason to grow.
To trust. To hope. To care.

Hate sits alone on the hood of his car.
Without much regard to the moon or the stars.
Lazily killing the last of a jar
Of the strongest stuff you can drink.

Love takes a taxi, a young man drives.
As soon as he sees her, hope fills his eyes.
But tears follow after, at the end of the ride,
Cause he might never see her again.

Hate gets home lucky to still be alive.
He screams o’er the sidewalk and into the drive.
The clock in the kitchen says 2:55,
And the clock in the kitchen is slow.

Love has been waiting, patient and kind.
Just wanting a phone call or some kind of sign,
That the one that she cares for, who’s out of his mind,
Will make it back safe to her arms.

Hate stumbles forward and leans in the door.
Weary head hung, eyes to the floor.
He says “Love, I’m sorry”, and she says, “What for?
I’m yours and that’s it, whatever.
I should not have been gone for so long.
I’m yours and that’s it, forever.”

You’re mine and that’s it, forever.

 

“The Ballad Of Love And Hate” by The Avett Brothers, Emotionalism

 

for jjs

“Sympathy” by Edith Wyatt

On By JennieIn Poetry

As one within a moated tower,
I lived my life alone;
And dreamed not other granges’ dower,
Nor ways unlike mine own.
I thought I loved. But all alone
As one within a moated tower
I lived. Nor truly knew
One other mortal fortune’s hour.
As one within a moated tower,
One fate alone I knew.
Who hears afar the break of day
Before the silvered air
Reveals her hooded presence gray,
And she, herself, is there?
I know not how, but now I see
The road, the plain, the pluming tree,
The carter on the wain.
On my horizon wakes a star.
The distant hillsides wrinkled far
Fold many hearts’ domain.
On one the fire-worn forests sweep,
Above a purple mountain-keep
And soar to domes of snow.
One heart has swarded fountains deep
Where water-lilies blow:
And one, a cheerful house and yard,
With curtains at the pane,
Board-walks down lawns all clover-starred,
And full-fold fields of grain.
As one within a moated tower
I lived my life alone;
And dreamed not other granges’ dower
Nor ways unlike mine own.
But now the salt-chased seas uncurled
And mountains trooped with pine
Are mine. I look on all the world
And all the world is mine.

~Edith Franklin Wyatt

 

“Love” by Czeslaw Milosz

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

 

“Love” by Czeslaw Milosz, featured in 10 Poems to Open Your Heart, Roger Housden.

“Digging” by Seamus Heaney

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

~ “Digging” by Seamus Heaney from Death of a Naturalist.

 

for my grandfather