Origami Swan

We made paper carvings and folded our hands

When the fat Asian Quaker came over, our assistance teacher,

She said I was folding mine wrong, not the hands but the paper

But I couldn’t tell her I liked to do things wrong, not for the life of me

When I went to Quaker school, I tended to do everything wrong

Contrary to anything they may say, you can be so wrong—

Peaceably so, but still wrong

We carved ridges into our hands in order to hold the ivory paper

It was natural and so were we, but natural didn’t make the swan fly

So I coped rather difficultly with its less-than-there wingspan

And delighted in my odd ways of turning paper

Into something more than paper folded into something,

I made it skin, feathers, bone, beak, claw, and trunk—not swan

And although we could say sex sex sex

And toss around our hair in mixed motions, call out names

(not surnames, just the name)

freely, write about life after death at age nine and not be condemned,

we could not fold the parchment in ways

that did not yield a set of wings and a pointed head and an upturned floaty body and points and folds and bends; we couldn’t do it, we couldn’t make paper into us

but I didn’t bother folding mine,

not if my self-expression had to look like everyone else’s

so when they came around the room to check our swans

and asked what happened to mine

I said nothing, and that my paper didn’t want to be a swan

But I opened my hands

And out of ridges I dug,

Flew dozens of skin-colored swans,

Only as big as the paper doll swans,

Only as big as my thumb’s tip to my wrist’s edge

They flew like the flat paper in front of me,

The one that floated up to my ear to tell me it just wanted to be paper

And that I already had created all I needed inside my skin

Prose Poem...This one's for my mom entitled: Photograph of my Mother, age seven

Photograph of My Mother, age seven

She’s so good at dancing, so good that we drew her into the ivory stained border of the photograph with all girls in it that looked like me.  Me and my sister, we drew her in; and on the little body with the crooked arms holding up first position sat a thirty-nine year old face with thickly pressed-on caramel highlights growing out of the scalp and eyes so big it hurt to look for too long.  We made her look full-chested and strong with little legs, little leathered slippers hanging in point, pushing the photograph down, stabilizing top to bottom like clothes-pins.  But she wasn’t clothes pins; she was a big head with hair that fell in points at shoulders that held up little arms that could do barely anything on their own—only raise upwards into first position.  We put her head on there because moms, well, they were never born.  They were moms, and they didn’t wear leotards and they didn’t dance with the other little girls. 

She’s so good at dancing so we drew her onto the girl that looked like me, the little girl in the photograph that Nana stared at as she told me I was going to grow up to be great.  And somehow we knew it was she, the one with the crooked left arm, the arm that practically blocked one eye.  We knew because

when I was young my mom told me I’d dance.  As much as I hate the way my toes can’t touch the sky, the way my arms won’t do anything unless someone else holds them straight, she wanted me to tip toe and stretch—arms raising a border that wasn’t there before I made my own dancing picture.  When I was young, my mom told me she had been young once too, young and small and a bit uneven—even to the point of loose arms and sideways pointing toes.  And when I danced, they framed me too.  I’ll never remember the things they now say, though I tend feign remembrance when they say I pushed the other girls away from my flailing arms and awkwardly shaped toe points.

 I don’t remember the dance.  I remember readying my toes and my arms in a stretch so tall that when my mom smeared rosy lipstick onto my fat, child’s cheeks, I didn’t need the dance to remember why we took dancing pictures.  But we took them and we wore pink all over our cheeks.

Channeling Sharon Olds' "I Go Back to May 1937..."

For My Sister

In October 1993 they told me i could

finally come in to see you, while

you writhing, well, you were in fact,

writhed, wrinkled, and the like, but you,

little native american baby doll, i could

fit your head in my two hands

i had practiced, too, with the naked baby doll,

naked baby doll, we put you in the car and

in 2007 we put you in the car,

i can take you out if i want, i’ll take you out

and you won’t have to see me CAT scanned and concussed,

you won’t have to see me after the car hit the tree

i want to put you back in the car,

in the back seat

so i can say you’ll be a good driver instead of

don’t drive, don’t go, don’t grow

you will instead yell at me in August

three years later you’ll say i was never a friend,

i was never a friend

and every time i will say Sh, babydoll,

i’ll make you hold my hand like you’re wrinkled again, and say:

you are going to make me want to be small,

with those hands, with them you are going to

hit me, you are going to become bigger

than you were in the incubator

you’re going to sit in the front seat of a car

you never imagined and kiss him,

he will have no face to me, and i will say

sorry but i won’t mean it because i want you,

i mean, i want you back in the station wagon

i want you in the back seat

where I can reach back and

feel like you’re mine, and

you won’t have to worry, you

won’t have to worry

about watching me make myself big,

because i felt like i needed it,

you won’t have to worry about my performance,

the bow that i take

when i look at you, and you are smiling

with the bouquet, you are smiling

with your head in my hands

i will pick up the head in 2007

between two fingers and make you small,

the way you made me small

but before i pinch, before i make you coo and writhe,

i hit the tree that i hit

because my head—it wanted to hit the windshield

so you’d come, head twice the size,

but just the same, to say: Don’t drive her, don’t go;

in the same place where they said i could come in,

i hold your head in my two hands because

i want to hold baby dolls together,

tiny, wrinkled, you touch my face—tiny, tiny

i’ll be in the incubator this time

and next time, we’ll both watch.

Poem that I would love suggestions for....

Going Without

Upon interviewing single mother of two daughters, one of whom living with cerebral palsy, I was struck by her statement that she no longer tells others that her daughter is waiting for government services at this point, but that after twelve years of unanswered cries for help from an uninformed government, she simply says that Caroline “goes without…”

your little body, contorted and confused

as if sopping up air, parachuting from me

you said wait ‘till you hear me laugh

except you wrote it in the air

your legs like the praying mantis, pinched at foot

and blown like the ribbed, plastic bubble wand

left to contortions, twists, and wire-like limbs

your little body rests itself as an upside-down U

you are swaying from one elbow crevice to another

and I am saying that I can do it

so I do it

but exert need when you can’t see me crying

you can’t see me crying, while you grow knees

and knees grow you into gauze circumventing

vocal chords, bronze but green, golden but not

threaded in patterns that make you say:

hi mom because you never knew how to

cast on, but you knew how to hold your

words, dangling from strings of parachutes

inside me, so that I may hold them in the same

space I once held your crinkled legs

and fly them to you on paper airplanes when you

most needed expression you had only held out to me

in cupped hands—small, sewed on, yet teenage

though you needed lifting, alloy substitutes, sight through air bubbles

you give me a day and my head floats

in silent skies, in your laughs and salty toes

once stuck in waters, ink pools stagnant:

contradictory to the intended whirling nature,

your little fists clench a cob-webbed scrap of parchment

donning names, old, whose heads float and toes sit

pruning, dry yet frozen

escorting the mantis, he kisses your twisted legs

and you laugh with a young raspy brilliance

and as if to write on the air with raspy words

you say that the time goes quicker if we ride in parachutes

but since i bore you, you’ve put your green hands

on either side of mine and said pray

because though I wait by your side

while you challenge my hands

that shake, almost always, neurotically

holding you because you’re still that

contorted flicker than once lay inside me

holding strings that you said not to cut

but not once listed, and when we asked for new ones

stitched, hopefully unnoticed

they said, you’re just small, you’re just small

and though we wait to jump the plane,

goggles sealed tight

readying our stances, your chair

wheeling itself to the edge,

but I wish someone else could catch it

by its handlebars, tumbling

for your protection, but then you step

slipping passed air bubbles

that have left us stuck for twelve years

and though you silently shout to the air,

to everyone: I’m not small, I’m not small,

you—are small, but heavy with words you

can’t tell me, and though I must push, lift, and hold you,

you carry me back to the sky

because below is not ours yet

to run around, laugh, to let our legs dangle

I’m not small, you say—from your

Readable head to my eyes—

And we sit without treasures of lower clouds

Going without, because you’re small

   

A New Poem...

Inspired by research on my grandparents' Holocaust documents and experiences...

The Soil of Birkinau: 1942

Blesssed are you, Adonai,

Our God, ruler of the Universe,

Who has created everything

For your glory

I wish my occipital lobe had failed me more than it did:

that cognitive function, that feeling that maybe we’d live

or die together; that feeling that I was thinking,

that I was Jewish, that nothing made sense,

and that made sense.

Sour spits projected onto my toes

because they took my shoes

because I guess they needed them too,

rotted, stinking shoes in piles, wheelbarrowed

and dumped into one of several gaping, gasping trenches.

Every olfactory moment brewed sense between my eyebrows:

over time as I imbibed and painfully regurgitated truths

of the wreak of the trench, in my hair,

on my blistery and impassionate hands.

With steel-sliced and labored fingers,

I can feel my sister’s bloodied shirt, the star hanging

from my mother’s neck, crimson and trying to mean something

in trenches.  I’d scream to know I had been born

Adonai, Adonai, kill me so that I may not live

but keep smoking lives alive so mine may not end.

But if I couldn’t see—couldn’t see syncopated diamonds

begetting steps taken and breaths skipped in Sosnowiec

I’d be breathing in guttural stenches, sanctioning realities

I’d rather step on, irregular waste I’d rather ignore

so it’s not Chanka’s cloths, her mother’s chain, the blues of her eyes

in puffs, permeating the dirt, and dying with smoky earth,

beneath my bones, raised by hips and scraps of legs.

I wish I’d forget that she made me see

but I cry Adonai because looking while smelling kills

in trenches, I wish to find her whispering

that it’s not real, we’re not there, we’re not there

in trenches, she touches me

and holds my finger out to stars that aren’t there.

I heave exhaust, sinking in the imaginary air

It’s like we’re there again

 Every time I think I’m sleeping

New Poem!

 The Fog Comes on Little Cat Feet............
 -credits to Mr. Carl Sandburg for the title

the haze can be an afternoon snack
if you want to eat it slowly but not to fill
over the scenery, rolling, taking the day
and making it silk-screened,
relishing in the swell-like
discharge from dry ice
scanning below where roofs,
blue-printed-in a way-stand
erect and pencil-smudged
and motion marks the haze
to blow by branches, where trees were
once 70% absent
and crows run into crows,
and crows run into sky,
feet and talons wrapped, stitched,
in pine.  When I see weather veins
twist wildly in undecided precipitation,
aviation ceasing,
migration becomes sickening
as tails, like vacuumed-up blankets
are spun as on a loom,
the chicken and the arrow
the chicken and the arrow
east, west, east-i can't remember
i push the haze
hearkening mallards
the ducks i see then don't
and when they go,
flung through a sequence of
the weather vein's turns
i close lids and hands
and create the fog

Gorgeous Song, Gorgeous video

Compliments of my boyfriend...