abbreviated.

Yesterday someone wrote something about a kite loosed from its string and of course I wished I’d written it the way I’ve been wishing all the time I’d written anything that wasn’t your able legs, the way you situate them on either side of this small table, how they end on either side of this chair where I sit which is somehow less than the unbound kite or the very big moon or the hills in all his photographs, green and blurred, or even than the chair I sat in once before, pale wood and cheap like mine at home. This chair’s been painted black but underneath is probably the same, blonde utility that, with enough sand, can become anything, go anywhere.

In my fantasy you hold my ankle

and you want to

and I know you do because you hold my ankle

and I listen to your favorite song

when I’m unhappy

which is only when someone says it’s such a shame

and you know this when you find me

listening to your favorite song

I’m finished writing it, I said

That’s what they say, he said when I asked him to repeat himself

He was staring, someone said later

and I knew he was, heavy-lidded like he used to

and it occurred to me

he must remake me every time

Last night there was a dark spot on the inside of my cheek

Cancer, I thought first

and then, more reasonably, a scab, some flesh I bit

This morning it was gone

absorbed in the night

or bristled off

or because in the thinnest moment before sleep I told God to take it

or because it was nothing

This is my new thing, giving it away

Next time I’ll teach him how to do Right Now

Right Now you’re sitting in a chair, I’ll say

Right Now your arm is pressed against the table

Right Now you don’t have to write me

I’m not wearing those old pearls

Is this better, he asked

Are you having fun, is it more fun, are you having a better time

Yes, I kept saying, yes

She said she didn’t feel a mass and nothing was enlarged and so this must be where you bent me back over the counter

knocking over spoons

at 4 a.m. when you said hi—

Sometimes we don’t know why the body aches she said

There are many aches she said

You can choose she said 

as if I couldn’t see the small white square taped to the door, the black arrow

I’ve always loved this poem, but I didn’t understand it until I was older. Adrienne, I hope one day I write something as beautifully as you wrote this.

1.

My body opens over San Francisco like the day –

light raining down      each pore crying the change of light

I am not with her     I have been waking off and on

all night to that pain     not simply absence but

the presence of the past      destructive

to living here and now      Yet if I could instruct

myself, if we could learn to learn from pain

even as it grasps us      if the mind, the mind that lives

in this body could refuse      to let itself be crushed

in that grasp     it would loosen      Pain would have to stand

off from me and listen     its dark breath still on me

but the mind could begin to speak to pain

and pain would have to answer:

We are older now

we have met before     these are my hands before your eyes

my figure blotting out      all that is not mine

I am the pain of division      creator of divisions

it is I who blot your lover from you

and not the time-zones or the miles

It is not separation calls me forth      but I

who am separation      And remember

I have no existence      apart from you


2.

I believe I am choosing something now

not to suffer uselessly     yet still to feel

Does the infant memorize the body of the mother

and create her in absence?     or simply cry

primordial loneliness?      does the bed of the stream

once diverted      mourning       remember the wetness?

But we, we live so much in these

configurations of the past      I choose

to separate her     from my past we have not shared

I choose not to suffer uselessly

to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me

flashing its bleak torch in my eyes     blotting out

her particular being     the details of her love

I will not be divided      from her or from myself

by myths of separation

while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me

than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning      on these hills


3.

The world tells me I am its creature

I am raked by eyes     brushed by hands

I want to crawl into her for refuge     lay my head

in the space     between her breast and shoulder

abnegating power for love

as women have done      or hiding

from power in her love     like a man

I refuse these givens      the splitting

between love and action      I am choosing

not to suffer uselessly      and not to use her

I choose to love      this time      for once

with all my intelligence.

From DIAGRAM.

What does any of this matter on nights so hot we can’t sleep, somewhere else the rivers spilling banks, pouring in, and somewhere else still, drought spreading out the once rich land into a layer of silt. What does it matter these nights, our backyards of trains, our turning to dust, even as we’re more saturated than we’ve ever been? We’re tracing routes of the maps hung above our beds, not sleeping. We’re creasing the atlases held in our laps, folding over the corners of another city gone, another place we’ll never see now tumble-weeding, now washed away.

Because I’ve become too lazy to lip-read in noisy rooms, the other night I heard, He said he’s going to make a city for all of us when we visit. He said he’s going to make a city for us so we’ll never want to leave. Instead of asking for a translation, instead of trying to clarify, I said, I would live in any city that man made, and I meant it, and when everyone stared, when everyone tried to adjust their sense of what they’d heard, I said, Think of the light there, that pulse. Someone corrected me, annoyed: He said dinner, not city. And I said, Oh, though I wasn’t hearing the revision. I was thinking about where cities go when they’re gone. I was thinking about the roads out of here. About how no one seems to leave this place with any grace. I was thinking about the bowl of my body, dusting over. About predictability. About expecting something even as we can’t. About any city my friend would make, any city whole enough, where we could live. I was thinking about our poor, damp hearts, and the ground torn up by wind that might carry us all away.

—Monica Berlin

Last week for the first time I picked a larva off a sweater in the closet

Since, I’ve been convinced it’s not the only one, there are enough to count, they’ve pushed into my hips slick as your fingers Sunday—

What a woman’s thing to say, wide wet wings under my skin

this, the way to explain hysterical Monday

clawing my side convinced my brown-apple kidney went east and down, the nurse saying I’d have to push so hard to feel organs—

I thought the first line of your story read She was a prop plane wedged between shoulders

I thought what better wings

So, at long last, I think the book I’ve been writing—the book Abbreviated became—is finished. Now, of course, the real work begins—editing, rearranging, cutting. Two of the poems have already been published on their own; in the next week, my goal is to get at least five more submissions in the mail (or e-mail, as it were, these days).

What does that mean for Abbreviated? Well, it means things will look a little different around here. Self-publishing has changed the submission game; now, poems posted on blogs—such as those you read here—are considered “previously published” so long as they appear online. As one journal put it, if it can be Googled, it’s published. So, in order to give my work a chance to see either the paper or the virtual page, I’m going to move some poems from public to private view. 

Don’t worry; there will still be scintillating (right?) things to be found here—random songs I adore, poems worth reading twice and, muse willing, new work of my own. We might even take this time to mix it up a bit: Ask me a question. Give me a prompt and I’ll give one back. Share a poem you love. 

While we’re waiting for the mail, let’s write.