Note:

These two poems are part of a series of about ten set in a post-apocalyptic society that could be considered a "women's underclass." They're strongly influenced by Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette (see a review & the amazon page, as well as an interview in Jacket magazine)

Reading the Stories of My Life: Chapter 5

A name is offered to me
and with it, I buy only nectarines and oranges, short
phone conversations. I am still learning how to slip into it
to blend with the light around me: I inhale
and eclipse it, a palpable darkness, as though beside me
is the entrance to a cave
a passage the same shape as my self,
inside a lunar world glossed with moonlight--
the dark windows of stores, bean vines and at the roadside
miniature yellow star-shaped flowers as delicate as the body
of a tiny insect, the ghosts of laundry swaying with ache for their
inhabitants.

If you walk along this road for fifty breaths,
a slow, paced inhale-then-release,
turn yourself sideways through the spines of the street
into an alleyway, maybe there will be a house with dim lights
and cracked plastic chairs,
the proprietors women whose husbands broke hearts on the factory nightshift,
women who broke open beer bottles over the edges of countertops
while we waited for illegal takeout.

This is the house where the women who gave you your name found it,
an illegal shop in an illegal trade.
You can exchange it if it doesn't fit: only there are rules,
and some people cannot change their names
for fear of the shadow it would make, the eclipse, or the thin, brilliant aura,
and they only shift the most remote valley or hook of a sound; others
run their hands over the air around them, reading the change like Braille,
brave and drastic, their lives in upheaval already, no family or lovers
only grocery clerks and postmen to sense the difference.

I sift through the dusty plastic drawers
in their gray metal cabinets, hold the names like breaths,
inhaling uneasily in the presence of others. But we are all
immigrants in this world, trying on our names like costumes or prayers
of a life we were taught about religiously,
but sent away from young;
and among us, the loose camaraderie of those new to ourselves.
But still, we carry with us an aura or eclipse:
the names providing us with new words, or taking old ones away,
a language we must learn and relearn anew
even as we become part of it--even
as we discover legends about ourselves
that existed within in it
long before we did.

Reading the Stories of My Life: Chapter 7

We brought soft bread to the empty-mouthed women who slept
by the river, by the 40th street bridge, and oranges
to toothless women who listened to waves slapping pilings all night,
Women without a palpable wealth, with names so new they dared not write them,
even say them--only the most reckless would--and called each other
stage-names, told each other the lives that had left trails of scars
like a garden snail's saliva over their arms and legs
before they would say what they were called.

Across the river, illegally moored houseboats bobbed in the shadow
of the bridge. In them, men clicked teeth together in their cupped palms
like a handful of dice, threw bloody patterns onto the paper-covered table,
a kind of divination. Some, dentists working in secret,
others less expensive, merely channels for an oracle, they said,
and for them you had to beg the pulled teeth (still bloodied,
risking discovery) from your own dentist.
Everyone knew what the teeth were used for--places where the law was thickest,
dentists refused to extract from a conscious patient,
and washed the little rooted bones clean in alcohol,
before the empty dreamless sleep wore off.

If you were one of those who couldn't stomach not knowing,
maybe with children gone missing, a whole family slipped out on you
at gunpoint while you slept undisturbed in the next room,
what did a tooth matter? So your mouth was full of dark holes.
Some you could tell, swollen-gummed, holding in their puffed cheek
a wad of bloody cotton, or black teabag--taunting the police
with their dark caves of empty mouths.

From this, there was an illegal business, conducted at hotels rented by the hour,
in unlicensed dentists whose anesthetic was whiskey,
or mustached vaudevillians selling dentures made of animal teeth,
or thin paper sacks of pig's teeth and dog's teeth, and sterilized
razorblades:
when you had gone through your own 32, you split open a bloody,
tiny mouth in your own arm or thigh,
until blood ran over the roots of the bought teeth:
a drunken god couldn't know the difference.
It was after this desperation, the body's memorization
of a houseboat's slow rocking and the gambler's song, teeth clicking in a cupped palm,
mouths too broken with anticipation of their future
to know their pasts, that one might find themselves
searching for their name, for something they might possess
with certainty, even as on a still night,
they could hear the hushed activity in the houseboats, sighs
as the bloody-rooted teeth spilled out their damp script
of the future like a knife, over the gambling table.