Saturday, March 6, 2010
Laughing. Sweetheart,
Resolutions in a Parked Car
After I’m done pleading with the steering wheel,
after I’m done screaming at the white doors
of the Friendship Inn, no, even while I’m spitting
and howling, I know, yes, this is the way
we find out about ourselves: crying in rental cars
in parking lots in strange cities that are already
too familiar. The huge ship in front of you,
don’t you hope it will soon disembark? Don’t you
hate hotels? Don’t you hate to travel
just to see the same old pockmarks and limps,
the weight carried below the waist
and above? Just look at what we have done
to ourselves, and topped it off with a club sandwich,
a scribble of neon. I’m wailing
like some foreigner in a foreign country
we don’t give a shit about because how could we
understand something as subtle as the mutilation
of ears and lips? Please, I beg you,
perform some crazy rite over me so things can either
finally dissolve or finally become solid.
Please, I need something primitive and complex
to relieve me of this world subdivided into better
and better ways to avoid life. Sicker
and sicker ways. Death cruising
down 90. Laughing. Sweetheart, Death is the least of it.
I’m in a parking lot in Spokane reintroducing myself
to myself. I’m feeling like throwing up.
In a parking lot in Spokane I am resolving
to read Nietzsche, to pierce and tattoo myself,
in a parking lot I’m determining things
about my labia and nose and heart.
- Olena Kalytiak Davis
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3 comments:
What a poem, Sophie. This one is gut wrenching. Who is this amazing poet? And thanks for introducing her to us.
Olena Kalytiak Davis is one of my favorite contemporary female writers - She's American, in her mid-forties... living in Alaska, to the best of my knowledge. I suggest starting with her book "And Her Soul Out of Nothing."
This one is gut wrenching.
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