Part 10 (1/2)

But so in Women SOMETIMES A MIND IS JUST BORN LATE, COMING THROUGH waves on a slower journey You were never, in the end, alone Isn't it a blessing, what becouerite Duras, you n city - foreign to you - foreign enough so that you becoe Lose your identity hts There htly open s The room must be blue The floor ainst your skin Up the length of your body Down Youall around you You must listen then beyond that, to the ocean and wind beyond all human motion And then you must listen beyond that, to the blood in your ears and the drum of your heart and how a lover's skin stories over you At night, it will rain Open the s Desire wets There is no inside out but the body Love unto death

With Gertrude Stein there will be eating and paper Tea and racefully She will say it with ice-creaain again

Make quiet for Eently a hymn in between the heaves of storm Let the top of your head lift See? There are spaces between things What you thought was nothingness carries the life of it

In the next rooht dances across the floor of things differently now Even your feet are new

With Helene Cixous you must close your eyes and open your us Your lungs Wider So open your spine unclatters Your hips swim loose Your orlds itself Wider Open the well of your sex Now speak your body fro

Jean Rhys ca canyon

Adrienne Rich went down into the depths ahead of you Her dive brought the possibility of language up to your surface Breathe And understand the broad shoulders you are standing on to reach the air Take these objects

With Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing you will learn to stiffen your spine, when to laugh and throw the drink back, when to weep and hom, when to pick up a rifle

Jeanette Winterson willenormous as the cose

Leslie Marer than that even Longer than anything

With Anne sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light Sing a dark drunken song of men Make a slurry toast Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the oht

When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong

Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a ti Make ar and have it out and settle it, scattering old s like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti The lines that are leftthey are awake and growling

With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day She will put her araze out At your backs will be history In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life Like language The s out horizonless

I a room With a blood red desk A room with rituals and sanctuaries I made it for myself It took me years I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch Balvenie 30 year I pour myself an amber shot I drink Warinia Woolf But there is a line of hers that keeps e whatever pieces come your way

I a is with

Run On

IT'S YOUR SECOND EX-HUSBAND'S BIRTHDAY, YOU KNOW, the one you divorced because he slept with not one but about five gazillion different women, and he calls you at 2:00 am all drunk from Paris where you two used to rent apartments and make art because it's his birthday and he tells you he's fallen in love with a wo to second person because if I say ”I,” in your head you'll just picture Heather Locklear or so 4-0 You are divorced for the sad sad second ti sure your blonde is blonde Waxed

So your second ex-husband calls on his birthday and tells you he's fallen in love with a woman who re fingers together and she looks so much like you and acts so much like you and s up the phone and glimpse the 37 year old skin of your own hand and walk to your writing desk and open the drunk drawer and pull out the bottle and drink an entire bottle of scotch in the ht and drive your car out onto the six northbound lanes of the freeway in SoCal where you now live due to your great new job as the Visiting Writer because you did the strong thing and left him because you didn't want to be an enabler and so forth and you wanted to rise above it and get on with your life so there you are on this freeway in SoCal in a red car with your blonde hair and your black dress and your stiletto heels to prove to yourself that you are still attractive like a fucking advertisement for Black Velvet and wait a hts to the right twinkle twinkle little star and WOOSH you are cutting tracks through the thick ice plant between southbound and northbound freeway lanes at 90 literally carving through thehtly news and spinning out big ti to a sht direction in the southbound lanes

You knohat to do You floor it Laughing that h of a 37 year old divorced woy voice in your head goes take the next exit raet your drunk ass hoh water up ahead you take it and you let go of the steering wheel like your hands are floating away fros until BAM you drive head-on into another car and your airbags deploy like two enor breasts and the police co set out of the car and ma'am stand on one foot and count backwards from 100 with your eyes closed and with this stick up your ass and balancing an egg on your left tit and what else?

You are cuffed and breathalyzed You blow a nual limit you could power a car Gi any shred of hotness left in your bones, when you look pleadingly into the young male cop's rearview on the car ride to the facility and say, couldn't you just take me home? With what you think are pout lips and bed blond hair, he looks back at you with - you guessed it - woman, you are old as shi+t pity in his eyes

Inside the jail the rerun begins The first thing that happens that has already happened is that you are inside You have been in jail before You have a record Not veryWriter and anyhow you have always been a snappy dresser

The second thing that happens that has already happened is there is another woh heroin withdrawal She's drooling and she's in a tight ball arainst the wall and spitting about every eight seconds Your left aro sit next to her You look a little bit like aWriter on the outside but what's not visible to the naked eye is that you haven't been clean all that many years, which suddenly has shrunken to the size of a hu a little cocky about it too, your beautiful recovery, your distancing yourself fro that happens over again which is how quickly you become the Universal Caretaker when YOU are the sorry ass loser who needs the HELP, giving your socks to the black wo the hand of the lumpy 50-year old wo the number of the boyfriend of the crack queen with the Alice Cooperfor her even though she has choke bruises around her neck, she begs you to call him so you do, you intervene, you become an objective outside resource, you tell hiet out since it is so obvious that he has abused her and later in life she will have one helluvuh case, one in which you will be a witness of course, watch out guy, you teach Women's Studies, and he proceeds to describe to you what she did to his living room and his cat and his motorcycle with a baseball bat and the house on fire before he calls you a fucking cunt whore ignorant bitch and hangs up

Undeterred, you find yourself calling the guard to get the fat woman some Tylenol as you listen to the Christian chick with a silk scarf and a screw loose self-narrating her experience with the guy from the hotel bar who she believed was there for the Jesus on Ice convention All of this activity suddenly takes its psychosoreen puke bellied nasty kicks in and you realize with a kind of brick to the lower spine feeling that you have to take an enormous scotch shi+t Which you take, of course, in front of everyone, like cons have to, nocosts, no matter how beautiful a martyr they make, no matter how pretty the letters PhD look after your du Writer name, you still have to shi+t in the presence of a crowd

Weird, huh

You close your eyes

You breathe

You are not sorry yet for what you have done

You are simply an incarcerated woman

Remorse, she came later Lemme throw it into reverse

Let me tell you who I hit

Collision as Metaphor THE PERSON I HIT IN MY HEAD-ON COLLISION WAS A 5' tall brown skinned woman

In the moment, this did not upset me In the moment, I was drunk as a ht looked a little like things were in slow motion and smeared over with Vaseline And at a treht have said Addicts have a proble just looks blurry

My airbags deployed Pow If you have never had that experience, it's quite so s wheel with both hands, your aret heat and friction burns on the insides Your head, because it didn't hit the windshi+eld, s; then your head jets back and knocks your noggin against the headrest Afterwards, you just sort of sit there and wait for the dust to settle and your brains to recollect the to stop

The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5' tall brown skinned wolish because, after I sat there trying to feel whether or not anything was broken or searing me with pain - which it wasn't, particularly since I had anesthetized myself with the bottle of scotch - I opened my car door and looked around My car, a red Toyota Corolla, eirdly angled and had its face smashed in Her car, a whiteI' like those old Gremlins - her car was smashed in on the left side all the way up to the windshi+eld Soue I saw the wos I didn't understand Her hair was ht around us She had a lu Her skirt hite and billowed out at times

The person I hit in nant wolish

How I knew the wout is that her belly had the unmistakable mound of a child Six, possibly seven months of child mound At the time, this did not alarh I did feel a prickle of so far far inside an to wail and hold her belly I said, ”Are you in pain?” She did not look at me or answer Dumbly, I put my arm around her shoulders I have no idea why she let me do that She rocked Inconsolably

I didn't feel anything No, literally I couldn't feel my hands, my feet, my ass I couldn't feel my own face

The woman fuht perhaps she was fingering 911, but she was not I could see she was trying to dial a nue my own cell phone I looked at it in my hand I couldn't see any nu It sat like a dead rodent I noticed I s we sat there The sound of cars whizzing by comforted me After a while three cop cars and an a to out-do one another The cops blocked off the bit of road ere on - the overpass between north and southbound lanes I cupped hts flashi+ng all around us So about the swirls of color looked like ere inside an underwater scene

The cops immediately separated us Her, they took over to the ambulance Me, they asked y yes They had a paramedic come over and ”check me out” but no one was very worried about me since I could walk and talk I hadn't a bruise or bu burns oncharacteristic: shi+t-faced The enant woman and her unborn child Except ness