HANNA YOST

the body as backroom

I could not say which was the truer thought:

One layer of that knowing is of the self. Isn’t it like that for everyone? Sometimes the ring comes round and I feel I don’t deserve a thing. Then I do the work of knowing. I see myself reflected in the bathroom mirror, it’s been a long day and I’m alone, my hair pulled into a tight chignon, and I know better by looking at me next to nothing, compared to nothing, and I say thanks to someone out there

Sometimes I worry that because I am ‘confessional’ in the work that I’m doing and I’m trying to eviscerate my own feelings and the feelings of the people around me—that it’s easy to write it off if the tone is too emotional. And that’s something women have to contend with all the time. The word emotional is like a no because suddenly you have emotions, you’re PMSing, you’re illogical. And it’s a total misconception to think that emotion can be divorced from logic and clarity—especially in poetry! Often people think poetry is just about feelings but there’s craft involved. I’m manipulating you to understand my feelings. I’m not writing in my diary.

“Why does red velvet denote a cake when I want it to denote my body? Exteriors are beautiful but I am too young to cough up blood. It is a sad story but it is my story. In some versions, the princess fails to recover the magic fruit. In every version there is a death, but she can never choose hers. I want you to think of me during war time, or whenever the first leaf starts to fall.”

I may wake up tomorrow and write poems because I’m terrified of dying. You might take up the business of death and build coffins, who knows. What would you say was the earth then? If someone asked you to describe it once and without revision. Like a question from a childhood game or those moments in a photo booth when you see yourself lit up, nothing like what you imagined.

by Cara Blouin

Imagine an empty room. Now imagine me in it. Does it look emptier now? Fun fact: loss tastes different every single time we experience it. So what is it this time? Black coffee? For me, it’s theater popcorn. Tell me I’m the one who took it all out of you, gutted you like a fish and left only bones. Tell me I made you small. Make me the bad guy so I can start being the bad guy. I won’t deny anything. Imagine a pantry. Now imagine me singing on my tippy-toes trying to grab the last can of chicken-noodle soup in it. Does it sound like home or some place far away? I was so close to giving you everything. I was so close to making myself good for you, but I couldn’t stomach it. Was I the hole in your pocket where your change fell through? Was I the reason you couldn’t buy your cigarettes? Was I your bad dream? Good. I wanted to be.

1. The women who do not know me. The women who, not knowing me, hate me mark my life, rise in my dreams and shake their loose hair throw out their thin wrists, narrow their already sharp eyes say Who do you think you are? Lazy, useless, cuntsucking, scared, stupid What you scared of anyway? Their eyes, their hands, their voices. Terrifying.The women who hate me cut me as men can’t. Men don’t count. I can handle men. Never expected better of any man anyway. But the women, shallow-cheeked young girls the world was made for safe little girls who think nothing of bravado who never got over by playing it tough. What do they know of my fear What do they know of the women in my body? My weakening hips, sharp good teeth, angry nightmares, scarred cheeks, fat thighs, fat everything. Don’t smile too wide. You look like a fool. Don’t want too much. You ain’t gonna get it. Ain’t gonna get it. Goddamn. Say goddamn and kick somebody’s ass that I am not even half what I should be full of terrified angry bravado. BRAVADO. The women who hate me don’t know can’t imagine life-saving, precious bravado. 2. God on their right shoulder righteousness on their left, the women who hate me never use words like hate speak instead of nature of the spirit not housed in the flesh as if my body, a temple of sin, didn’t mirror their own. Their measured careful words echo earlier coarser stuff say What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are? Whitetrash no-count bastard mean-eyed garbage-mouth cuntsucker cuntsucker no good to anybody, never did diddlyshit anyway You figured out yet who you ain’t gonna be? The women who hate me hate their insistent desires, their fat lusts swallowed and hidden, disciplined to nothing narrowed to bone and dry hot dreams. The women who hate me deny hunger and appetite, the cream delight of a scream that arches the thighs and fills the mouth with singing. 3. Something hides here a secret thing shameful and complicated. Something hides in a tight mouth a life too easily rendered a childhood of inappropriate longing a girl’s desire to grow into a man a boyish desire to stretch and sweat. Every three years I discover again that no, I knew nothing before. Everything must be dragged out, looked over again. The unexamined life is the lie, but still must I every time deny everything I knew before? 4. My older sister tells me flatly she don’t care who I take to my bed what I do there Tells me finally she sees no difference between her husbands, my lovers. Behind it all we are too much the same to deny. My little sister thinks my older crazy thinks me sick more shameful to be queer than crazy as if her years hustling ass, her pitiful junky whiteboy saved through methadone and marriage, all that asslicking interspersed with asskicking, all those pragmatic family skills we share mean nothing measured against the little difference of who and what I am. My little sister too is one of the women who hate me. 5. I measure it differently, what’s shared, what’s denied, what no one wants recognized. My first lover’s skill at mystery, how one day she was there, the next gone; the woman with whom I lived for eight years but slept with less than one; the lover who tied me to the foot of her bed when I didn’t really want that but didn’t really know what else I could get. What else can I get? Must I rewrite my life edit it down to a parable where everything turns out for the best? But then what would I do with the lovers too powerful to disappear the women too hard to melt to soft stuff? Now that I know that soft stuff was never where I wanted to put my hand. 6. The women who hate me hate too my older sister with her many children, her weakness for good whiskey, country music, bad men. She says the thing women’s lib has given her is a sense that she doesn’t have to stay too long though she does still she does much too long. 7. I am not so sure anymore of the difference. I do not believe anymore in the natural superiority of the lesbian, the difference between my sisters and me. fact is, for all I tell my sisters I turned out terrific at it myself: sucking cunt, stroking ego, provoking, manipulating, comforting, keeping. Plotting my life around mothering other women’s desperation the way my sisters build their lives around their men. Till I found myself sitting at the kitchen table shattered glass, blood in my lap and her the good one with her stern insistence just standing there wanting me to explain it to her save her from being alone with herself. Or that other one another baby-butch wounded girl How can any of us forget how wounded any of us have to be to get that hard? Never to forget that working class says nothing does not say who she was how she was fucking me helpless. Her hand on my arm raising lust to my throat that lust everyone says does not happen though it goes on happening all the time. How can I speak of her, us, together? Her touch drawing heat from my crotch to my face her face, terrifying, wonderful Me saying, “Yeah, goddamn it, yeah, put it to me, ease me, fuck me, anything…” till the one thing I refused then back up against a wall her rage ugly in the muscles of her neck her fist swinging up to make a wind a wind blowing back to my mama’s cheek past my stepmother’s arm. I ask myself over and over how I came to be standing in such a wind? How I came to be held up like my mama with my jeans, my shoes locked in a drawer and the woman I loved breathing on me, “You bitch. You damned fool.” “You want to try it?” “You want to walk to Brooklyn barefooted?” “You want to try it mothernaked?” Which meant of course I had to decide how naked I was willing to go where Do I forget all that? Deny all that? Pretend I am not my mama’s daughter my sister’s mirror? Pretend I have not at least as much lust in my life as pain? Where then will I find the country where women never wrong women where we will sit knee to knee finally listening to the whole naked truth of our lives?

It’s all a trick of language.      Anything can be a field if you walk through it. Anywhere can become you      once you forget how you got there.

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political I must listen to the birds & in order to hear the birds the airplane must be silent

My daughter in her white-washed jean dress w/ butterfly skirt says she wants to stay home from school w/ me, & my immediate thought: pull the car away from the drop-off curb w/ her still in it. Adulting, I’ve heard, is understanding our mother’s anger when we forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer. I’m not a grownup mother. I never let anything thaw. I won’t even handle raw poultry. I wanted to bring my daughter home because I’m lonely & she says the loveliest philosophical things in the way of an eight-yr-old girlchild I don’t think I’ve traumatized or injected w/ the venom of girlwounds as I was in my wired girlcoop. No backhand popping her mouth. No sick hand pulling the gauze of her butterfly skirt. I sometimes re-live through her. She takes me through dark forests, teaches me which wolves are prey. How not to be afraid.

can you imagine the rabbit’s feet hung round my neck during hunting season, the fur matted and the nails so desperate to finally decompose. what does it mean to carry a dead animal so closely to your heart in hopes you might kill some more.

No matter where we go, there’s a history of white men describing a landscape so they can claim it. I look out the window & I don’t see a sunset, I see a man’s pink tongue razing the horizon.