Read Teahouse of the Almighty for Free Online Page B

your body. I know your scars, badges
    earned in the grave pursuit of science—
    jump rope whips along a curve of calf,
    toes stubbed purple, tender uncolored
    patches of skin woven shut over your
    small traumas. Wily dervish, you flip,
    hurtle, fly, daily rattle your soft spine,
    send your bones to the wailing places.
    This is play in the age of Grandma, who
    knocked those buildings down? This is
    8 years old in the age of could-die-soon.
    This is life as collision and scrape, hard
    lessons in the poetics of risk. Daring
    the world to harm us, you pull hard
    on my hand. Grandma, let’s run! We laugh
    and trip as the sidewalk sniffs our skin
    and stars along our path flame shut.
    Die fast, die slow, die giggling, die anyway.
    Our speed tempts the Reaper as I shelter
    you in this first death, the loss of our throats.

STOP THE PRESSES
    My job is to draw the pictures no one can voice,
    to soothe and bellow toward the numbed heart,
    to breathe in your chronicles, discuss them out
    in lines weak enough for you to read and swallow.
    My mouth is a jumble of canine teeth, I bite only
    at the official whistle. My job is sexy leads for the
    bones clattering in your closet, to sing you sated
    each night with a forgettable soundtrack of paper
    and ink. I am neat, easily folded, a sifter of truth
    born to be burned. I count your dead, fathom their
    stories, bless them with long, flexible histories
    and their final names. There are no soft stanzas
    in this city of curb sleep and murdered children.
    We need soft words for hard things, this silk
    brushing the inevitability of rock. Birth truth in
    this way, just once. Craft the news and overcome
    all that you ever were—a reason to turn the page.

WHAT YOU PRAY TOWARD
    â€œThe orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  — Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966
    I.
    Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made
    myself come. I’m right here!, he’d sputter, blood
    popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks,
    goddamn it, I’m right here! By that time, I was
    in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my
    pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train
    slicing through my blood. It was easier to suffer
    the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives
    and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking
    with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and
    codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership
    of things? I was sneaking time with my own body.
    I know I signed something over, but it wasn’t that.
    II.
    No matter how I angle this history, it’s weird,
    so let’s just say Bringing Up Baby was on the telly
    and suddenly my lips pressing against
    the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought
    wow this is strange, what the hell, I’m 30 years old,
    am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt
    go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy
    I had never had it never knew, oh I clamored and
    lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried
    writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping
    and machine-gun diddling their insistent c’mon girl
    c’mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing
    blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing
    left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has
    rocked she, he who has made she weep with script.
    But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby,
    the fur do fly, all gush and kaboom on the wind.
    III.
    Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling.
    As long as there is still skin on the pad of my finger,
    as long as I’m awake, as long as my (new) husband’s
    mouth holds out, I am the spinner, the unbridled,
    the bellowing freak. When I have emptied him,
    he leans back, coos, edges me along, keeps wondering
    count. He falls to his knees in front of it, marvels
    at my yelps and carousing spine, stares unflinching
    as I bleed spittle onto the pillows.
    He has married a witness.
    My