Samara
I wrote Nessy I’d planted tomatoes
and basil and tarragon in the dark
under the whirling maple seeds.
There were maple seeds
scattered on the slate
inside the screen door
the next morning.
What do men want?
It has to do with the urge
to shove their * junk * into the
dark mystery. They’ll do anything to avoid
their own duende. It’s like we’re
supposed to go in there and bring it
out for them like a coal miner.
Where do
you get your vitality? they ask.
From the bituminous alley
of course
I answer, but they reply “I love the Lord,
but I hate being alone.” Say what? And
“Jesus is the only
God.” Again–wot?
How would you know
if you’d never entered?
This morning,
I finally put the worry dolls away
exhausted from two days
of labor
spread out akimbo on my
dresser. They looked
like wiped-out
partiers, their dresses and pants with
thread unraveling,
sometimes a tiny painted
face askew. I returned them to
their woven bag to
sleep it off. I thought of Dracula
for some reason. Now, there’s a man
that knew the dark. Every morning at
sunrise, back into his plot of earth,
similar in size I’m guessing to my
raised garden out back. When he
traveled to England he had to make arrangements
to have the wooden
boxes filled with “mould”
travel with him. Such was his power
that all of nature
convulsed and a terrifying
storm came up
when his ship approached
the shore. Onlookers
could see through veils of fog
a wind-torn corpse
with drooping head at the boat’s
helm—the captain—hands tied
to a spoke of the wheel
with crucifix dangling.
Then an immense dog leapt off the boat
and up into the cliffs.
Shapeshifter Dracula
absorbed by the night.
It used to be I’d travel
and everywhere
I went I’d case out the nearest rectangle of
sky blue water so that I could swim back
and forth my eyes glued
to the inscrutable bottom,
and sometimes
the sparkling honeycomb shot through with sun. I felt
like the Count planning
my vacations, finding the location of the
requisite blue box.
I’m not sorry Z. is mad at me, J., and J.,
and T.,
and even D. May their dicks be
merry. If their women
are willing to hand over
what they’ve worked so hard for. We had
children out of their recreation center! Their
happy hole!
Bitterness is a kind of fecund soil.
I had to settle for
inserting Miracle-Gro-inseminated “potting soil”
into the tomato
plant indents, b/c
COVID, b/c I can hardly shop for, much less lay
my hands on, manure.
There is the compost heap,
ash and vegetable detritus of my past,
behind the house
that I have been into with my shovel
but it was dark I wanted
to beat the rain.
I came back in and texted my current cyber
man, Z., but he brushed me off.
Replied only to my comment
about our time zones.
That he, six hours south,
is to the east of me but to
the west
of me in time. This means that
he does not have 9 p.m. twilight in May—which could explain
the whole problem.
Who knows, he was
probably smack in the middle of sexting
with somebody he met online.
But Ness loved the story
of the air full of those tiny muted gold helicopter
blades whirring over me,
and the warm breeze
and the wind chimes,
as I planted the tiny strip of garden
between house and driveway.
Z. says he has an inordinate
interest in pedigree: race
horses, “chocolate stripe” heirloom tomatoes
he grows from seed. He raises
bantam chickens
with voluptuous
blue feathers. He eats their eggs and oversees
the hatching of the fertilized ones.
He sends me photos and even videos
of the mother hen feeding
her babies meal worms that he has
provided. They’re in a pile
and then she distributes them one morsel at time to
a different place and somehow signals a chick
to come over and consume it.
I don’t tell Z.
about my fear of worms, especially the big
earthworms that loll around
engorged
after a rain. The time my friend
Nancy chased me with one and I ran screaming
down the two hills of my backyard
into my father’s arms near the weeping
cherry tree (Yo ho! Freud!). Sometimes
he places his chickens in a dark box
and takes them
around the tri-state area to shows. The only
time Z. uses the word “love” is about these
chickens: I am so glad you love them,
he writes.
One time a guy somehow got on my Facebook
Messenger. I may have friended him, as my whole
account is crowded
with people I have no clue
about.
I opened his message, and there
was a huge glistening erect cock.
Oh good lord.
I did not sign up for that. The next time I ran
into it by accident,
having not yet figured out how
to block the guy.
The second time I stumbled on it, I saw
it was really his—or someone’s—
not really
as preternaturally big as I had thought b/c
it was real—because his
pants were down and I saw his
checked boxers.
It filled me with the worst desire, dark and rich
like the garden, like whatever twisted thing
I get into when I imagine—oh help me—
my husband pushing himself into
that other woman.
Samara, Samara, protect me my God.
ξ
Summer Solstice: She Wore “Imitation of Christ”
Stephen, full of grace
What does it mean
when the place
you got married in
burns to the ground? Cheryl asked, at
the same time
sticking her phone in
my face to show
me a structure perfectly, beautifully
on fire. White square wall
at the end
of a fenced
pasture
and orange flame
fanning
out on all sides,
Jack-o’-lantern cut-out
windows black
tarry smoke coming
from the roof,
rippling it, buckling it.
I was sort of
surprised to
learn her sister had had
the presence of mind
to take
the picture.
Same time asking
if the horses
were
in there. Fireman
said, Nothing we
can do about
it if they
are, and then Donna
ran up and said, They’re
in the
pasture. Then everybody
had to round them
up and trailer
them over
to Janie’s, a thirty-horse
stable
that had stood
more than twenty stalls
vacant
for two years, dust
and neck-high weeds and
waiting to be
foreclosed, basically. The insurance
money for the fire
could change
that. One person’s
bad luck, another’s stroke of
good.
Everybody bustling
around today
to make the
quarantined—and hot—
stallion happy.
“Open the window.”
“Get him
a fan.”
Stephen said
my name
and stepped out
of shadow.
Ivy climbed
the maple
and dappled the
streetlight. His wife left town,
he said, because the
university screwed her.
It was November
before last.
He said
he didn’t know
if she’d come
back, that he hadn’t
been to an AA meeting
in a long time.
Then “oxycontin,”
“heroin,” “speed,”
“vodka,” in no
particular order.
Hep C. Stomach
problems. It all
started with a little
tiny pill, he said—
Darvocet—
for a severe
two-week headache.
A familiar story.
I believe it.
Damn doctors.
I told him
Go get
yourself locked
up somewhere. He said
his wife said the same thing,
that that was the only
time he’d been able to get clean,
behind bars.
Stephen was thin,
beautiful as ever.
Dr. D-for-Death was
standing with him.
I’d been jogging
in my braids.
Today in Thai Essence
a young friend
who might have
been my daughter
and I talked about
sex. Four Thai
waitresses and one
Thai guy
who seemed to be the owner
and/or chef lined
up near the cash register
and listened. Jean
said, My friends
are just going
out and losing their
virginity
for the sake of it (I said
nothing about my “regard”
for my virginity
at a similar age). Like a girl
had sex with her prom
date, he never contacted
her again, and then
she just went
out and started sleeping
with anyone. This is someone
who said
she was never going to
do this kind of thing.
Jean said, The way
I see it is
sex is like drugs or alcohol.
If you get
pregnant, it ruins
your life, just
the same. And Holly, her friend,
just casual as you
please about having
sex with her boyfriend.
I thought about how
it was kind of necessary
to trivialize it (they’re texting on
their cell phones all the time,
e.g.) in order to ignore
what is happening, kind
of like people decorating
nurseries for baby-to-be and
buying frilly pastel
maternity clothes and “layette”
stuff. Completely ignoring
the fact
the universe is about
to open
and emit another
human being. Like that
barn with
its black window holes
and the terrifying
red glow that is taking
everything but
that last west-facing wall.
I said, You know
how you fly to
Europe (or anywhere really) and
it takes like
a week to catch
up? I mean your body,
or your spirit, can’t
get in synch because
you went too fast, faster
than the body
can go? I said
sex is like
that, when you’re a teenager
and you have
no “relationship.” It’s
like an Aston Martin, is that
what it’s called? Only I called
it an “Austin Martin.” I’m sure the
Thai guy was aching to
correct me.
Lamborghini.
Like a Jag. Like you drove
a VW beetle and then
suddenly one of those. This huge
amount of power, and you
have no idea
what to do with it. Were
the cash register contingent agreeing?
I remembered
our waitress basically did
not speak English.
I wanted to say to Cheryl
that maybe the
burning barn
was a sign of her
immolating marriage, consumed,
or transformed, by its
own passion—she’d barely
known her shy bull-riding
fiancé, met him on a horse-loving
dating site—but I didn’t
want to stumble
onto talking about
her sex life. She, I mean Jean,
my daughter-like friend, at lunch,
told me something
awful she learned on
on Facebook. Our mutual friend
from New Hampshire who just
left her husband of twenty-five years
is going back to Aden
who she adored
in her early twenties. I filled
Jean in on the anorexia, skipped
Victoria’s later pregnancy, abortion,
the séance led by Jill
the psychic after Frank’s suicide,
where Aden and Victoria
“bonded,” Francie, Aden’s
wife, throwing
eggs at Victoria’s house and
yelling curses (well, I told
her it was messy but
didn’t get into the
terrifying, broken-hearted details,
the considerably older Francie—
how she adored Aden—she
always arrived to work
in the afternoons breezy and full
of herself from their
afternoon trysts);
did say Aden
left Victoria to go to Europe, did not
communicate while
there, and then
when he returned
to the States went to Florida
and reunited there
with Francie, who
came down
from Virginia. Meanwhile Victoria
was half-dead from anorexia, and
ended up with Dr. Johnson
whose presence in her
life so threatened her mother Leslie
she thought
she saw him
lecturing to her
from the TV set—
and then the subsequent
“King of Burma”
episode (didn’t recap in detail
how Leslie pressed
Victoria to take her to
a remote airfield in Washington
to pick up
“the King of Burma,” who was
coming to confab
with her
about some crucial
international issue
or other
in rural Virginia—
needless to say,
the drive back—
without the king—was quiet). So what
was on fire? The table
of dumplings
and pot-stickers
at Thai Essence? The eyes
of the incredulous
maitre d’ (an Aston Martin—
was there a battery-operated
sex-toy overtone
in that
analogy?). I’d been
reading the first-person
narrative of another
schizophrenic.
The summer had started
like this, she said: Everything
heightened, beautiful.
Then she heard
the derisive chanting,
“You will die.” I haven’t
done well in summer,
which was reputed to
be my favorite season. I simply
have to tell you
this. I was messing
around with one of
my favorite, but dilapidated,
“summer” tunics the other night
and I happened
to look at the fashionably rent
and crumpled label.
“Chance
and Coincidence,” it was called (talk
about trivializing
your life! “Branding”
yourself!). Made me think
of that awful moment
when I was
leafing though
People or something a
few years ago:
“Scarlett Johansson
is wearing ‘Imitation of
Christ.’” There she stood
at some party
or premiere
in her frothy white
cocktail dress
with the scoop-neck lace bodice
and fluted silk chiffon
skirt. Stephen used to come
regularly to the
Saturday night
meeting. Is his absence
the reason I no longer
find it exciting? His
beauty was the cool
kind. And considerable. He’s still
cool, loaded, coming
out of the shadows of that
lush grassy ivy-laced yard tonight
the way he did. (A “friend’s”
house, he said.) His pale green
almond eyes. His cheek bones,
one with a slim shiny
football-shaped scar.
Just sittin’ in there shooting
up and drinking vodka,
he said outright. I smelled
his breath before he even
said anything. And I have
Hep C, for Christ’s sake, and
there I am
putting dirt in my veins.
Oh, obituary, don’t show
me Stephen. I often
thought of what it would
be like to simply
lie down, the
pleasure of simply
lying down
with him—
for years—
he’s that
beautiful. He wore faded
blue jeans, flat,
flapping, paint-splattered
pull-on Keds. Life was
so much better
when I was
sober; it was
just so peaceful, he said.
The barn
went up in
flames.
A man said
in the paper even a discarded
bottle could
catch the sunlight
and ignite a whole
field in minutes.
Stephen
slipped, many of my friends
disappeared. I’m in the Adult
Swim Aston Martin
whether I like it
or not. And my
young friend Jean’s cup
overflows with
her beauty and
sensuality. Suppose
I had.
Suppose . . . Stephen
was thin. He could slip
through
a slit
in the universe. He’s
standing in
the vestibule. In the
night shadow. He told
me his last name
and I told him
mine. We laughed
because no one has a landline
anymore. We had
nothing with
which to write
our numbers down.
ξ
Gaslight
I met a man at a twelve-step meeting
and didn’t know much about him.
I dressed him in a nice outfit,
set him prancing on the golf course
behind the hotel where I lived—in limbo—
at the center of the contiguous states.
He rode a golf club like a witch’s broom
while I sat inside watching a Halloween
“Bewitched” marathon on cable. He texted me
about Toto only he spelled it “Tutu” and said
God had my back. Meanwhile,
Samantha changed her handsome
warlock former boyfriend George
into a raven. Miffed at Darrin,
Endora changed herself into a trick-or-
treating child princess and Darrin
into a werewolf; and Aunt Clara
messed up everything. She gave Samantha
and Darrin clothes for a dinner party that subsequently
vaporized.
You wouldn’t believe the
clothes I dressed that man in. The black
wool dress coat I saw from across the room
that turned out to be a flannel shirt. Who
needs to be hoodwinked when you can do it
for yourself? My mother rode a broomstick
through my childhood and for years
after her death. She slapped me so fast
I never saw it coming. It became
an erotic rhythm. After I left home,
she dropped money on me periodically
from a great height—which I Fed-Exed
to friends immediately. We were happy
watching “Bewitched” on our black-and-white
TV every Tuesday at 8 on the hard-cushioned
sofa. Wide-eyed Samantha—in perfect black
winged eyeliner and ruffled apron—
exerted the power that was rightfully hers.
I think K. wanted me but would have liked
to change me—by that I mean “save” me.
He thought he was my god. I could tell
by the way he ran around saying
“God has you right where you’re supposed
to be.” I got a frisson of fear when I heard
that. My mother kept a bead on me.
True gaslighter, she told me I was
a narcissist. Even now, she’s a searchlight
chasing me on the golf course with a hairbrush,
finding me and pinning me
to the trap, the velvety green, the verge.
ξ
Dana Roeser’s fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and was published in 2019. Her earlier books won the Juniper Prize and Morse Prize (twice). Recent poems and translations appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Laurel Review, Barrow Street, The Florida Review, North American Review, The Indianapolis Review, Green Mountains Review, and Poetry International Online (PI Online). For more information, please see www.danaroeser.com.