CURE ALL KIM PARKO
CURE ALL KIM PARKO
Box 82588, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15218 www.caketrain.org caketrainjournal@hotmail.com Š 2009 Kim Parko. Cover photograph Š 2007 Elene Usdin. Used by permission. Printed on acid-free paper in Kearney, Nebraska, by Morris Publishing.
+ Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the publications in which these pieces first appeared, some in different form and under different titles: 3rd Bed: “Explain,” “1.5”; 5AM: “Learn”; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet: “Schoolgirl”; Frigg: “Sunday Best,” “The Curtain,” “The Conversationalists,” “Lucy,” “Calm Eye,” “The Spinning Woman,” “Gash,” “Matinee,” “Hibernation”; Keyhole: “Root Mouth”; Jubilat: “Murderess,” “Hold,” “Commerce”; Ocho: “The Bomb,” “Stork,” “Phases of the Moon”; The Bitter Oleander: “After the Flood.”
E X P L A I N 11 C A S T O F C H A R A C T E R S 14 L E A R N 19 M Y D O P P E L G A N G E R 20 S C H O O L G I R L 22 S U N D A Y B E S T 23 R O O T M O U T H 24 L O O K I N G F O R D A U G H T E R 25 S I C K W I T H C R O W S 27 Q U E E N B E E 29 I N F I R M 30 P U S H 31 P O C K E T 32 R O O M S 34 M A T T R E S S 40 C U R L S 41 P E A S P R O U T S 43 P U P P E T S H O W 44 R A P I S T 45 T H E U N D E R F E D H A M S T E R 46 M U R D E R E S S 47 T H E C U R T A I N 48 A N C E S T R Y 49 B I R D S A N C T U A R Y 50 T H E R E V O L V E R 51 V O L U M E C O N T R O L 52 H E D G E S 54 S P I N E 56
B E A U T Y T R E A T M E N T 57 NOTES FROM THE HIRED HELP
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A N N O U N C E M E N T C O N C E R N I N G A N S W E R S 70 P O S S I B L E C O M P L I C A T I O N S 72 T H E C O N V E R S A T I O N A L I S T S 73 F I S T S 74 A N S W E R S 76 T R A I N 80 L U C Y 81 C A L M E Y E 82 H O L D 83 L A R G E L E T T E R 85 W I N D O W 86 R E F L E C T I O N S 87 T H E S P I N N I N G W O M A N 88 C O M M E R C E 89 T H E B O M B 91 G A S H 92 E R A S 94
1 . 5 107 T H E A N I M A L S 110 A F T E R T H E F L O O D 111 S T O R K 112 M A T I N E E 113 P H A S E S O F T H E M O O N 115 H I B E R N A T I O N 117 U N D E R W I N G 118
For Steve Kholi Mom Dad
EXPLAIN
+ Explain the condition. The heart can float around in the chest for no good reason. You can just wake up one morning and that is what it is doing. And try as you may to anchor it, it does not work. A futile attempt as you notice access is impossible through the physical structure. Explain the circumstance. You live within a society that is responsible for the most heinous crimes. And your living condones. You have two choices. Both rife with demons. Stains are shadows and vice versa. See the difference. One changes with the source of light. Speaking of which, your own imperfections impede your ability to access the fountain. When you speak in a crowd you cautiously drip over the sides. You spread languidly across the floor until inertia.
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Explain the mitigating factors. The body will still itself in the case of overload. No one will say, “this is good.” No one appreciates an altered state. The altered are often a burden to society. Although some fellows may express concern in the form of food and used clothing. Explain the potential causes. If your heart is both loose and beating rapidly, it is good to identify why. Practice by lying in bed. Concentrate on the looseness and the beating. Think of three vastly different concepts. Some choices: houseplant, cobweb, unmade bed. One will certainly exacerbate the situation. Explain the danger. The danger is presumed ability. Explain the cure. If you take a bird’s-eye view it is all very sad and misguided. This can cause the aforementioned. If you stay within your intimate realm you are cured. If cured you find no space to move.
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Explain the effectiveness. Idleness is a workshop of perception.
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CAST OF CHARACTERS
+ ME:
a lake is not so much water as birds
HER:
US:
an ocean is ebbing fragile dollars
this is how we gauge failure
YOU:
a mountain is not so much granite as ants
MOTHER: OTHERS:
HE: SHE:
someone who protects the lives of insects nurse the scribble of our brains
a food chain tethers us to mangrove inhuman talent for rootedness
BRUCE:
cloud crowns unfurl
MOLLY:
we slowly coiled tower’s staircase
MARTHA: DIANA:
a cool unchlorinated pool
they arrived in pure condensation
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DARLENE: PATRICK:
SUE:
rain keeps still in cobweb if you find a leaf twice the size of your body
swaddle yourself
ROGER:
I hold hands up
GOLDIE: LUCY:
I love to see a vein’s scaffold
can you imagine the pith of forest
JANDICE:
immortalized as a ghoul
SOMEONE:
The Curtain houses prophecy
HE:
hedges map their thoughts in wood grain
WE:
what are you thinking
US:
chair
OTHERS:
THOSE: THAT:
HIM:
measure the amount of insecticide
what is needed to keep the estate pest-free we embody reptile migration
pardon me for saying
THEY:
how our vacation has left us clear-cut
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SHE:
mountain spines sag
ANYONE:
THIS:
you are arranged in swayback
a nest is well built in observation
OTHERS:
we chart Doppler’s green blobs
EVERYONE: NOBODY:
this floor is marred with rearrangement
clouds are inflated to east by lungful
SOMEBODY: IT:
the flood took eight hours to leave
tower-man says forest-ghoul searches blood
THAT:
who is trying to scare domestics
THEM:
I name the frogs “bo peeps”
US:
bo peep bo peep bo peep
THOSE:
MINE:
we are disappeared in thickets
what if the ocean were liver
EVERYBODY:
YOURS: ME:
all our souvenirs are bile
a simple conduit for purity
my skin leaks pimples
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YOU:
for years I have been covered in abscess
THEM:
SHE:
clumps of rain forest hang from scaffold
from bird’s-eye a superimposed pattern
OTHERS:
HER: ME:
touchdown over small sprigs
what is leading me to ruin
classify these salient weeds
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IF YOUR MOON REFUSES TO WANE FEED IT THE JUICE OF ONE HUNDRED DARK BERRIES
+
IF PHANTOMS SWIM BEHIND YOUR BREASTBONE FISH THEM OUT WITH A BIRCHWOOD TWIG
+
IF LICHEN COATS YOUR ELBOWS COME TO REST IN THE CROOK OF A BRANCH
LEARN
+ I was diagnosed with failure to thrive so my mother took me home and put me under the grow lights. I spent my younger years among the chlorophyll-skinned. When I finally grew a sprout from the top of my head, it was time for kindergarten, but I only knew how to communicate through photosynthesis and was mocked or ignored by the other children. Daily I waited to get home and sit under my lamp and idly grow toward the false sun with my seedlings. I was diagnosed with fire blight. They put me in a basement room all day and I came home cracked and wilted. Mother worried about my health and upped the dosage of fertilizer. When I entered grade school the principal was made weary by my size relative to my intelligence. “These are dangerous times,� he said.
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MY DOPPELGANGER
+ In the beginning I had no doppelganger. I had only Martha. I draped Martha over me. I hid beneath her. I put her edges in my mouth and sucked them to frays. I lived beneath Martha every winter and above her every summer. In time, Martha became so threadbare that I mistook her for lace. One day my mother was holding Martha above my head so high that I could not reach. That night my doppelganger inched toward me and soon it was beneath my sheets. It was spooning me before I knew how to be eaten. It was putting its hands on my breasts, which were coming in like hard stones unearthed in a plowing. Where had my mother put Martha? I searched through all my mother’s trunks in the house; most of them held vast stores of river water for the escape route my mother would one day pour into the riverbed she had carved down the side of a mountain. In one trunk, I found her collection of oars. In another, I found instructions for knitting Martha. Every night, my doppelganger rode me, pinched my hard
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stones, crumbled my pelvis, and injected me with trout. I knitted a new Martha, furtively, while my mother put her kayak in a trunk and practiced pulling oars through the rapids she had been hoarding for so many years.
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SCHOOLGIRL
+ I ate my breakfast like a good schoolgirl. I daydreamed that I was drinking a glass of milk for my bones, and that my bones wept for dead calves. I daydreamed that I was tasting bacon while a soft pig tongue licked the slaughter of its body. During class, I had many desires: I wished to suck the knobs of my chest inward, away from probing boy-eyes; I wished to question authority with pastel-glossed lips; I wished to console Diana, who blamed herself for misery amongst animals. It was time for lunch. The bell rang and the schoolchildren lined up at the trough. “Today you will consume the rendering of animals,� the woman in the hairnet mouthed joylessly. Her own breasts had been cut off, but she spooned out the mash just the same.
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SUNDAY BEST
+ I donned my Sunday best and walked out the door into the day of my birth. My mother said I was “full of woe� and lo and behold, within my chest sloshed a bucket of sorrow. I walked to the park and sat under the Shedding Tree. No matter the season, the Shedding Tree rained down debris coated in pollen. Every once in a while, it drizzled sap. I sat under the tree for hours. My bucket of sorrow stilled, and when I looked into it, I could see my reflection enshrouded in seeds and nuts and berries and the pollen covered my adornment like a fine, yellow fur. When I got home, my mother took a good look at me and sighed. She knew there was no saving my Sunday best.
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ROOT MOUTH
+ My mother told me not to gnash my teeth in public. She was afraid that over time, I would grind my teeth down to their roots. She said, “Who’d marry a woman with a mouth full of roots?” But I couldn’t stop gnashing, and come my tenth birthday, my smile was thick with dark, branching roots. I perfected my closed-lipped smile and my closed-lipped talk. The boys found my closed lips intriguing. What was behind them? They had to know. “C’mon,” they beseeched, “let us see.” They tried prying my lips apart with their fingers, then a butter knife, then a crowbar. They would not be opened. Meanwhile, there was a tree with baby-green leaves burgeoning in my brain.
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LOOKING FOR DAUGHTER
+ My mother was looking for her daughter in all the wrong places. First, she looked for her in the wisteria. Then she looked for her in the sagebrush. But those places were not where her daughter was. Her daughter was on foot, soon to be swallowed by the gaping woods. Her daughter was just beginning to feel the soreness of her body. She moved carefully to protect the soft parts that swelled from her tight core. My mother was sad because she did not know where to look for her daughter. She felt, acutely, that she did not know where her daughter might go. Her daughter wore a white cape in the forest, and she crushed the juice from berries to color it. Her daughter noticed the patterns of lichen on the rocks. With each forceful step through the underbrush, she thought, it’s as if I knew where I was going. My mother had an idea. She swept under every piece of furniture in the house. She took out all the forks and straightened
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their prongs. She stacked a pile of newspapers in the yard and watched the nightly rain flush their type to slur. Her daughter woke in a pine needle bed one morning. She saw the butterfly mobile that hung over her crib. She reached toward a glass-eyed bear that had always rested beside her. My mother crawled to the bathroom in a siege of cramps. Beneath her ribs was a breach. She felt a thick, meandering line pull itself from her body.
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SICK WITH CROWS
+ “Keep the crows out!” My mother called after me in her usual merry voice tinged with devastation. I had that rare genetic disease that lets the crows in if you aren’t vigilant. The crows followed me like streams of obsidian. The magnetism that the crows felt toward me was strictly spiritual. I was their chosen repository. Armed with a can of pepper spray, I struggled to thwart their pilgrimage. You cannot live with crows inside you. The most I ever had were three, and the infestation downed me for months. “You can’t kill the host,” I tried to explain as they surrounded me in charcoal plumes. The situation made me ponder sacrifice: should I give up my self, pitifully singular, for the salvation of the multitude? When I was sick with crows, it was not all that bad. It was like my organs were all asleep and caught in dreams of flying. At night I woke with crow call, an achy sound that made me feel as if I had been compromised in some slightly violent way. It swirled around my esophagus so that I sickened,
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vomited tufts of glistening feathers. I lay back down. My thoughts hardened into a great, uncompromised beak. My organs launched themselves into air. My fingers contracted and sprouted scales. I marveled at their prehensile strength. They grasped what was left of my body, lifting me up and out through the open window.
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QUEEN BEE
+ I was caged for hysteria and high-pitched laments. I took my last bee with me to my cell. My other bees, in the span of a night, had disappeared. My last bee’s name was Bee and she was the queen. It should have been Bee that moaned and wailed and tore her hair out, but she was subdued by a blue pill that the entomologist had prescribed for grief. She kept mumbling, “When will my colony arrive?” My jailors were wary of me because the niceties of human interaction were lost to me in this time of tragedy. I cursed them: “Bring nectar, you fuckers.” But they rebuffed my request with a plate of anguished meat and a bowl of pesticide minus the fruit. After days, Bee succumbed to toxins and despair; the blue pill could not penetrate her tiny, weeping heart. I held her striped body in my palm. Even in death she displayed a regal bearing.
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INFIRM
+ “You are infirm,” I was told inside the infirmary. Nothing could be truer, I thought as I jiggled my doughy arms and belly. After many bedridden days the nurse told me, “You have a suitor.” I desperately tried to knead myself beautiful, but in the heat of the afternoon my arms drooped and my belly sagged. My suitor sat by my bedside. “You look pasty,” he informed me. “Would you do me the service of placing me in the broiler?” My suitor did so with the chivalrous aplomb of a new lover. “Remember to check on me every few seconds.” “Certainly,” he said, his eyes gleaming. But he left me in a minute too long, and later had to scrape me clean of char.
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PUSH
+ I could not stand erect because of some unknown weight. A group of nurses tended to me. The nurses sat on the sides of my bed and lifted my shirt. They saw that my breasts were covered with a fine, green fur. My room was filled with vapor and steam, and the nurses could make out small particles in the air that swished their tails. One nurse went to prepare tea and found all the dishes in the cabinets filled with dark, curling hairs. The nurse made tea anyway, and I sipped from a hirsute mug. The tea was musky and sweet with an undertone of brine. Another nurse bathed me, gently removing the green moss that covered my bosom. Yet another nurse parted my legs and saw a little girl inside me, breathing all on her own. The nurse said, “Push, push!� but I refused. I then took a small doll that lay beside me on the bed. I reached through the opening in my pelvic floor and handed it to the little girl.
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Kim Parko lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and dog. She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of the chapbook The Rest of the World Seems Unlikely (Achilles Chapbook Series, 2009). This is her first book.