NECESSARY FIRE kma s u l l i va n poems
n e c e s s a ry f i r e
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NECESSARY FIRE
B L A C K L AW R E N C E P R E S S
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KMA S U L L I VA N POEMS
w w w . b l a c k l aw r e n c e . c o m
Executive Editor: Diane Goettel Book and Cover Design: Alban Fischer Cover artwork: © Christina McPhee, Inversion 14, chromogenic print, 2012 Interior artwork: ©Christina McPhee Inversion 17, digital photograph, 2012. Both images from the photographic series “Inversions” are used with the permission of the artist. Copyright © 2015 KMA Sullivan ISBN: 978-1-62557-932-4 All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Black Lawrence Press 326 Bigham Street Pittsburgh, PA 15211 Published 2015 by Black Lawrence Press Printed in the United States
for daniel
c o nt e nt s
Thrashing 13 Fear comes 14 Waiting for Pangaea 15 Grown tangled 16 No more 17 Does anyone need saving? 18 Wondering about the cancellation penalty on my cell phone contract 20 Tuesday morning at the post office 21 Adopted late 22 Night medicine 23 Family reunion 24
Have I been saved? 26 Small, they said 27 Night air 28 Song for my mother 29 Considering antiques and curiosities 31 You wonder 32 June service 34 Why my socks don’t match 36 This life 38 I don’t visit gravestones 39 Note to a young friend 41 Moist 43 The horse has gotten out again 45 When my father falls 47 First-person shooter 49
Circadian rhythm 50 A mother’s crime 51 Careful 53 Playing tennis with old men 55 I believe in sandwiches 56 These days are long without you 57 Searching for answers in the feminine hygiene aisle 58 You are my favorite erection 59 Ant love 60 Saturday 61 Floating 63 For him I would pawn my metal 65 Hole 66 Spring tide 67 Viridian 68
Reality TV 70 Witness 72 I met Jesus today 73 First born 75 Some mornings 76 This is new this absence 77 Left staggering 78 River’s bend 80 In Montecavolo, Italy there is a bank filled with cheese 81 Opening song 82 Necessary fire 83 Stand here if you like 85
Acknowledgments 87 Thanks 89
thrashing
I’ll start with the way my youngest rubs the center of my forehead with his thumb when I need to calm down or he’s about to ask for an advance on his allowance so he can buy weed or a permanent marker for Emily who will cover his forearms in viney tattoos and has invited him to work the river with her this summer so he can earn money by renting inner tubes to country boys who earn county medals wrestling other boys in leotards on mats but would break and bloody my son for rocking rayon genie pants and hemp bracelets and loving another boy on the mouth the way we were meant to soft and hard and aiming for each other’s center so we might for a moment pretend we aren’t alone as we thrash and thrash and thrash in this world of lips and blood and rivers.
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FEAR COMES
when you kneel bedside, head resting against your mother who is unconscious but still in pain, you realize what you dread and hope are the same— the son you loved past addiction—past counties full of lies—offers his hand through bulletproof glass but you’re not sure you know his fingers anymore while your father, who hunted wild mushrooms and taught you how to find Cassiopeia in November sky, no longer understands the cable bill. When fear comes it creeps around cedar siding, peers in windows, lips to sill, eyes so sad and wild even priests leave town.
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Wa i t i n g f o r Pa n g A e a
2.5 centimeters per year is the average rate human fingernails grow. Earth’s continents move with similar breathlessness. Floating on molten rock that churns, plates slam into and separate from one another with a force that pushes the Himalayas toward ever-thinning air and, one day, will break California into shallows. Even galaxies stray from their centers. I wonder if the Milky Way occasionally longs for days before the singular blast that made family reunions more difficult to plan. Scientists don’t seem worried. They say dark matter is the glue that binds the cosmos to itself. It will hold. I wonder if that’s just an idea out of the academy to explain what we don’t understand? Like why there were no photographs of my adopted children on the walls of the foster home where they’d lived for three years. Like why one of my sons hid canned peaches behind toilet paper in the bathroom closet before he was arrested for forgery and shoplifting. Like why my daughter didn’t touch my hair with her hands until I’d been her mother for two years and why her earlier mothers never allowed her to run.
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G r o w n ta n g l e d
Do the scales on a pangolin ever let go, walk off by themselves and look for daffodils? They might ďŹ nd a new home in a wild clutch of bulbs, decide to protect uted petals from the rain or stay a little while then move on in search of tiger lilies and trumpet vines grown tangled in Eastern Hemlock. Married at 22, I missed loneliness and traveled straight to footed pajamas, cello recitals, and 3D models of Jamestown. Christmas stockings are cross stitched with colored silk, photo albums are decorated with landscape die cuts and balloon stickers. I bake carrot cake and chocolate cake and strawberry-iced vanilla cake for birthday dinners. My youngest chooses blueberry cobbler for his candles. Lop-eared rabbits, black bear hamsters, and chinchillas in specialty colors ďŹ ll empty spaces. These days I wonder about emptiness. What happens in a place so quiet not even a popped cello string can ring out?
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NO MORE
When was the last time I rocked you to sleep in a warm dark room, your milky breath on my face? What day, what hour, what minute marked the end? Did I kiss your palm, stroke your toenail with my thumb, watch your eyelashes sink and float and finally come to rest on the pink of your cheek? Or, anxious to wipe linoleum counters, start the evening soup, sit at my writing table, was I waiting to let you go? For the sweetness that filled me, that will never come again, I hope I lingered.
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D o e s a ny o n e n e e d s av i n g ?
Wonder Woman, red cape trailing, orders an iced mocha at the coffee shop counter. She sips from the side of the plastic cup. Straws cause creases, she says, touching her upper lip and looking at a middle-aged woman who stops drinking her ice water. But hey, I’m here to save the day. Does anyone need saving? A customer asks Wonder Woman if she can convince the shop owner to talk more softly so she can eat her banana nut muffin and have a quiet minute. Sorry, that’s above my pay grade, she says. A man whose wife died a year ago, stands in the pastry line. He asks her if she can find a new mother for his boys—one who knows how to make potato salad with mustard. No, says Wonder Woman, but I can show you how my Lasso of Truth attaches to my gold belt. The little girl who’s been pulling on a corner of the superhero’s polyester cape lets go.
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Wonder Woman takes another sip of her mocha, pushes the screen door open and strides into the afternoon, her red shin guards skim the top of her Air Jordans.
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Necessary Fire, KMA Sullivan’s debut collection and winner of the St Lawrence Book Award, opens a window into the world of a woman who is mother, partner, daughter, and lover. Surprising in the variety of moment, wrenching in detail, grounded in grief and care, this collection moves from the innocence and bravery of a young son coming out in a world set to crush him, to playing hymns so a dying mother can plan her funeral service, to witnessing the breaking of a son who had been abused and abandoned in earlier years and cradling an adopted daughter long enough for her to find her own voice, all the while experiencing the fullness and desire and ebullience that comes from being loved and loving others without limit. Necessary Fire offers a deluge of image and emotion and experience, a deluge that only a heart on fire can survive. Early on in Necessary Fire, the persona states “I make sense of things.” It is true, KMA Sullivan’s collection makes sense of the seemingly senseless and tells the story of a life lived beyond the scope of feeling to the sort of listening that becomes an almost angelic empathy. The people and things in this book are good things and they have lived life to its fullest boundary. We can listen to them and start to see that this life is one filled with darkness, sure, but also family, completeness, the divine, and love. Dorothea Lasky,
author of
Rome
and
Thunderbird
“Bones can straighten with memory” Sullivan writes. And it is with such resilience and faith in the personal that Necessary Fire achieves itself as a fierce and tender book of questions—questions that propel us beyond our singular and limited certainties toward the myriad lives inherent in language. These poems complicate, expand, and disarm in both their joys and contradictions. And by gazing through their flames, we are rewarded, perpetually, with the most human versions of ourselves—a reminder of how necessary we can be when “loving another ... on the mouth, the way we were meant to.” These poems are gifts we have and will always deserve. Ocean Vuong,
B L A C K L AW R E N C E P R E S S
author of
Night Sky Wi th Exi t Wou n ds