These are my bones (chapbook) by loisa fenichell

these are my bones!

loisa fenichell (april, 2015)

Table of Contents 3 – Inconsistencies 4 – macro poem #1 5 – Bloodlines 6-7 – Passenger 8 – Poem for Bone and Dirt 9 – Picturing my Family as my Body as the Red Sea 10-11 – Eject 12 – For Two Vertebrae 13-14 – Confessional 15 – 1994, Heat 16 – IF YOU LOVED ME YOU WOULD HAVE STRIPPED ME OF BODY 17-18 - [THINGS ABOUT BODIES ARE THAT:] 19 – macro poem #2 20 – Red 21 – macro poem #3 22 – jesus 23-24 – trying to reclaim songs for myself

Inconsistencies Let me writhe on pavement ripped by sun. Rumor has it that that’s how my mother was born. Rumor has it that that’s how I was born, too. I picture my birth the way I picture the bible, happening between two gentle and soft fingertips. Reverent whispers, because, not to brag, but I was the first child. The first child, the hardest child. I like to think that it stormed that night. That the rumors are wrong. That I wasn’t born in the sun. That the night of my birth, the electricity went out, and my parents were left without light. I like to think that they wept when I was born. That they wept again when they could finally turn on a lamp, and watch its sparks burst the way I did from the womb.

(macro poem #1)

Bloodlines The last time I was home I was 18 yrs old & here I am again & there’s already dirt in my bed. I like the tall tree in the backyard the most: it is the only one free of snakes. Snakes crawl around the others like crowns of teeth. When grandfather was alive he took me to that tree & picked me an apple & told me about family, i.e., mothers tied to mothers tied to mothers; now I am the only daughter. Grandfather told me about my birth: my mother cried until her face turned transparent like the thinned out wine that my father drinks at dinners, the wine my mother tries to ignore: she’s terrified of her ancestors, all drunk like barrels of young boys. I had three brothers & they are all dead now: an ocean, a car, a burst of lightning. I don’t think about them anymore. Instead, in bed, at home again, I listen to my sheets as they rub against my legs like a child’s chalk to sidewalk. These days most of my dreams are about my grandfathers: one was arrested & the other an alcoholic but they knew how to love the way ghosts do, all hushed & subtle & colored quietly. One day I will learn how to sing the way the women at the local church do. I know nothing about Christ, but I still stand outside the open stained glass window with my eyes closed & pretend that I can feel the pews pressing against my body like a boy’s hands.

Passenger My mother used to keep Lupines in the cracks of her favorite book. They bloomed into oblivion, and they bloomed into the book, because they didn’t know any better, which is how it is with all flowers, and not just Lupines, and which is like how I don’t know any better than to whisper gratitude to strangers I’ve seen a million times over sitting on the curbs of sidewalks that run along every surface of the earth. It is one of my only redeeming qualities, and it makes up for all of the times when I’ve been petulant, even though Little Brother tells me that I’m too sorry too often. My mother says that I’m just “being (too) polite” -my mother has never known any better than to defend me even when I should not be defended (which is always). Instead of gullible, my mother calls me trusting, even though I didn’t trust Billy The Neighbor on the other side of the street (in East of Eden) when he told me he saw an alien, and the alien’s name was Fred, and he was a nice enough alien, and he was the size of a fingernail with pink and yellow skin. Aliens are what I cannot believe in, because my mother said that before I was born, I was an alien. I guess she just doesn’t know that the only alien is Billy The Neighbor, and that when he said he saw an alien, what he really meant was that he saw himself. Billy The Neighbor has long skin, and short hair, and tall eyes that I don’t like to watch. Once, he called me a ghost, and maybe he’s right (I believe in ghosts, even though I don’t – can’t – believe in aliens, unless you are Billy The Neighbor): my skin is always too pale, and my arms are always too far away, and I can stick my hand through my cold leg, which I guess is not very normal. Sometimes, I wish I could be the largest sea turtle in the world instead of being a ghost, because I like being in water, even though I don’t like to drink it (I only like fat-free milk, and on every other Sunday, I like orange juice). Also, it might be nice to have salty tears – mine are usually too fresh (which is odd, because my tears should be salty, even if I am not a turtle), but: my eyes have never actually drooped, except for when Billy The Neighbor told me I was dirty after I finished loving his brother. So, maybe it doesn’t matter how fresh my tears are. Or maybe I would cry more if my tears were saltier, and maybe my crying

would be more fragile than it is now. I saw Billy The Neighbor’s brother cry, because he had loved his dog too much. Also, I saw his collarbones, and I guess Billy The Neighbor called me dirty soon after that. Billy The Neighbor’s brother once told me I became too attached too easily, but there’s another word for it – I just like people who are loyal, and who can be as loyal as I am. Also, I like people who are like Billy The Neighbor’s brother, and who can cry over everything, because when I was little I did cry, just not anymore. When I was little, I fainted, because someone was talking about rape. My mother called me sensitive, but everybody else called me “mentally disturbed.” I started seeing a therapist after that. My therapist told me to sing. She had a torn poster of Don McLean on her wall, and she wanted to be his therapist. Or, she wanted to sing dirges in the dark with him. I guess I was the next best thing, but I didn’t know how to sing a dirge for her, and I apologized to her for it – she didn’t know that I was actually just too lonely to do so. Then I stopped crying, even though my body still housed more tears. Billy The Neighbor’s brother once cried over steeped tea, and I wish I had, too, but I didn’t. Yesterday, Little Brother cried tears of amethyst, and he stained the floor velvet. Nobody came to clean the floor, or to lick the color away, so the floors are still velvet, which is sad, but mother says it’s beautiful. Whenever she says “beautiful,” I want to throw up, because that is the worst word. I’m sorry for that. I wish I could call people beautiful, but I’m too kind to do so.

Poem for Bone and Dirt i. When my brother and I were younger we used to compare the sizes of our beestings. When my neighbor and I were younger we used to compare the sizes of our bones. I always wanted my beestings to be smaller, my bones larger. ii. Soil works well to bury the way I feel about my body. When I was younger I licked soil slowly from my fingers and refused to spit it out. I liked the way that if I closed my eyes I felt like a worm. iii. Do you hold certain sounds in the palm of your hand, carefully, the way you do with soft bone? iv. Cut my mouth off with the way sleep only comes to those who wait for it. When I was younger Mother’s mouth was cut off with a coin, then she broke the bones of her fingers. It was a reminder of the way in which we are built from more than flesh.

Picturing my Family as my Body as the Red Sea My flesh is freshly skinned, because of my father’s nails. My father is brushing out the tangles in my hair. He is used to the brushing, he says, because he used to have a sister. I don’t think to ask him where his sister is now, although I picture her with hair perfectly tangled, like an extended family, like ancestry. My family tree is knotted and webbed, but every member has a place, and if you’re lucky, a purpose. My mother’s purpose is to cook soup for the Passover Seder. I picture Passover as bloody as when the planets forget to flash across the sky. This happens. I have seen it the way I’ve seen a boy look at me from across a wooden table. The boy feels like my cousin, even though he is not my cousin. He just happens to have a gaze that calculates, like the gazes of the old men that sit together in my town, on the corner of the two streets whose names I can never remember. When I walk by them I make sure to shuffle my feet even quicker than I usually do, because I want to forget about my body. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. I don’t even look into my favorite lake anymore. The way it wrinkles together hurts as much as my father’s nails do: my father’s nails against my scalp and against my skin. My father picking me up out of the bath. I am still wearing my organs. I don’t think I’m three years old anymore, but I’m not quite sure. I can never remember what it is like to age.

Eject My parents when they slept they slept with snakes. My parents when they slept they died, every night, in cycles, like monthly blood: the first time I got my period I was 12 years old and wearing jeans newly stained and thought that I’d killed a man. There are still times when I think that I’m killing men, or boys, by accident, because of all the milk swirling around inside of my collarbones (there are still times when I think that I’ve killed you) When you sleep you whisper to your parents. Did you already know that? Have you already told somebody else about the way your body looks when you sleep, all stretched out like the legs of a newborn? You’re a boy with hair as red as emergencies, a boy who belongs best on subways, your body lanky, your hands like skies gripping onto the metal pole. Later after dinner I am that metal pole, only with a larger stomach. My stomach is always largest after eating dinner. Your hands are always the most over a girl’s body – your hands the most like skies – after dinner: this is the worst horror movie: my stomach popping like a mountain or an ear high in the sky (or, worse, my stomach never pops, it is always there). In November we are in a parking lot (it is late it is full of rain) and you don’t know my voice, a voice sounding like fucked up broken jewelry. For my birthday you gave me a bracelet you found in your mother’s bedroom. It broke two days later, beneath a softly lit streetlamp. Somewhere in the middle of a sidewalk somewhere near the East River

I am holding the bracelet and crying water from littered water bottles but nobody sees me (or: it’s all a dream, and it happens over and over again, cyclical, the way my parents used to sleep, used to die). The two times that you’ve rejected me: once: my parents with banged up bruised bodies in the hospital. When I saw them lying in between sheets cotton like your t-shirts I fainted twice: the funeral is back home. I fly there and my ears won’t stop popping, like a mountain, like a too full stomach. At the funeral I forget hands like skies, at the funeral I fall in love with everybody I see, at the funeral I forget that I am no longer in the city (I can trust people). I see you now as a ghost: when two ghosts fuck we are horizon over a snaky river when two ghosts fuck we are flying back to the state of my birth when two ghosts fuck (in ghost parents’ bed) we sound like car crashes

for two vertebrae (when the first bird crashes & dies into a fainting sun a second bird comes to take over the first bird’s place.) (songs about mountains are the most important) i wonder if birds listen to mountains, if they think about mountains. do you think about mountains? in the dead of summer (death of july) the two of us climbed a mountain & you saw a snake & i vomited. it was then, after i vomited, that you started to become less & less the boy with a face like sweet fabric. there was this way in which we tied ourselves together dangerously to your bedpost for an entire year. you were good for something. don’t ask me what. i want to make a friend soon, who also has trouble with missing & very much not missing a boy: hello, friend! if you ever want to ride a carousel, you can! come with me. we’ll claim two horses as our own, forget that they ever belonged to those who touched our bodies unapologetically.

Confessional (My fingers won’t stop growing like shells! My fingers won’t stop growing, but without water, just with food!) As I stand in this bathroom stall in this congested church I can’t stop thinking about how much I hate my fingers, about how much larger they suddenly seem. This stall is stained in blood and vomit and graffiti that reads, “girls day 11/13/14.” Nothing seems so sad and so dry as this stall does. I think of you sitting in the pew with your hand on the thigh of the girl whose hair is sheared short as though it were Judgment Day and she were an apple tree, its branches cut into small, fragile pieces. On Judgment Day my grandfather died and everybody in my family and everybody in my town went to the funeral except for me who cried and cried and cried and I’m still crying for the way his skin used to fold over like a moon violent in its softness: 1. he’s a dead man with a body like a fish who has just ripped off its scales. 2. he’s a dead man who before he died liked to stand on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town and yell, “I will not spill my guts!” But he died anyway.

Would I be lying if I said I loved my grandfather? Would I be lying if I told you who I loved? Here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare (triple doggy dare style) Here: this is an experiment Here: on Judgment Day (on the day my grandfather died) we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love in terms of the way we kiss them: we go into the woods just to touch each other’s chests. We lie on tops of rocks and I kiss you as though I still need more fat on my huge body.

1994, Heat 1 The boy dies after staying awake all night reading The Plague. He drowns himself in a lake. This is summer of '94. We all attend the funeral. Nobody talks, except for the priest, as the body is being lowered into wet grounds. The rest of the time it is as silent as the boy's body was in the moments after drowning. 2 Summer of '94 I am eighteen, lying in bed in between sheets that are as white and as cotton as my mother's wedding dress. The moon's face is as cruel and as yellow as that of a boy's. I dream up my first nightmare: I am a widow and I am being strangled by my corpse of a husband until my skin is dark blue, the color of the lake the boy drowned in. 3 Summer of '94 is the hottest summer. Billy The Neighbor takes me to behind the yellow house. We are both barefooted, our toes grassy and sticky with sweat. He seems to love me, he tells me he does, before having me lie beneath him on the ground. It is night and I can barely see his face, but I know that it is tinged with glistening pink. I touch his back and it feels like a childhood fever. 4 There are days when Mother thinks that she is her mother, who died before I was born, or at least pretends to be her: dresses in her mother's clothes that we keep in the attic, talks poorly about herself. I have to hold her until she begins to whimper and then is herself again. 5 The last night of summer the dog dies. The vet tells us that it is a natural death. 6 The last night of summer the moon is as bright as an old ghost and I do not get any sleep.

IF YOU LOVED ME YOU WOULD HAVE STRIPPED ME OF BODY In October we picked apples that tasted like mountaintops, apples that were colored red like teenaged brides. In October, a reminder to self: Don’t forget the teenaged years. Don’t forget the boy with the tongue like a slick arrow. The school was painted white with grey trim, and the two of us stood behind it like a pair of stag deer. Remember: there is a difference between grey and white, and I am not colorblind. Remember: this boy’s face was grey as the robe of a young monk, and I am not colorblind. Remember: this boy is not a monk. Don’t forget being thirteen with hair licked short like a small body. I stood with five other girls, I was flat chested, I was lying about a trembling kiss. When one girl cried I should have remembered to mean well, when mother called I should have answered, even after she died, even if sometimes mothers kill children. It’s just that they do so without realizing it. Remember: mothers often lack bodies. Reminder to self: bathe, wash behind the ears: the chalk that still rests there from grade school. The teacher made me write I WILL NOT MURDER MY BODY, then, I WILL NOT MURDER BODIES, then, I WILL NOT MURDER THE BODIES OF BOYS OR MOTHERS, each statement ten times over on the green chalkboard. There was a hunger in my stomach back then, rooted down like a pit of shaking guilt. We ate apples covered in teenaged blood. I could not shake it, the hunger. I still cannot shake it. We continue to pick apples with bodies that are meant to be sorrowful.

[THINGS ABOUT BODIES ARE THAT:] i. ii. iii. iv.

Do they exist? Do we know that they exist? How do we know that they exist? How do we see (our) bodies (properly)?

How to write a manifesto for a body! For the body! Bodies sink like the breaths of a baby when a baby is held by a tired mother whose face is gaunt and whose ribs are the sharpest leaves anybody has ever seen. I want to walk through a body of woods. I want the woods to be full of leaves. I don’t want to have any limbs. In my head I can taste the trees that are in this body of woods (and this body of woods is full of leaves). The trees stretch out the way your body does atop my bed. I still don’t know if you belong atop my bed. When we walk I’m jealous of your calves, of how puffed out they are. When we walk I want to pick you a cactus. I want to pick my body something. I want to pick it apart. I want to pick it lying in the grass. I’m sorry but my mouth is too full of candles for it to touch yours; I’m hoping that doing this will make me quick-witted the way you are

and always have been. I’m sorry too that I’m not quick-witted already. The way a body is: it’s a road, like this one that I’m on now, visiting you. I’m taking a bus again, like the last time I went to see you. The last time I saw you you had a bruise on your left cheek. I never asked you why. You never told me why. Whenever I picture you I picture you with the bruise on your left cheek (sometimes though I forget and instead it ends up on your right cheek). When I see you I think I will be disappointed because you will not have the bruise on either one of your cheeks. In an ideal world there would be one long bruise trailing all across your body. Maybe this would make you mysterious. I am trying to picture our bodies together again, trampled by our flesh in the rain. Where you live there is so much rain.

(macro poem #2)

Red 1. WHENEVER I LOOK IN THE MIRROR IT IS THE SAME RED GHOST THE SAME RED GHOST THE SAME RED GHOST WHENEVER I LOOK IN THE MIRROR I AM CHANTING I AM CURSING AT YOU AT YOUR BODY WHICH IS REALLY MY BODY OR I WISH IT WAS MY BODY BECAUSE I WANT TO CURSE AT MY BODY & BECAUSE I WANT MY BODY TO BE YOUR BODY BECAUSE I WANT OUR BODIES TO BE TOGETHER ALWAYS OR NOT ALWAYS BUT A LOT OF THE TIME IN A WIDE, WIDE BED LIKE STACKS OF THE TEETH OF FOXES HAHA I THINK I LOVE YOU NO JUST KIDDING HAHA 2. whenever I look in the mirror the mirror is red I am red my face is red I think of you, of how beautiful you must look, were the sun to hit this mirror right here, just so, although it is night and I am alone 3. I talk a lot about vomiting and blood 4. WARNING; DO NOT LOVE ME BECAUSE I TALK A LOT ABOUT VOMITING AND BLOOD AND I HATE MY BODY AND MIGHT END UP HATING YOU, TOO, AND WILL BE JEALOUS Warning: I love being soft I do not know how to be loud except for right now Warning: sometimes I like to imagine us both with headaches, the romance of it all We would eat rice together, and soup, and drink water, and share stories about the little visions we see with our hurt brains

(macro poem #3)

jesus boys fuck me & then tell me all about the bible classes theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re taking. boys' breaths usually smell of how they're thinking about the girl with short brown hair & bangs as no more than a girl with short brown hair & bangs. i am not angry with them. this is not me angry. i am not angry at any boy. this is me trying to forget about boys with hands like the teeth of fake gods.

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trying to reclaim songs for myself 1.”rivers and roads” - the head and the heart: august - september, 2013 you were the first person i ever showered naked with. you were the first person who ever saw me naked. you called my body normal looking. in august, before you left, we made each other mixed cds & you gave me a bracelet that looked like a handcuff & told me to wear it around my wrist so that everybody would know that i belonged to you. at school boys looked at me with violent & greedy eyes. (change in song: “novel” - bulldog eyes: i broke up with you in december. for days afterwards i cried the way a deer does just before being shot. guilt breathed into my lungs like buckets of tight thread.) 2. “i must belong somewhere” - bright eyes: august - september, 2013 i am high for the second time. the first time i thought i saw a whale in the sky & fell asleep atop a friend’s pile of dirty laundry. this time i am crying & squatting behind a bush. 3. “lady liberty” - andrew jackson jihad: october, 2013 i left ohio like a dog through rain. eight hours in a car with my mother, driving across flat highway. we didn’t pass enough trees, or mountains. again my lungs were too full, this time with emptiness & exhaustion & vomit. 4. “poor places” - wilco: december, 2013 - august, 2014

the boy has hair like dirty teeth. the night we meet we both have breaths full of beer. we find a closet that is too brightly lit. when he puts his fingers below my underpants, it is the first time that it feels okay. 5. “mr. tambourine man” - bob dylan: september, 2014 i am trying to forget that any boy exists, that any of them can touch my body the way that they do. this is why i kiss too many of them.