Hitting the ground running.

This piece by Denise Duhamel from Queen for a Day  is precisely why I love the form of poetry.

It hits the street running. Makes us rethink everything we think. Wakes us up. Makes us see differently. In the best possible ways. Xo t

The Ugly Stepsister

You don’t know what it was like.
My mother marries this bum who takes off on us,
after only a few months, leaving his little Cinderella
behind. Oh yes, Cindy will try to tell you
that her father died. She’s like that, she’s a martyr.
But between you and me, he took up
with a dame close to Cindy’s age.
My mother never got a cent out of him
for child support. So that explains
why sometimes the old lady was gruff.
My sisters and I didn’t mind Cindy at first,
but her relentless cheeriness soon took its toll.
She dragged the dirty clothes to one of Chelsea’s
many laundromats. She was fond of talking
to mice and rats on the way. She loved doing dishes
and scrubbing walls, taking phone messages,
and cleaning toilet bowls. You know,
the kind of woman that makes the rest
of us look bad. My sisters and I
weren’t paranoid, but we couldn’t help
but see this manic love for housework
as part of Cindy’s sinister plan. Our dates
would come to pick us up and Cindy’d pop out
of the kitchen offering warm chocolate chip cookies.
Critics often point to the fact that my sisters and I
were dark and she was blonde, implying
jealousy on our part. But let me
set the record straight. We have the empty bottles
of Clairol’s Nice’n Easy to prove
Cindy was a fake. She was what her shrink called
a master manipulator. She loved people
to feel bad for her-her favorite phrase was a faint,
“I don’t mind. That’s OK.” We should have known
she’d marry Jeff Charming, the guy from our high school
who went on to trade bonds. Cindy finagled her way
into a private Christmas party on Wall Street,
charging a little black dress at Barney’s,
which she would have returned the next day
if Jeff hadn’t fallen head over heels.
She claimed he took her on a horse-and-buggy ride
through Central Park, that it was the most romantic
evening of her life, even though she was home
before midnight-a bit early, if you ask me, for Manhattan.
It turned out that Jeff was seeing someone else
and had to cover his tracks. But Cindy didn’t
let little things like another woman’s happiness
get in her way. She filled her glass slipper
with champagne she had lifted
from the Wall Street extravaganza. She toasted
to Mr. Charming’s coming around, which he did
soon enough. At the wedding, some of Cindy’s friends
looked at my sisters and me with pity. The bride insisted
that our bridesmaids’ dresses should be pumpkin,
which is a hard enough color for anyone to carry off.
But let me assure you, we’re all very happy
now that Cindy’s moved uptown. We’ve
started a mail order business-cosmetics
and perfumes. Just between you and me,
there’s quite a few bucks to be made
on women’s self-doubts. And though
we don’t like to gloat, we hear Cindy Charming
isn’t doing her aerobics anymore. It’s rumored
that she yells at the maid, then locks herself in her room,
pressing hot match tips into her palm.

I have actually never been a committed fan of Charles Bukowski’s. Someone described him perfectly, don’t know who, I just remember reading it years ago, that when he read Bukowski’s pieces it felt like “being stuck sitting beside the boring drunk at a bar and there was no getting away.” To me, this is perfection of description.

But this poem for me stands above. His grief over Jane here is palpable. And unsentimental. A tough combination to pull off.

And so I wanted to share it.

 

For Jane with all the love I had, which was not enough

– by Charles Bukowski

I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of two gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know
her dress upon my arm
but
they will not
give her back to me.

 

Photo courtesy of Walter Pilsak

A Sad Child

I love how Margaret Atwood manages to let go here – utterly – and yet still retain perfect control. It’s what she does best, I think. She gives the reader a breathless exhilarating free fall in her poems and all the while we know we are in expert hands.

 

A sad child

You’re sad because you’re sad.
It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
you need to sleep.

Well, all children are sad
but some get over it.
Count your blessings. Better than that,
buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.
Take up dancing to forget.

Forget what?
Your sadness, your shadow,
whatever it was that was done to you
the day of the lawn party
when you came inside flushed with the sun,
your mouth sulky with sugar,
in your new dress with the ribbon
and the ice-cream smear,
and said to yourself in the bathroom,
I am not the favorite child.

My darling, when it comes
right down to it
and the light fails and the fog rolls in
and you’re trapped in your overturned body
under a blanket or burning car,

and the red flame is seeping out of you
and igniting the tarmac beside your head
or else the floor, or else the pillow,
none of us is;
or else we all are.

Manuela Huertar and me.

 

A lovely letter I received from a Colombian child about her work and mine. A friend teaches her here – she is new to Canada  – and used my books as poem studies. Best news ever to learn I may have inspired a child to write her own poems.

Easter Morning Once

Here’s an Easter poem.

It’s never been my favourite holiday. All that forced gaiety (I speak of Catholics) about the “rising,” and the massive baskets of gargantuan, alien-like palm leaves lining the church vestibule.

Those unsettling paintings of a bearded man bathed in light emerging, floating, eerily, from some cave-like structure. I was supposed to find comfort in the images but frankly I found them foreboding.

And three masses for us to sing through as the student choir, from the airless darkened loft above.

I know. I should cheer up. But all these memories resurface, unbidden, (I won’t say resurrected) each year at Eastertime.

The chocolate made up for a lot though.

 

Easter Morning Once.

 A new dress, even if it had been my sister’s.

Fresh perms and white cotton gloves.

My boring knee socks and yearning to wear stockings like my older sisters.

My wee brother at my side in his clip on bowtie and tartan vest

And little pressed trousers.

We four positioned, solemnly, on the stone church steps before Mass

In the harsh sunlight of the still chilly April morning

For the obligatory snapshot,

Our secret smiles as we huddled together,

Counting the days until summer, warmth

And freedom.

 

 

 

Writer and Poet

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Tricia McCallum

Always be a poet. Even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire.

In essence I am a storyteller who writes poems. Put simply, I write the poems I want to read.[…]

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