The Bad Wife Handbook. Rachel Zucker
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Название: The Bad Wife Handbook

Автор: Rachel Zucker

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Поэзия

Серия: Wesleyan Poetry Series

isbn: 9780819576118

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ might. All the good wife

      wants is to go home.

      When no one watches

      I teach the dog to fly.

       Floating Wick in Petrol

      I am too happy to see him.

      Someone must be blamed. Perhaps

      the therapist or my marrying young.

      Say, are you really this beautiful?

      I dream a woman puts a gun in my mouth

      to make me choose—lustrous, sleek, sexed.

      Next a jade green sandal from a bottom

      drawer. Suede wedge with straps

      that wind around my shin. My foot

      in the smooth cradle is lavish, ignitable.

      Please, say you are a dress I can put on for tonight,

      say you are a gun or untouched leather

      purse, a beaded belt or denim

      patch or felt-bottomed box or basted hem, say

      you are a spiral binding or photo of a forest

      framed in beeswax, say a hat pin, say a buckle

      say a gun or polished knob, say anything

       Bridle

      I promised to stay steady,

      but who knew the rage

      of arbors?

      Forests, groves, flagpoles,

      Stand, we told them. Stay.

      When we set up the blocking,

      marked my toe-stops with tape,

      I can’t describe it—

      how my shoes abrade,

      fit, like casket.

       Thought, Antithoughts

      I’ve nothing to hold him,

      suspect I’ve been dreaming—

      a woman awake, her

      husband breathing—she wants

      to be anywhere.

      He’s a man

      who happened to notice

      I made him want

      to play guitar

      but he didn’t. This is the winter

      the husband started snoring

      and science said free will

      is a feeling we believe in.

      Post hoc confabulation.

      I must get up and attend

      the microorganisms.

       Sex

      Wane, wax, wobble.

      My mind is a map of hunger.

      They say Abulafia could stop his heart

      with one letter. Alef

      lodged in his semi-lunar valve.

      Small e after breath is what I do to keep living.

       What Is Not Science Is Art Is Nature

      I am dreaming a hole right into the voice of God.

      Straight into the dark place where my children were made

      but can’t follow me back to. Right into the room

      whose windows are too high up to see out,

      though the sloped roof is too low for me to stand up.

      In New York snow is unusual, arrives like childhood

      memories that might not have happened, disappears

      without changing anything. But do we say,

      when it snows, because some countries

      don’t believe in snow, I dreamed of snow? No, we say the news was right or wrong.

      We say this strong desire for a window—huge square

      glass through which a child standing up in a crib

      at night alone in a room at the bottom of a flight

      of stairs far from the mother in winter sees:

      a Greenwich Village garden cast in urban glow,

      quiet, because snow in the ’70s was enough

      to make the city slow and mute—is real.

      So, say it really happened. That doesn’t mean

      it will again or did. Or that the dream

      doesn’t make you ordinary.

       Freud Had Sex but Jung Had God

      I take water

      into my lungs

      in lieu of him, want for air,

      have none and not

      because a good wife rose up in me

      or a sharp right turn, bright

      discipline befell me: I wanted

      sugar and salt in equal measure

      one making the other desperate

      the now tasteless by turns desperate

      this was this wanting of course

      it was the kind of snow that never

      sticks—O blizzard! wild sky at wit’s end—

      but when I look again

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