CHRISTINE DESIMONE
———————————
Singles
The men are aligned in the wallpaper,
repeating flowers that barely move from gloom and fear,
stand solid and sway. The crowd is a dormant mob
shifting its weight and dull drink hand to hand.
One cocks his head, nudges another over the noise,
assessing each particular. Ruthless and vain,
dim long room a feast of worship and boredom in Friday night best.
The band surges, dozens hover and munch on cheese,
suck the languid toothpick squares,
roll wine flutes in their twittering hands.
She hunches, deflects, but these men still arrive upon her,
burbling cleaving requesting always adoring hungry and frightened.
She is an itch and stale, forced to chair
from the greasy mocking eyelooks.
She feels one descend, he is pressing forward anyway,
despite the averted gaze, turned neck of disinterest,
he walks through anyhow brazen fulfilling all his nudging
he must perform. Her cruel neverlook turnback to sip
her much-empty glass. Her gesture of compound calmness.
She stares at the singing woman, then out the window,
admires the ships on the Bay.
Rejection without a single exchange.
He scratches his head nonchalant back to the wall, back to nudging,
back to the nightwaste of futile souls.
[353]
Chatsworth, California
Ahead are all the hometown signs
pointing the way to the aqueduct, a sign
that I am entering the kind of paradise
reserved for fuzzy pairs of dice
hanging over a rusty dashboard that rattles
its coin-jangling muffler like my old baby rattle.
As if driving through the past,
I swear wistfully that I just passed
my mother's 1980 Oldsmobile, carrying her bored
and nauseous children, motor coughing beneath the boarded-
up windows of this single zip-coded town. It used to take me past her
aging, dependable church, weave through the plaster
buildings with their brooding, fatherly stares.
Every day began with a walk down concrete stairs,
avoiding the barking dogs chained to flimsy fences,
forging my determination with hand-fashioned defenses.
I'm startled again by the loud, reliable train
screeching through the reverent ground that guided, trained me;
Walking home, when the school day trailed,
I crossed these tracks from sidewalks onto horse trails,
over overflowing canals, burnt-out lots,
endured shouting cars of drunken men, the whole lot
of the town's finest, cut across garbage heaps and browned-grass
backyards, inhaled wisps of smoking grass
from the neighbor's kids. I swallowed sweltering heat on my palate
with jukebox twang from the Cowboy Palace.
A country song on my radio, I coast back into my sweat-jammed pores.
I glide by the free racks of nude magazines, the porn
[354]
studios churning their smut into the dusty hours.
This is the town where I formed and cooled--and it remains oddly ours--
new tract homes and the closing decade have not changed
a thing. The old remnants still chitter my brain like loose change.
After all this time, the billboards are still peeling
from lazy contractors, church bells still pealing
useless calls to worship. Hurtling down these freeways,
it's still an old habit: counting all the free ways
to catch a ride out.
[355]
A Friend's Rape
She unfolds for me in a late night office
Over hot kettles and a Camel Hard Pack.
Going mad, she says,
Is like a planet hobbling out of
Oval orbit, losing its ellipses,
Caught in mosquito netting folds.
She was left with pieces
And afterwards, the telling--
The breaking-rank, the shushing index fingers--
Was a confrontation of truth and severance
And of all those simple things.
I eat her words like foreign food,
Turning them on my tongue
With strange, polite custom.
These are the shells of our worlds,
The old fences,
The dead walls that keep us back.
Her skin has peeled;
She is whitened and well.
Her distant tale is mere
Voyeur dirt, a scar on her arm.
The undergrowth is neverending, she says.
The last haunting was in a movie theater,
Screaming and clutching at the darkness.
Each time the fine hairs crouch
On lip ear nose,
Her strength in fits and starts.
She has sucked clean the bones of words on page,
Voices on ear. She's reached that end.
The girl under her skin is not paper flesh.
Teapot screaming.
No, she says, my anger does not fade.
[356]
Her story is much like her first cigarette
After three years' abstinence.
The burn reminded her of those tenth grade puffs
All over again--
And she is still
The strongest woman I know,
Our hands trembling in the cold night.
Our smoke rising to ash,
Lingering.
[357]
Christine DeSimone was born in Los Angeles in 1977. She received her
B.A. from Chapman University and, in 2001, her J.D. from the University
of California, Hastings College of the Law. A poet, musician, artist, and
fourth-generation Californian, she is currently an associate at a San Francisco
Bay Area law firm. |
