Atkinson - Mean

mean

COLETTE LABOUFF ATKINSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Chicago and London

colette labouff atkinson is associate director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2008 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2008
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5

isbn - 13: 978-0-226-03057-9 (cloth)
isbn - 13: 978-0-226-03059-3 (paper)
isbn - 10: 0-226-03057-1 (cloth)
isbn - 10: 0-226-03059-8 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atkinson, Colette LaBouff.

Mean / Colette LaBouff Atkinson.

p. cm. (Phoenix poets series.)
isbn - 13: 978-0-226-03057-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn - 13: 978-0-226-03059-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn - 10: 0-226-03057-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn - 10: 0-226-03059-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
ps 3601. t 4895 m 43 2008
811.6dc22 2007051716

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z 39.48-1992.

The happiness of being with people.

franz kafka

I am not I.

sir philip sidney

Acknowledgments

Thanks and acknowledgments are made here to the editors and publications in which these prose poems first appeared in other versions:

Exquisite Corpse: 1971

Identity Theory: Mean and Mean, Part Two

My gratefulness goes first to Killarney Clary, James McMichael, and Peter Lippincott Atkinson for their support, which offered me the ease and discomfort to make these poems possible. Id also like to acknowledge Ngg wa Thiongo, who reminded me that the work week would not make sense without this. Thanks to the good readers: Lorene Delany-Ullman, Patty Seyburn, and Kenneth Young. To my family and also those who go before me, more thanks.

Space Race

I knew him before he was broken. He wanted me and I wanted to break him. And then I wanted him not to want me anymore. And then I wanted him to call. When it happenedall of it in just that orderI drove to his house. We watched the longest movie, The Right Stuff , which I had the patience to sit through since I knew at the end wed have sex. Somewhere in the film, in the middle of an argument about how chasing women who dont matter can ruin everything, Gus Grissom says The issue here aint pussy. The issue is monkey. And that movie watching had nothing to do with space or history or men or monkeys. All he wanted was sex. Id waited a couple of years for that: to have seen him broken and mended and then looking right through me, right on to the stars. I would still want to mean so little that Id be see-thru. Sometimes I can daydream him back to breakable. Mostly, I would want to watch movies with him while hes in love with someone else and helping himself to me.

Mean

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I dont know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said, okay, but, if you let this one go, Im really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away. You were never sweet , my mother says.

In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmys crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard. He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent. The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then theres his mother, surrounded by her children. She was tough , he says. Tough. When Chicagos Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfatherthen fiveand took him to deliver the money. Thats all youll ever get , she said, and dont touch my kids or Ill kill you.

Mean, Part Two

Wife one was a child-bride. He introduced her to me in Greenport, New York, eight years ago. She wore her black skirt the same length I wore mine. A woman like that, who covers her legs, likes to hide. Right away, she told me she was always torn over work. Told me how she cried her eyes out years earlier when, divorced, she had to leave her baby for a long day away. By then, shed been left for wife two.

And you have to wonder about a guy like that: trading in his child-bride, leaving his son and newborn, for another. But we skipped over that part of the yarn and didnt stop to speculate. Besides, it would have been disloyal. She asked: Whered you get those shoes? Later, I sent her some fabric for a cushion. She dug a chair out of the trash, varnished it, recovered it, brought it to me whole and new. I stopped by her house for tea. She came to a barbeque to celebrate my first anniversary. We roasted pig. Whered you get that skirt? I asked. She sent me postcards and recipes for bisque. Thanked me for taking care of her son in California. Once she flew here with her youngest, a girl. We went to the beach. Got burned.

Medium Intense Red Copper

At the hair salon I swept floors. Answered phones. Got my hair colored weekly: deep reds, black. Before a trip to Mexico, I bleached it Barbie-white. My father said I looked like Eartha Kitt. A hairdresser I met asked if Id let her cut my hair and, on the spot, I moved to her side of the salon. The guy whod been cutting my hair for years didnt mind. Besides, everyone could see she made me look better, like a girl. I got to know her enough to beg her for more: a deep conditioning. Straightening. Just a few lowlights. What I should have said was please turn me into someone Im not. Just the way Eartha Kitt sang in 1954: And whatever Ive got Im eager to lose. Or, please turn me into someone Id like to be. Like Catwoman. The hairdresser knew what I meant. Shed grown up on Catalina Island where the world was doll-likeand married her school-sweetheart before she preferred girls. She and I drove across town and to bars. We danced, and I was masquerading in whatever new color Id barely washed out. She was pretending to be someone not interested in me. Her forearms were always stained with the tint.