Bianca Stone - The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

MORE PRAISE FOR Bianca Stone Bianca Stones poems are powerful, moving, and original.... In her poems, were in the presence of a naked human voice, not concealing itselfor over-reaching to expose itselfwhich dives as deep as voices go. SHARON OLDS Bianca Stones poetry has the glow of 21st-century enlightenment and lyric possession. Hilarious and powerful. MAJOR JACKSON I read the work of our most brilliant young poets to be reminded that it is still possible, despite everything, for our abused and decimated language to ring out the difficult truths of full-on awareness. The best of them, like Bianca Stone, do not settle for mere cleverness.

They know it is not enough to be brilliant, that it is essential in poetry not only to report the miseries and blessings, but to transform the m.... [I] believe she is going to the difficult places and writing these poems in service not just to herself, but to us all, so that we can go to them and together find a little hope. MATTHEW ZAPRUDER Stones poems astutely and honestly address the longing and cost of human connections. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY THE MBIUS
STRIP CLUB
OF GRIEF BIANCA STONE Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. for
Grandma Contents Adjusting type size may change line breaks.

Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Odin plucked out his eye in exchange for a drink from Mimirs well of wisdom. He wanted to know everything there is to know of the past and future. And so it was. But the weight of wisdom made his face sour. Seeing everything blown to shit.

The gods with it. After that, he never ate again and lived on a strict diet of alcoholic beverages at the Mbius Strip Club of Grief. At the Mbius Strip Club of Grief, come on in, the ladies are XXX! If you want the skinny ones we got skeletons cracking round those poles. And over at the bartheres Grandma, with her breasts hanging at her stomachgorgeous with a shook manhattan, and murderous with a maxi pad. At the Mbius Strip Club of Grief all the drinks are free. Grocery store ros in gallon bottles on every table.

And the dead dont want your tips. They just want you to listen to their poems. Dont do anything dangerous. And call every once in a while. In fact, they tip you at the MSCOG . With checks.

With a sigh theyll throw one down at your feetWe make it rain with checks. Then the dead are sitting at the back of the club, dying further. Sniffing. Shuffling into the bathrooms, holding their skin in their hands, farting methane and sobbing across the stage with their last mealits the raciest show in town. And ladies, theres men too, hanging themselves on the bathroom doors and from the rafters, totally naked, with their cocks in their hands, tears coming down their faces. Ladies, youll love how their feet smell.

How their bones protrude. How they leave no note. At the funeral they carried boom boxes on their shoulders, blaring Chopin, swaggering over the snow in sync, in all black, the cloth of penitents and matriarchs. A hole is free to dig, if you know how to ask men with the right tools. Funerals need not break the bank. Through the yard like a procession of Danes and Duchesses from Hamlet , all hired mourners from birth, punters of rough gods, women of the salons our funerals are like poker games in the back room at the Mbius Strip Club of Grief.

The stakes are high. You have to have pneumonia to get in. You have to cough and gurgle. You have to have a cat on your lap. And refuse to eat. After the funeral was out the hors doeuvres came out.

Olives, pt, sardines with soft bones and violent, flushed organstoo much wine, slouched on a flowery chair aperitifs on the porch with the early moon I looked at the sky overhead where it said in the white jet-stream cursive: dying is awful . And I lit my head on fire. Danced a dance for the gods. Mom pealed out, off down the mountain like Mad Max to sit alone in her house, to play solitaire in the dark because theyd turned off the lights again; the pipes were frozen, the wood almost gone so solitaire on the floor beside the woodstove, thinking about abandonment about love about luck about money like a winter songbird it sang in her head all day: Who will pay? Who will pay? Who will pay? I think everyones glad Im dead , said the stripper with the caved-in face. Her fingers were bone and no sinew. She flapped her arms at the two wrens caught up in the rafters, staring down on the empty dance hall.

Chirps rained like sparks from the electric saws in their hearts. No one here is glad anyone is dead. But there is a certain comfort in knowing the dead can entertain us, if we wish. We line up outside looking drowned, telling whoever comes our way that we are falling very fast. And that we are fine. The dead as wrinkled as jet streams cutting across the room with glasses lost on their heads, vitamins dissolving like milk under tongues, hair still growing, crackling out of their skulls in time-lapse loops and we file in, in ones and twos, clinging to our tragedies, finding our favorite face, and it looks back at us with indifference, contempt, chill disappointment.

You never came much when I was alive , says one with red hair, lying on her side, a Botticelli on the stage; and now you want a piece? $20 for five minutes; Ill hold your hand in my own. Ill tell you you were good to me. I Over the door theres the iconic ice-pick in a human heart. You have to show a scar to the bouncer to get in: the old suture holes, a common kneecap, the shy smile of a cesarean, spattering of long-gone acneany scar will do. And you have to tell a story about your mother. Something she suffered through.

But once youre in, youre in forever. Then theres only the horizon, lush carpeting through cigarillo smoke, coats on hooks, worried aunts, croquetgrand as a yard sale, a ghost, her eyes like thumbs pointed down, her laugh like an almost perfect test score leave your inhibitions at the door. There is no room for modesty. Your magnum opus will start in the dim alcoves of grief. II Main dance room: frivolity, managed by a House Mom, who sits in a high swiveling chair, making sure no one breaks the rules of solitaire. Lay me out on the floor and win me.

I have nothing to give but my songs no one knows, on my album no one bought. The DJ is the world, spinning and spinning. On the loudspeakers its Rubinstein at the piano, remixed with sick beats. and theres Grandma, half-blind, naked but for an open XL flannel and Birkenstocks. She peers out from behind the bar, squinting into the faces, trying to figure out who is ordering and what, her hand up behind her ear like a sail. Dont let the cats out! she screams, whenever someone comes in.

III You want privacy with your dead? Follow the nameless great-great-grandmothers through the screen doors. Cross your hands over your chest like a coat of arms. I will ravish you with songbirds. Youll see angels bathing in dust. Let there be something for you in one room or another. And there are so many glow-in-the-dark galaxies to look upon.

Like youre all alone in your childhood bedroom, but totally restored in the adult entertainment industrys moral center. IV For the masochist, nothing quite hurts like the truth. Farther in the cavernous club where the bend in the strip fakes an edge, I engrave my lunatic memorial: I WAS HERE! The dungeons of the mind, the most defeated cells, wherein cruelty cums. V Let go and there is nothing tethering you to the stake that is always driven into the soft center of your vampiric world. VI The great cosmic cow gyrates her stomachs on stage. The tall grasses sway at her knees.