Daniels - In the months of my sons recovery: poems

In the Months of My Sons Recovery Southern Messenger Poets DAVE SMITH, SERIES EDITOR In the months of my so n s recovery POEMS Kate Daniels LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BATON ROUGE Published by Louisiana State University Press Copyright 2019 by Kate Daniels All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America LSU Press Paperback Original Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom Typeface: Whitman Printer and binder: LSI Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Daniels, Kate, 1953 author. Title: In the months of my sons recovery : poems / Kate Daniels. Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2019] | Series: Southern messenger poets Identifiers: LCCN 2018036785 | ISBN 978-0-8071-7035-9 (pbk. : alk. for Mona Frederick & Arleen Tuchman Theycarriedmethrough... contents A NOTE TO READERS These poems are narrated by a character similar, but not identical, to myself, and represent other characters and situations that may be archetypal, emanating from many aspects of and perspectives on the current opioid epidemic. i. i.

Her (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.) RAINER MARIA RILKE Her Barbaric Yawp I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. W. WHITMAN Past time to praise that beautiful freak, the aging Female Body. It was easy to praise her back in the day, watching her celebrate and sing herself on TV, in movies, on billboards and glossy printed ads, in the narcissistic privacies of our ceiling-mirrored beds and baths where we met her in our own fresh images. Young, clad all over in tight, unwrinkled skin, not yet stretched out or sagging, she was a pleasure to ogle... So we gawked and gaped as she flung her diaphragm, unwashed, in the corner of a bedroom at partys end, then mated, again, in the dirt, peeling the used condom from the sole of her boot, and walked out to breakfast, bra-less in a thin tee shirt and someones boxer shorts tightened up at the waist with a safety pin.

What a beauty she was back then, what a marvelbutchered haircuts grew out quickly, and the godawful blood streaked whites of eyes and puffy cheeks of all-night benders gave way uncomplainingly to a good nights sleep and extra hydration. Just that, and the young beast was ready to roar again... Well, thats all decades in the past. Now, theres this flowing away, this gigantic ongoing flush she finds herself fighting. The juice that made it all go, the oil, the universal lubricant that used to grease the gears of all that made her her is runneling down the bodys hidden culverts. * Who would blame her for being angry and noncompliant? For missing the not-quite-greasy wetness of excitation that doesntgetaroundallthatmuchanymore... Trying to re-arouse it, she thinks of the pugnacious bitchiness of Etta James singing the old jazz song, affirming how awfullydifferentlifeis without the old companions of her youththe low growling deep in the gut when potential mates sauntered into view, and the way that nothing more than that image unleashed the hydraulic blood rush that scurried to the center of the marshy pelt where she used to keep her privacy. * Everywhere she lugs it, these days, the old beast feels strange and unwelcome, uninfused by fresh blood as inert and useless as a stretched-out elastic strip undone from the waistline by too many washings... * Everywhere she lugs it, these days, the old beast feels strange and unwelcome, uninfused by fresh blood as inert and useless as a stretched-out elastic strip undone from the waistline by too many washings...

Those cloying fresh fish and damp mold smells she used to try to soak and scrape off herself are history now. What she wouldnt give to have them back... And that patch of skin on the side of her neck where her first date placed his fingers midway through the movie whispering in wonder yourskinssosoft ? thats the slackened flap she gathers up and pulls back, in front of the bathroom mirror, rehearsing a lift. * The word BITCH leaps out at her now from many contexts. And every single time she hears or reads it, she gets a little shock. * Allthenewthinkingsaboutloss, so opined a famous male poet in 1981 something at the time she didnt comprehend. * Allthenewthinkingsaboutloss, so opined a famous male poet in 1981 something at the time she didnt comprehend.

Now it comes back full force, motoring through the brand new millennium, soundtracked by the male genders elegiac yawping about all theyve lost: submissive spouses and cowed kids; the ability to control the flow of urine, to achieve and sustain a workable erection; the freedom to compete for jobs unhindered by dark-skinned applicants uplifted a bit by affirmative action... She, too, is thinking about loss. Nothing new there, however: loss of weight, loss of looks, long perished virginity. Loss of reputation/job opportunity/ promotion/raise. Loss of one or both breasts, then the entire reproductive system removed in a prophylactic surgery that may not succeed. Loss of hair following chemotherapy.

Then loss of libido, and loss of long-term partner, repulsed by the scar sites topography. * All those packs of older women at the movies together, in restaurants, padding about in their Reeboks and fanny packs on single sex organized tours of the offbeat capitals of eastern Europe. She hates the tacky attraction of their freedom even as she craves it. No more makeup or sucking in her gut. No more worrying about what her husband used to caution her about: the old male ego when she aced him consistently on the tennis court. * Ok: she admits she wants the juice back, but does that make her a failed feminist? To crave the juice again, but without the bother? How bad was the bother anyway? Now that its over, marriage keeps drifting back in concise forms and piercing images she cant dismiss: hefty handfuls of warm man-parts under the covers of their bed, and that cheesy smell in his trousers that never laundered out.

Him hauling garbage out in rain and snow, handling the metal cans with bare hands in slick sleet. The dip stick whose greasy level he always understood. And beneath the lamp in the dining room, reading glasses tilted on his nose, paying bills the first of each month. He was the necessary mind of math, and she was something less precise, but richer and more complex. The full range, perhaps, of the arts and humanities... * Atthepool,yearsago... A flash of pure hatred had inflated her when the flat-bellied one in the two-piece swimsuit murmured to her friend, ImgladImpastthat, nudging her head at her swollen stomach.

And she had glared, and positioned the tremendous ass of the eighth month of her second pregnancy to block the view, and waddled off slowly, plowing warlike through the world with her magical body. * Once, she had contained multitudes of milk and meat that her body turned to bones and blood: living orbs she carted heavily about until she couldnt bear it anymore, and they slithered out, covered in slime and already mewling, thrilling her with ancient emotions that filtered through as if brand new. Now the orbs reside in southern California, struggling with bad air and property tax. Ungrammatically, they whine in texts and emails until she tunes them out, and falls back from the glowing screens, to gorge on inward images of their infancies when she sucked and licked them at her leisure, undressed them solely to admire her corporeal handiwork, then clamped them to her tits to shut them up, and pumped out effortlessly the milky sustenance of human life... *