Most letters were love letters until they were not.
That was when the mail began to change—
and “enveloped,” the only word that was believed
to contain its meaning, was opened and found to be
empty. Back then it meant something when my letter
never arrived, and now after ten years reaches you,
who are dead or in love with a lookalike, or so full
of hate for me that you can barely see to read this.
If you’re not reading this then it never got there,
and both of us are married to someone else.
The body of the mail still waits for your knife.
Why haven’t you written. Why don’t you write.
Rape Joke
The rape joke is that you were nineteen years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”
No offense.
The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.
Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.
The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.
The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.
Not you!
The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.
He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.
The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.
How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.
The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
OK, the rape joke is that he worshipped The Rock.
Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.
The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.
The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.
It gets funnier.
The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.
The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!
The rape joke is that he was your father’s high school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.
The rape joke is that he knew you when you were twelve years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.
The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.
The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.
The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.
Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.
You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.
The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.
The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.
It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.
The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.
The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.
The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.
The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.
The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.
The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love
Piece human, piece hornet, the fury
of both, astonishing abs all over it.
his head in the hornet and his head
in the hum, and oh he want to sting
her. The air he breathes is filled
with flying cheerleader parts. Splits
flips and splits, and ponytails in orbit,
the calm eye of the panty in the center
of the cartwheel, the word HORNETS
—how?—flying off the white uniform.
Cheerleaders are a whole, are known
to disassemble in the middle of the air
and come back down with different
thighs, necks from other girls, a lean
gold torso of Amber-Ray on a bubbling
bottom half of Brooke. The mouths that
cry GOOD HANDS GOOD HANDS.
The arms he loves that make the basket,
the body he loves that drops neat
into them.
Oh the hybrid human and hornet, who
would aim for pink balloons.
Oh the swarm of Cheerleading Entity,
who with their hivemind understand
him. Rhyme about the hornet, her tongue
in her mouth at the top of her throat! Clap
one girl’s hand against another’s. Even
exchange screams in the air.
The pom-poms, fact, are flesh. Hornet
Mascot is hungry, and rubs his abs, where
the hornet meets the man. Wants to eat
and hurl a honey, in the middle
of the air. (No that is bees I’m thinking of.
Like I ever went to class, when the show
was all outside.) The hornet begins to fly
toward the cheerleaders. “Make me
the point of your pyramid,” he breathes.
And they take him up in the air with them
and mix and match his parts with theirs,
and all come down with one gold stripe,
and come down sharp and stunned,
and lie on the ground a minute, all think-
ing am I dead yet, where am I, did we win.
The Descent of the Dunk
First no one could dunk and then they all could.
The dunk evolved, and then stood upright, was even
perceived to be intelligent, with too big a brain
at the top of it, the ball. It grew upright and smooth-
skinned with a tendency toward religion, the dunk
stood up too fast, they said, and consequently has
headaches, and trouble breathing in spring when
it is so beautiful. The childhood of the dunk
was no childhood at all.
He practiced on a paper route, throwing The Sun
to the same place each morning. Did not sleep long
but when he slept, the springs of his bed imparted
something to him. At night the streetlight floated
down and let him dribble it. Then there was school
there was every day school where he crumpled up
tests and tossed them in the trashcan. He shouted
TWO POINTS and had to stay after and copy out
keep him down—he saw writers of the dictionary
at their desks, performing small silent neat dunks.
The crowd of the devoted watching. Like watching
is reading. Like it isn’t. The dunk felt like a leather
study in space, and someone thinking how inside him,
and a perfected body in a leather chair wondering just
how high he can jump toward heaven. A leap sometimes
occurs within an animal, the dunk felt that happen
within him. He landed sure on his feet again and then
he was wholly himself. A joint so surely in its socket,
the whole city could go walking on it. All the rain
comes down at once in a single bounding drop,
and the wells of the countryside look up at once full,
and no open mouth is thirsty, and every mouth is open.
A great heavy body it weighed the dunk down. The dunk
and the moon pulled it up like the sea. The crowd of us
shouted his name to dunk him deep into himself. More
than half-moons in his fingertips, and rising through the air
in a loud round translation,
and the air right then breathing him back.
Was the only complete thing in the world, was the dunk.
Well that and everyone who watched it.
Goosebumps even on the ball. The ball spinning like
bodies could live on it, and whatever led up to the bodies
too. It stood up too fast, it got taller and taller, its women get
bellies like basketballs. A woman dunking! That’ll be the day.
Yet here I am sailing over your heads, and then,
with the sound, slamming into them.
The Third Power
Little boy he is learning to see
Magic Eyes. Little boy hidden objects
leap out their way at him. He covers
his walls with the pink and red posters,
and pops his black eyes at them, and sees
all the objects that live in the sun, objects
so tan they stand out against sand. More
than words the boy wants to see something
undress, even if only a lake and a sailboat.
They jump out and he longs to jump in—
he would cannonball into that lake and
just float. Here he is in a room that smells
all locked up, like men and the imprison-
ment of lizards, and he stares at Magic Eyes,
in fact he stares so hard it hurts, and says
oh my God a heart, and oh my God a pair
of lips, because what is 3-D after all? When
the air in the room becomes apparent,
and carves itself out around a her or a him,
and now little boy’s father he bangs down
the door, and strides in and stares so hard
that he hurts, says, “We had 3-D in my day
and we called it AMERICA! We had 3-D
in my day and we called it bare bosoms!”
but the pictures refuse to open for him
or show even their innocent parts:
the dog and the sphere and the American
flag will never undress
for the first time again.
He slams the door behind him, and thinks
getting into heaven is hard. It is the cube
that does not open. It is the cube that is only
to look at, but look. There behind that door, look
there. There the cube is, leaping out of the square.
Natural Dialogue Grows in the Woods
Along with the poison berries,
and it’s your job in this life to spit both out,
and spit both out if you want to live. Listen
and learn to me and the woods: the Ummm
of the little crickets. The fresh and slangy
crows, who end every last word with the letter
A. Rats, say the mice in the woods, and What’s
the fuckin difference, Dad? My PawPaw
always says, says the voice inside the fruit tree.
Good ears and great ears and even uncanny
are trembling here in the woods, perked every-
where are ears for speech as it is spoke. Stiffies
of dialogue circle the trees and look for holes
in the conversation, and wait to get Red Riding
Hood as soon as she leaves the wild.
She says she never will, and stretches the word
giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl so long that we all become
women during it. The woodsman lives here too,
and he stretches the word maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan
so long that we all die out before he’s done.
Death is so random, deep here in the woods.
In the woods the eternal Daaaaaamn and Gonna,
and the small exact birds saying What it is. Like
like like from morning to night, till even the night
is like the day. Nothing dwindles down to nothin.
Maaaaaaaaaan and giiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl flee to the woods
to forget their proper usage, and after what seems
like endless fuckin—well you know and you know
and you know what I’m saying. Know what
I’m saying and know what I mean. They fall hard
to the grass like the oldest trees and lie a while
listening, and then begin to speak, their mouths full
of the air of natural dialogue: Hopefully, hopefully,
totally, totally. Where are you from I have nowhere
to be. What are you called can I axe you a question.
Can we stay here forever. Probably, probably.
With the probly and the prolly and the loblolly pines.
The Brave Little Goes to School
A–Z animals hunger for learning. They hunger
for learning, you sneak them to school. A mouse
in your pocket, a frog in your pocket. They talk
or you think they can talk. A cricket hides in the dark
of your desk and glitters like a great black IQ point.
You carried a housefly to school in your fist, now
repeat after me the teacher says and the fly makes
vowel sounds one by one and sometimes y the
fly says. Now what other animal goes to school—
a nude in your pocket, a full page of nude!
She shines with concentration all over her skin, trying
so hard to learn to learn. Man is an animal too says
teacher; you brought a man to school today. A man
from the past is visiting you and the one place
he wanted to go was school and his name is Benjamin