The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five collections of poetry annually through five participating publishers. The Series is funded annually by Amazon Literary Partnership, William Geoffrey Beattie, the Gettinger Family Foundation, Bruce Gibney, HarperCollins Publishers, The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Padma Lakshmi, Lannan Foundation, Newman’s Own Foundation, Anna and Olafur Olafsson, Penguin Random House, the Poetry Foundation, Amy Tan and Louis DeMattei, Amor Towles, Elise and Steven Trulaske, and the National Poetry Series Board of Directors.
THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES WINNERS OF 2020 OPEN COMPETITION
Borderline Fortune by Teresa K. Miller
Chosen by Carol Muske-Dukes for Penguin Books
Requeening by Amanda Moore
Chosen by Ocean Vuong for Ecco
[WHITE] by Trevor Ketner
Chosen by Forrest Gander for University of Georgia Press
Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa
Chosen by Sally Keith for Milkweed Editions
Dear Specimen by W. J. Herbert
Chosen by Kwame Dawes for Beacon Press
Also by Teresa K. Miller
■
poetry
sped
Forever No Lo
■
nonfiction
Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building
(coeditor)
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2021 by Teresa K. Miller
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Miller, Teresa K., author.
Title: Borderline fortune / Teresa K. Miller.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2021] | Series: Penguin poets | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021008296 (print) | LCCN 2021008297 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143136811 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525508304 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3613.I5585 B67 2021 (print) | LCC PS3613.I5585 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008296
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008297
Cover photograph: Brian Adams
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Designed by Ginger Legato, adapted for ebook by Shayan Saalabi
pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0
For my family—here, gone, chosen
Contents
I. Of the Dead
II. Our Own Worst Consequence
III. Disenthrall
IV. Lay Down Your Rigid Creation
■
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
I
Of the Dead
who were you?
Merely a kid keeping alive.
—Anne Sexton
I came here to conjure you.
What may I say—
anything, all of it, friction
on the flint, many-armed agent
of entropy. What wrath would
I risk reaping, what disowning.
Who bore me
to the shore, pressed
me under, dragged there
ragged gasps.
If I am already orphaned, why fear
orphaning, this splintered boom in my hand.
What I built better than what
you offered me, my first sin.
Erasure only takes
a generation—we’ll be cursed
and blessed this way.
I woke a forest. What sounds serene
has a rotten floor. I could dress it up, candles
on the sundered trunks, silk scarves and cut
flowers. But you arrive already
cleaving, a riven nausea in the cambium,
some needle-leafed private anguish.
The canopy swoons. You could hypnotize yourself
a savior, nourish a legacy in your suckers
and saplings, bank on a lightning-struck
triple crown. Topple early and end it.
I never had a sister. I had a girl
who threw a brick at my head.
I never had a brother but a fellow traveler,
warped melancholy by our raising, queer like me.
Later, no one. All the mortals on the stoop—
how to revive them, usher them in.
I lift the ban—if you are gone,
you will speak your own language.
You broke my mother and so you broke
me, lost in the thicket of your misfortune.
Sharp brittle branches sticky with birdshit,
dusted with gray down.
If I had a child, she was already mine. We did it backward,
skipping time.
The mouth of the Duwamish smells like creosote. Gravel yard.
Freight train on a rusted trestle.
We lashed a raft together and set off paddling. I wasn’t
yet born. The water dried salty, reliable—cold.
In the game, if you get good news,
if you get bad news, if you’ve driven
in traffic, you’re tired, the lazy
afternoon grows too boring, too hot,
if you’re lonely, if the neighbors
are married, the garden overgrown,
if your friend is sick, if your daughter calls,
take a drink.
Summer-gray night, my unprotector
slumbered among the ants. I cleaned
her frosted paces from the entry,
through the kitchen, mapping her descent.
Sometimes, a little drunk,
I want a baby, too. The horizon
where you surrender your first vision,
pass the currented point
and keep swimming, the wish
you’d unwhisper.
I fell from the roof but could not crack.
Sank past the seawall but would not drown.
Ripped open my arm, but the worst
part of me would not bleed.
The river drew a breath—
I heard it whipping up the gorge,
almost threw me from my ledge.
I drank gasoline but would not light.
Dug a hole in my throat yet found
no sound. Even mute,
you hunted me.
I’m asking you to believe in what you’ve never seen or heard—
still, listen, it will save you. Don’t misunderstand: No personal
god will resurrect to offer grace, no reward waits
on the other side of suffering. Instead, imagine
your skull dissolved, not your temporal armor but the rampart
you think you stare from. No longer the sound of the bird’s chirp
or the car passing but movement in the plane
where your head used to be. Can you find that place? She will
swing from her bough, but you’ll have nothing left to break.
Who were we thawed,
rebounding from retreated glaciers?
You were snow on the red tile porch
outliving your generation, holding fast
the prophecy of your death in gnarled stick fingers.
Resisting the melt until August,
then sublimating into air.
Along the way, more than one
will renounce you, refusing
to say why. Your solace will smash
to a bony pulp, go lifeless.
The afterimage, your father’s
furrowed brow unwinding a trail—
you’ll ascend the last hundred
feet scrambling against columnar
basalt, against vertigo, Pacific spit’s
hooked tail below the mountain
your ancestors stole.
Was hope a thing with feathers?
I think it rested densest carbon,
a small, stubborn shard.
Who wanted the glint.
I saved myself two years
dormant in the ground,
bare root, longer—part of me
remains asleep.
I looked back and you were unqueened—
sudden, without ceremony,
afraid of me.
When did our tormenters become
grain of sand.
Past whittling
the moment,
we go underground,
the dead murmuring in memory.
Once, the canyons were born, once,
every river had a first day to flow.
Once, I rose a blank sandstone
canvas and you scratched
your name
in my side.
Staggered down the shivering fossil seep, an ancient
unearthed stream murky with our skin and sweat.
What withered life I worry inside me,
a Frankenstein montage. The dinosaur halfway to flight
claws against intercostals, tapping on ribs
too late, too late, too late.
II
Our Own Worst Consequence
I was cowering at the circumference
Of your heart, howling
—Lucie Brock-Broido
Until the magnetic pole reverses,
no amount of trying will summon
you a mother. Until the Arctic ice
returns to its sheets and the calving
thunder cracks backward. Haul
yourself out,
one frozen leg at a time.
From the corpse-sized pillar,
Noguchi called forth
rings of a worm, strikes
like sticks of dynamite.
How far the gale carried us
to get tangled in our own string.
A whole continent. A separate
ocean.
In Queens, I am a stone
carved to let water
run down. My heart
has stopped. The stones
envy my stillness.
Dregs cast, camper top
torn and bent in the shadow,
the continent’s highest peak,
towns of circling corvids, junctions,
ghosts.
How will I learn your chaos
never sprang
from me, wasn’t mine,
this pile of pointless rubble.
Bolting dandelion, buttercup,
ground ivy, proud and purple, dried
and on the wind before I got wise.
Chopped back into the grass,
now a fixture in the landscape.
Though I doubt another life
will bring a reckoning, what good
does it do to wish you
poor,
found out, abandoned
in this one.
The branches sang me silent. Papery maple
skittered on the window. Cutting too hard
too fast spurs a reaction in kind. My creator
topped them all. Thirty winters thrust
through summer, I clenched my swallowed octaves.
You twirled me a crackling helicopter, chased me a birch
twig broom. It wasn’t all bad, was it. Didn’t we in the slant
light have fun.
Then, you see only the knot,
learn to name every place the string
bends, turns and dives toward the core.
Stop pulling. Find your hands
occupied elsewhere.
I dissolved
They would act upon me
I was what proof
I thought the rainy bunker of a chiton
Her embrace appeared a whetted oyster shucker
We waded out hurling geoducks, harvesting
Any we is an eye in the pearl’s center
Knife-winged solitude, a trinket for your witness
Breeze flapping the sheets, rock slaps
the creek. Will I ever stop reassembling
what never rent. You swept
through, gust at the screen door,
left me beating.
The maybe possible flared out, bottom of an hourglass,
but I couldn’t fit through the waist. We laid,
we overdosed. My disintegrating ally stole
tools to buy poison—I saw her works
but not her face. Relief just another anteroom,
an empty-weathered theme park.
For years, I watched water lap
the basement, tar oozing between white
tiles, cockroaches like gilling knives.
We stomped them and they’d stand up, crocodilian,
scurry away. You said I was too direct,
especially for a woman, but what direction, fractures
spilling out this chipped mouthful.
Rift in your tooth and veins in your shell
already ruptured well before you emerged—
you clutched them around you, a jagged quilt.
Remembrance branching like a pitchfork turns
and tosses the villains. You cower,
but they will pile beneath the cherry tree,
make black, rich soil.
The future hangs in panicles, yet
we are frostleaf and final, falling.
What am I if not a meadow, a rat
tunneling through the scraps, a pair
of starlings quarreling over too much seed.
Where you are beyond the glass is not
the real game, our strides
unreconciled, our ties
too loose.
You unspooled five thousand promises,
I wound them up, a pitted anchor,
a counterweight.
Truth tempts
banishment. Finish this tale
before braiding a prettier one.
I recoil from the howling, the same lonely
wolfdog penned another day. What can I give you,
sleepless and fluttering. By the time you realize you’re alive,
this is your life, the light already cooled toward evening.
Forever and nothing. Which drooping river birch will you sacrifice,
what muddy vinca-covered bank fending off the ivy.
I don’t listen for you now, your crow step,
so eager to say my own piece. How does it
start. The ants
came to tear my house down.
I went to bed thinking of them, woke plotting
against them. I did not dream. A legion of men
that summer, none could bear to let me
speak. They focused over my shoulder,
the vacant corner a more willing
conspirator. Where will I lay you, wright,
smith, climber cutting to the node, choosing
a new leader.
If you are the hawk, fly higher
than the bolas. If you walk the ground,
leave the weapon by your side.
Together, you whip a twisted figure
crashing, caught in your sinew
and reason.
Two nights I tumbled from the ladder.
Then what I grasped could not scare me,
though we swayed up the dripping dark,
calcified deer skeleton, the jungle
and its leeches, leafy silhouetted
sinkhole in the skylight. The fantasy
had a weight, a mass we hefted
but could not take home.
Maybe thigh-deep in lake mud
I will hear you, you will tell me.
Lured back, I spun myself a shiny aluminum wing—
but in the afternoon, she put on a new face.
Those you love will evaporate before you, leave
their slack-jawed wind-up bodies lying in the yard.
Nicotine-stained filters reeking in the kitchen garbage.
Here is the next moment of your life: You spent it
in my crooked song.
In the end, there was no end.