A Room in Dumb Bitchville

Hello. Can you hear me? If not me, do you hear the notifications sweetly intoning?
This is where I come when I’m sad or even confused. Come in. I keep adjusting the layout,

but the rooms don’t seem quite right no matter what I buy. I keep the furniture quite large, quite
metallic—furry, even—and I thought to mix in a few antiques and some French tapestries

with undulating holes. There’s plenty of nail polish remover and rice pudding, so help yourself.
Here, take a lusterware coupe down from the shelf. I love how heavy it feels in your hand.

I’ve been setting things up a little differently ever since I became what’s known as a wife.
I was a girl, then I was a poet, then I was a bride. My mother fed me oysters on the porch

in my white dress of organza and open-weave linen. People kept asking me if I was cold,
but I felt lovely, like I was on ice. Like cold cream. I can’t stop looking at pictures

of my happiness. His tears collected like stars in his beard. My friends, they were so beautiful.
We danced. We cut a cake. It was dry. It was the most beautiful day. The butterflies

and hawks circled against the sky. Now I’m something else, it doesn’t feel quite right
in the mouth. Every room feels like a waiting room. The magazines out of date, slime blooming

in the cheap vase that holds the semiaquatic plants. My friend Simone once made a sculpture
of a woman who is in the process of becoming her own pool of tears. A lacrimarium,

it’s called. Her concave abdomen was a bowl glazed with mercury. Reclining, she gazes and cries
into her hole, she becomes her hole. And what happens when she is all hole? Do you want a piece

of flourless chocolate cake? I have to be honest. I’m known for my honesty and my macramé.
All the complaints about me are true. I’ve let my community down. I’ve cried my way out

of a jam, a punishment. I’ve been self-sacrificing, but it’s all for attention. I’ve been passive.
I’ve been dull. I’ve been silent and manipulative. I’ve taken the wrong side. At all costs,

I’ve avoided conflict. I’ve wasted time: the hours flowed like strawberry milk into the cracks
in the windows and floors. You can strike me here, if you like, on this little rectangle of flesh.

I’ve grown quite fond of the feeling. Like a song no one sings anymore or the pattern
on an extinct flower. Oh, you’ve noticed the mice, don’t mind them, I can’t bring myself

to cast them out, though they piss and shit little hyphens all over everything.
They are so small, and their tiny families huddle against each other for warmth.

I’m starting to think they widen the holes between things: words, days. They chew the tunnels
that connect nodes in the new thinking. Just a tug on the corner of the eye.

Their little gray forms move so fast you can barely, barely…Jesus, listen to me! I’ll stop talking
about myself. Maybe I’ll think instead. This is only one room in a vast conspiracy of space.

The room shows me to myself, presses on me, reflects me back. It slaps the outlines
of all it holds into focus. The borders are black and jagged. Where are my manners?

I used to curtsy, but I lost that in the collapse. I didn’t lose the nod, a kind of curtsy
of the face. I still have the low bow, the unfolding of the forearm that means “after you,”

the demi-plié, the step touch, the ball change, the échappé, the heave-ho, the lunge.
I’m so lucky. Luckier than most. Whose blood is this on my turtleneck? Yours?

I can’t really fix anything, but I feel all this pressure to save everyone. To be of use.
My friends, they are coming apart at the seams. Not my problem, you say?

That’s where you’re wrong. What if tomorrow everyone said of other people’s problems
“Not my problem!” What kind of world would that be? Those clouds coming in, color of

wet newspaper, they make things feel a little episodic, like your story has been doled out
in segments on a conveyor belt, little taffy squirts of living. So we might continue

in this way, exercising our ability to slow injury, taking our great pains to glimpse
at a retreating image: the future embossed and flickering—as flies leave footprints

in the majolica. The teachers used to say, “The poem is smarter than you.” Well,
I should hope so! If you must know, the toile scene is of my father, changing the batteries

in a radio at the grave of his stillborn uncle. The name on the stone is BABY. Just BABY.
I love the shit out of that dead baby. As if it were my own. And I’m the weeping willow,

repeating at the edge, though it’s difficult to weep in the presence of my ancestors.
The great thing about velvet is, it shows where you’ve grasped it. It’s a very emotional fabric.

It can crush. It can wear down in patterns resembling forlorn patches of earth.
You can write your pain in it. If you can do the walls in velvet, or even a dark dark suede,

you can make it so everything disappears. You don’t want to disappear? I’m sorry.
I shouldn’t have assumed to have pollinated your desire. Wait just here.

By the intergalactic silence of the banister. The lack of the day is violet.
I’m so glad you asked. The last thing I remember was someone, I think it was my mother,

saying: “The first thing I remember was someone, I think it was my mother.”
They all groan back. A gravel sound—beauty, gray tide. I levitate in the center.

I remember the shells I would bring to her. She would thank me in her former voice,
gone now, almost light green. Wet mauve, like mouths not singing

along. Little porcelain cradles. And at one time they were everywhere.
You don’t see them much anymore, do you? Lady slippers, I think they were called.