Poems
Worth Telling
Brilliant, she thought, studying her own face. Following
the lines like little eroded paths down a hill of dirt.
At the bottom of anything is the top of something.
Before bed she pulls the blinds down in specific order,
then she taps each wall three times with her right pointer finger.
She thinks she is a planet, knocking about
space and then orbiting in pattern.
She thinks of the bees, of the indistinguishable patterns of destruction.
and taps her long fingers in patterns of three.
This sounds like nonsense to anyone who doesn’t know what it is to know
that she is a spicket rusted into an on position.
Here. Here—can we have everything within its own context?
Each body is its own branching language. If she moves
in this way she will love in this way. She was once something rutting
about happy to stand in the sun. She read a story about a donkey
that was rescued from starvation. And the part of the story that sticks
with her isn’t the element of heroics. It was how the man who had
the donkey to begin with didn’t know he was neglecting it to near death.
She wants the story of how he came to lose his vision
for things, more than she wants the story of the donkey that persevered.
We all knew the donkey would go on to do great things
the minute the story opened. If it had died before its rescue no one would
have thought its life was worth telling.
How Long Did He Fall? Four Minutes Thirty-Eight Seconds
It’s been weeks now, since the water
began turning green inside the vase. I am
impatient. I think die already so I can throw you out.
I hold it too long before I pee,
and I promise I will love you more
if you tell me you do the same. I am still a kid
who doesn’t want to stop what I am doing
for the inconvenience of a body.
There are too many things to become obsessed over
and I think this is why I don’t get invited to a lot of dinner parties
because I talk about things like how I learned about Joe Kittinger
and how he did a free fall from just where our atmosphere ends
and Space becomes itself where gravity begins to resign:
where it turns dark. Don’t you want to feel
like you are touching something like that?
But we can’t touch it
without a special suit or our bodies would balloon,
and yeah, he said he couldn’t tell
his free body was falling 600-something mph
because he had nothing
to measure it against. No landscape, no grazing cattle
or gas stations. No lipstick guts from roadkill baking
as a large bird pulls flesh from where flesh was pancaked.
Vultures like their pancakes with whipped toppings (my dinner party joke).
And I keep repeating the story of Kittinger
to myself. To myself. Can you imagine.
Can you imagine? After all that, Kittinger had to go home and eat dinner.
What was he hungry for?
Things people don’t talk about.
Whenever my mother calls I don’t answer, instead
I tap my fingers in three sets of threes.
A wasted petal makes its descent
to the counter. The water grows from green to gray.
Carrie Buck to Robert Edwards
(Father of in vitro fertilization, Nobel prize winner, eugenicist)
I.
Did you study the insides of a dog,
did you lay that bitch’s parts out on the table
and trace them? Make bloody prints
that tell the origin story of your success.
Take her self-replicating parts in and out
and in and watch them slide into a form of life
you stood over like Zeus? Lightning bolts
in your eyes reflecting the flash that happens where life begins.
Your maxim as prayer: To whom will you give, from whom will you take.
If you play this role, maybe you can sew one back in me. Your own hands
lingering over themselves in lust, just before they take the plunge,
sewing a new kind of fabric.
II.
Edwards, did you know that in seventeen-something, Lazzaro Spallanzani published a study about a stone’s ability to skip over water. And he studied digestion and then he artificially inseminated a dog. And in 1785, a surgeon, John Hunter helped a couple who couldn’t get pregnant, by piping from a warm syringe, the man’s semen in to the woman?
You could sew me back, work something from your fingers out of your fingers, and whole me again, as if I am un-whole now, as if I was ever whole to a man like you. As if you didn’t want to cut time back with your scissors, you a surgeon of the humanity aggregate, you a surgeon of decision of dancing and dancing and how some can dance with you and some, some cannot.
III.
I think about what incinerator my parts went in,
after some medical student took them apart.
Did they wish they could take off their gloves
and feel the slick nature of my body outside of itself?
Did they note the way the uterus once held a child.
They called me patient X and passed me around
like a good bottle of something, lips wet and hungry for more.
Caroline Plasket’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, The Laurel Review, The Cortland Review, Threadcount Magazine, and elsewhere. She was previously a mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Program.
