Like One Flapping Her Tail on a Rock
mermaid diptych
Matter of fact, I did like standing around with my clipboard.
I liked the festival. Matter of fact, I know
it was my fault, the youngest daughter holding
one of the rabbits out for a photograph, its body slung down, ears
back along its head, quiet
and dark as a porch along the far side of a house.
Let’s go back. I’m tired of swimming now.
All winter it was me, my jangly body, me rattling
like hangers in an empty closet*, or
my throat thick with grudge but Love, it’s spring! The sun’s
lounging around with trophy wives and green
mist-grits the limbs of trees*— Let’s lay back
all afternoon, get lit up, far from family photos
piled in the dumpster, faces
still smiling out at nothing, sky.* Today, taking
a turn in the road, I swung into it, knock, my body went inside,
knock, knock! sunglasses sliding all around the dash*
-
-
- the rooms above pitching around
- like songs we’d made up in the kitchen: too many forks, now you’re fucked; spoons you are alive
- no love, not a shred of tenderness
- no more of the worn ornament, ticking down through the tree; no more collapsed already on the rug, sister, like leaves
- the rooms above pitching around
-
Earth to Cowboy
Enough, friend, of the car show—
The passersby whistling there she is!
brushed, touched, rubbed with cloths
and lifted clear
Enough of the field below
and the evening light, lean
at altitude, empty as a stairway
When I was small, I heard a story
Girl, all’s been lost. Stitch up this weedy dress.
Girl, in a well the Frog Prince sat, firmly he sat
then a face, like a moon, rose over the lip
—it was glorious! Her face the sound
of a bell in the distance. Or like once, twice,
when getting high: the lights beyond you and those within you
met, held each other, shhh, here you are,
equal to the world—
Because I’m telling you, friend, this is a sink
and over it, a spinning. Spinning like even at eighty
our tiny mothers, spinning like someone
who loves a holiday! Spinning like CDs
the neighbor strings by the windows of her house.
Rainbows flash around the bowl of the yard
and the tree by the sidewalk
looks like a tree when you know there is a nest inside.
Animal House
Inside the wall, there was a well. The cat, Amelia, went where we sisters couldn’t get. Now the rain, driving against the edge of everything, is a showroom. C’mon down!
Big voice gets the grease, I see. Nurses float over at dawn, I see.
Can we talk instead about Tom Cruise, his teeth? In the way of my eye, teeth so clean they see me seeing them, are not my father’s teeth which fall shhhp back into a greasy sea
.
And My Land, I am sick of my father’s teeth, wreckage of his bowels and breath, sick too of Tom Cruise rising over the screen and his big bicep moving back and forth under the skin like a small forest animal. Bitch, in your dreams! my ex, now dead, often said, flexing, joking. In the mirror, in Philadelphia.
.
Once, upstairs of the Army Navy, I turned in a door. a dozen or so tents stuck there in the sunlight
.
It was August, the sounds of traffic clogged below rose through the open windows, and voices on phones saying, I’m saying, Marilynne!
A few of the tents shifted a little and squares of fabrics rippled around parts of the room, like a wind passing over the far expanses of a lake
.
Later, walking home up Walnut, bits of air conditioning cooled my skin, suddenly here, there, at the mouth of the swankiest stores
but back in the showroom, the tents were something else: bedded down, breathing quietly.
Kate Northrop’s recent collections are Homewrecker (New Letters vol 88, 2022) and cuntstruck (C & R Press, 2017). She teaches at the University of Wyoming.
Read four more poems by Kate Northrop also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header image of mermaid generated by AI using Adobe Photoshop.
