Fanny Says Read online

  Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit

  —for Katie Mead

  My friend, we die mid-

  sentence. In medias res.

  We die half-delirious in labor

  reversed. You expected

  poignant last words but

  instead came a heap

  of trash

  from your mother’s mouth:

  bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,

  she said—bullshit

  to halos, bullshit

  to wings, bullshit

  to golden god mansions,

  celestial beasts sharp-fingering

  bullshit harp strings.

  Because of this, I want

  to say I was once

  in a car with another car a sliver-

  second from severing

  my throat. What I remember

  most is my glorious

  last thoughts

  would have been a dark

  green dress, something in velvet,

  something exotic,

  a tad racy, with a slit

  to reveal

  my sides just so, but really now,

  what shoes would I wear?

  Because of this, let me

  tell you

  a true story turned sad

  joke: a woman has gone

  the color of shadow

  on snow, bloated with chemo,

  and the priest

  with his last rites

  asks her religion.

  None, she says,

  then, smart-ass to the last,

  spells it for him:

  n-u-n.

  Because of this,

  my grandmother

  spent her last days bitching

  up a storm: the sage had turned

  the cornbread dressing

  gourd green, nothing tasted right.

  She wept

  big, unreasonable toddler

  tears. We worked so hard

  on it, she said, and still, we got the dressing

  all wrong. I know I’ ll never taste

  Thanksgiving again

  in all my life.

  At the time, I wanted

  to be that family

  reciting poems

  to beckon

  angels to drop blazing

  beams of light

  by her bed. I wanted

  to pipe-in the pluck

  of harmonious song,

  wanted us to

  genuflect, to cross

  an X or two into the air

  to scissor a passage

  for her into the sky.

  But no.

  Hell, no.

  Instead, we let her cry

  for a minute then said she

  couldn’t kick the bucket, no,

  not now, because Bernie May

  wouldn’t have a job

  no more, because everybody

  knows that woman would

  rather pick her toes than work,

  because that woman’s too

  lazy to make a dime on her own.

  Bernie said, You got that right,

  told her, Scoot your big

  ass over in that bed.

  You motherfuckers,

  my grandmother said,

  wiping her eyes. She took

  the dry green dressing

  to her dry mouth,

  unable to swallow right

  from laughing.

  Fanny Says Again the Same Dream on Morphine

  And they had long, black tails that went like this, on a sailboat, two animals, and I said, You’re beautiful. And they were white, with long tails, and with white fox faces. Just beautiful. Do you know what kind of animal it coulda been? I just couldn’t figure it out. It weren’t no dog, no. And it weren’t no cat neither. No. Nothing as big as no damn horse. I don’t know what they were. I just knowed they was beautiful. And when I returned to the boat one of them was dead and I was scared and I sat on the dark edge but I didn’t cry. No. I didn’t cry at all. I crouched down there in that dark yard and just waited for somebody to come for me.

  Flitter

  is what she said but what she meant had nothing

  to do with the lighting from one bloom to the next

  by a monarch or an equally colorful diva at the bar.

  What she meant was your privates, your girlie parts,

  something you better soap up daily and watch

  like a spectacled hawk. It was code, really,

  a kid-friendly word like every Christ-fearing family has,

  something to sidestep the gynecological genitals

  and its speculum-chilled vagina, something that wasn’t

  her sex—a word that said Colette, both verb and noun

  exhaling the same thin gentlewoman cigar.

  Hers was a word rated PG, something that wasn’t once

  an innocent kitty in boots that now swung

  practically buck-naked from a pole, and never do you hear

  flitter in any bass-thumping salt-and-pepper-my-mango,

  va-jay-jay songs. No. Flitter is lyrical but awkward; despite

  its featherweight meaning, it never does fly.

  To me, flitter sounds heavy, ironic, with the phonic

  aptitude of a frying pan, a word a little too natural perhaps,

  in need of a shave.

  What kept it alive was that “f” sound, slightly transgressive,

  ready to leap off the four-letter cliff, but more so it echoed

  with fat and flat, the two qualities of a flitter Fanny found.

  A babygirl, for example, was always born with a fat flitter,

  and that’s exactly what she would be called,

  then there was fat as a flitter, applying to cute, chunky things

  like chipmunk cheeks and toddler’s wrists and puppy dogs.

  Then, of course, there was flat, a more mature version

  of the same, and if you did enough crunches, yes,

  your belly would be flat as a flitter. The similes go on,

  as carbonated beverages can go flat as a flitter, as can your hair

  on a humid day, and if you drive west, all that land—you got it—

  flitter-flat.

  My favorite times with the word were the last days

  we had her, when she needed oxygen and ice chips

  and kept death backed into a corner

  by calling me a flitterhead. I swore I didn’t have her remote,

  and she didn’t believe me until she found it

  under the covers between her legs. She changed the channel,

  said, Okay, flitterhead. I’m sorry; right there was the clicker,

  right under my flitter, who would have thought. And when it was time

  to change her, to wipe off the blackest

  stool with a warm cloth, she kept me from deep

  sorrow by saying, Make sure to hit my bald flitter now—nobody tells you

  every hair falls out down there as you age—and hit it with a douse

  of powder, Koey, Grandma’s gotta stay fresh. I cleaned her as I would

  a baby, turning her best I could from side to side, and later,

  when I tired, I called in the nurse to help me hold her

  so I could change the sheets. The nurse was from an island

  not far from Florida but far enough that when our work was done,

  she stopped me, asked, I’m sorry. Your grandmother—I can’t understand her.

  Can you tell me what language she speaks?

  That was when I knew.

  I wasn’t losing my grandmother, no, I was losing

  my home, the one place I could understand

  the world through a mother tongue only she

  could sing.

  Fanny Asks Me a Question Before I’ d Even Ask Myself

  Now, my sister and her husband still do—every morning at five o’clock in the a.m. And the night she got married she said they did it fourteen times. And I
believe her too. And I said, Honey, it’s a wonder you got a puss hair one, no wonder you ain’t rubbed it all off, and you know, I don’t even think I could walk, but no, she said her and him did all night and woke up the next afternoon at 4:00. She got up to pee and he got up to pee and then they did it all over again. But he ain’t never strayed from her, not one time. And it’s a good thing too, because it would have broken her heart. . . . And it’s a good thing he married her when he did—she had just turned fifteen (they had to walk across the bridge to Indiana to do so)—because like my daddy said to my mama oncet: Monk, we gonna haveta watch that girl, we’re gonna have to whup her; she’s gonna be a slut.

  We called it hot pants. I don’t know how she got so sexual. I just wished I had a bit of it. I think my mama had it too: my daddy let it kinda slip before she shut him up. But I never really did. Now, I do know my sister used to watch me and Monroe through the attic window. . . . It was a real ornery thing to do in them days, and I was embarrassed to death. Said she couldn’t see nothing like our naked bodies or nothing but only them covers, just a movin, she said.

  But I never was sexual like her. And I don’t know why you aren’t.

  You ain’t a lesbian, are you?

  Well, okay. I’m just checking.

  My Book, in Birds

  A book of birds. A story in birds. Each breath

  a bird, each dream slipped from my ear

  to my pillow out the window a song:

  cardinals laughing at me—birdie birdie birdie—

  on a lonely Valentine’s. Then robins swarming

  the last bits of red another February day,

  so many of them on the holly tree the branches

  tick with their picking and I stop

  the car. But I was so cold, I had to get to the store,

  and in the fluorescent buzz of the freezer aisle, I swore

  I heard, A flock of larks is called an exaltation,

  but thought, No, that’s too pretty, that can’t be

  right. I bought my frozen pizza and peas and tried to

  remember warmer days:

  the surf shop with the parrot, big and green with a beak

  full of fingers, my hair a dread of salt and seaweed

  so I would run home

  to wash the sand from my scalp. In the shower,

  on the sill of the window made to crank tightly closed

  to hurricanes, her porcelain bluebird—

  all those years, Fanny swore she’d die and come back

  red-breasted, blue-winged, and singing,

  but when the time came, it was only morphine

  talking: white beasts stalking the hospital room,

  with tails long as a Cadillac and tail feathers flowing like new

  curtains, she said, and faces, they’ve got faces bright and sharp as a fox.

  There was nothing I could do. The reincarnation

  I used to believe in became a drag queen named Phoenix

  on Saturday nights at the bar where a girl leaned in

  to me with both thumbs cowboy-hooked

  to the pockets of her jeans, nothing more.

  When she asked for my number, I made for the door.

  There was nothing I could do and so I traveled

  to Brooklyn where birds sing louder, competing

  against sirens and cabs and ice cream trucks.

  I tried to find a woman there who made me forget

  the woman before, the one who took me

  to a red barn, swallows knifing

  the air between rafters. I left her,

  I always left, my heart a young hummingbird

  that learned hummingbirds land

  but never really stay—only fledglings

  hesitate at the red plastic feeder. I said, I just can’t,

  I said it, then left, said it,

  then made my way to that stone marking

  the death of my grandmother. Her ashes are not

  there, but her name is, and because I still believed

  in some words, it was enough. I went there to seek

  permission, to cool my face against the granite and ask,

  Is what I have become okay?

  After, I fed the cemetery swans dandelion greens

  and thought their beauty not unlike the hissing

  swan of Lake Bled, the tidal swan of Galway, all

  water the same drowning, no matter how far I go.

  Once I had the courage, I took another woman

  to my bed but woke on the porch

  to a cathedral of sunrise singing, the boards splintered

  hard to my back. I walked with her

  to the park where a yellow bird followed alongside

  in a sine cosine rollercoaster of flight.

  I argued with her—It’s not possible, a canary

  in Kentucky—but thought, Why not?

  What’s lovely in this world is no more impossible

  than what’s not—when I was married

  to a man, three sparrows trapped themselves in that porch light

  and cooked against the glass; later that first summer

  as a wife, a mother jay—again, say it—trapped

  in the garden pond, my face reflected in that fish-shit water

  dashed bright

  with blue feathers and golden koi.

  I never did grow old enough with him

  for the pink plastic flamingos to decorate the front yard,

  never did see that hokey sign—Lordie, Lordie,

  look who’s forty!—and it made me cry like a peacock and shred

  my flesh in strips to the black tower

  beaks—Take it, dear raven. Take it,

  clacking black crow. When there was no meat

  left, I threw strands of hair and bits of cheap bread

  to fast-food sparrows, ate for years on the bland sorrow

  of grease and plastic and frustrated men

  until I traveled to a woman who had a lilac-eyed

  cockatoo that beat its head against my collarbone

  to rush up a serving of hot fruit and seed, a vomit offering

  meant for another with a beak to guzzle it

  back down. I said, I’m sorry, but I think your bird

  is sick, but she simply cleaned

  off my shirt, put her pet softly back

  in the cage. No, baby, that’s her way of saying

  she loves you, she said. Can’t you tell

  love from sickness?

  A Translation for the Spiritual Mediator Who May Speak for Me to Frances Lee Cox, Wherever She May Be

  To My Grandmother’s Ghost, Flying with Me on a Plane

  For if there’s nothing then

  nothing. And if there’s something

  then there’s something. Say it

  again: if there’s nothing, then

  nothing, and if something,

  something. This is ablution:

  a curl of a cousin’s hand

  into a blackened fiddlehead,

  the mirror shattered on your

  closet door. This is the detritus

  left behind: something, something,

  nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

  I try to steady myself, say the Lord’s

  Prayer as the wings crest above

  the city’s capillaries of false light

  so crowded this morning when I followed

  a beautiful woman to the square.

  She stepped into the subway stairs

  and before disappearing turned,

  said, Come step into this dark

  hole in the ground with me?

  Fanny, she did not mean to be

  morbid. She only meant to say,

  Follow me. And what I mean

  is that I love her and did not

  follow. Fanny, the stewardess

  has nothing on her rattling cart

  to quench this thirst and the Sky

  Mall does not comfort me tonight.r />
  Worse, I can see death either way:

  the velvet black of anesthesia, count back

  and you’re nine, eight, seven, six, five,

  gone, or something better, peacock-feathered,

  smelling of leather-bound books and you baking

  cornbread. I mean, will you come for me? Will you

  come get me, your hair piled high and white, when

  it’s my time to go? Or will I find

  you another kind of mother,

  the one who knows the dyke