Do you sometimes drink alone?
Have you ever woken up the next morning
after a night of heavy drinking?
Does your cat wander through the house
meowing inconsolably,
despite having fresh food and water?
Hunger, thirst, friendship, love.
Green Bee, Russian Quaalude, Redheaded Slut:
IEDs on the supply route to pleasure.
There’s a gala in your hypothalamus,
helium balloons rising to the rafters,
the fizzy ricochet of laughter.
There’s a stumblebum in your cerebellum.
That empty feeling crawling toward you—
should you kill it with a wadded paper towel
or trap it in a jar and shake it out
and send it flying into the grass?
Is your head full of frozen tamales
and a vodka bottle curled on its side?
How do you get through the interminable evenings?
Are they really interminable?
Have you considered the alternative?
Now get out of your car,
stand by the side of the road
and take a step. Now recite
“The Waste Land,” backwards,
beginning with that sexy Sanskrit word.
-Kim Addonizio
(Hear Kim read ‘Yes’ accompanied by cello)
They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,
they’re passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.
They were your loves, your victims,
your good dogs or bad boys, and they’re over
you now. one writes a book in which a woman
who sounds suspiciously like you
is the first to be sadistically dismembered
by a serial killer. They’re getting married
and want you to be the first to know,
or they’ve been fired and need a loan,
their new girlfriend hates you,
they say they don’t miss you but show up
in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes
where they’re buried in rows in your basement.
Some nights you find one floating into bed with you,
propped on an elbow, giving you a look
of fascination, a look that says I can’t believe
I’ve found you. It’s the same way
your current boyfriend gazed at you last night,
before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights
above the bed, and moved against you in the dark
broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs
of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks,
the big rigs that travel and travel,
hauling their loads between cities, warehouses,
following the familiar routes of their loneliness.
Kim Addonizio, from What is This Thing Called Love
Here’s my bright idea for life on earth:
better management. The CEO
has lost touch with the details. I’m worth
as much, but I care; I come down here, I show
my face, I’m a real regular. A toast:
To our boys and girls in the war, grinding
through sand, to everybody here, our host
who’s mostly mist, like methane rising
from retreating ice shelves. Put me in command.
For every town, we’ll have a marching band.
For each thoroughbred, a comfortable stable;
for each worker, a place beneath the table.
For every forward step a stumbling.
A shadow over every starlit thing.
Kim Addonizio, from Lucifer at the Starlite
Why did she cross the road?
She should have stayed in her little cage,
shat upon by her sisters above her,
shitting on her sisters below her.
God knows how she got out.
God sees everything. God has his eye
on the chicken, making her break
like the convict headed for the river
who’s sloshing through the water
to throw off the dogs, raising
his arms to starlight to praise
whatever isn’t locked in a cell.
He’s headed for a farmhouse
where kind people will feed him.
They’ll bring green beans and bread,
home-brewed hops. They’ll bring
the chicken the farmer found
by the side of the road, dazed
from being clipped by a pickup,
whose delicate brain stem
he snapped with a twist,
whose asshole his wife stuffed
with rosemary and a lemon wedge.
Everything has its fate,
but only God knows what that is.
The spirit of the chicken will enter the convict.
Sometimes, in his boxy apartment,
listening to his neighbors above him,
annoying his neighbors below him,
he’ll feel a terrible hunger
and an overwhelming urge to jab
his head at the television over and over.
Kim Addonizio, from What Is This Thing Called Love
According to Roman mythology, the genii were gods who watched over particular people and places. Each man had a genius, a spirit who had given him being, who taught him and protected him. Each woman was said to have a juno. So maybe I should say that I found my juno. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know how to write poems, yet. I had discovered the thing that I wanted to keep close to me for the rest of my life, and if I did that, my tutelary spirit would watch over me, would teach me what I needed to know.
This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If you are meant to be a writer, you will serve your genius as well as you can. If not, you’ll find your genius elsewhere. You may still love to write, but it won’t be the main thing you serve. Forget wondering, am I good enough? Can I do this? The only thing you really need to ask yourself is: Is writing my genius? If it is, then apprentice yourself.
-Kim Addonizio
I love you but I’m married.
I love you but I wish you had more hair.
I love you more.
I love you more like a friend.
I love you your friends more than you.
I love how when we go into a mall and classical muzak is playing you can always name the composer.
I love you, but one or both of us is/are fictional.
I love you but “I” am an unstable signifer.
I love you saying, “I understand the semiotics of that” when I said, “I had a little personal business to take care of.”
I love you as long as you love me back.
I love you in spite of the restraining order.
I love you from the coma you put me in.
I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone, except for this one guy.
I love you when you’re not getting drunk and stupid.
I love how you get me.
I love your pain, it’s so competitive.
I love how emotionally unavailable you are.
I love you like I’m a strange backyard and you’re running from the cops, looking for a place to stash your gun.
I love your hair.
I love you but I’m just not that into you.
I love you secretly.
I love how you make me feel like I’m a monstery in the desert.
I love how you defined grace as the little turn the blood in the syringe takes when you’re shooting heroin, after you pull back the plunger slightly to make sure you’ve hit the vein.
I love your mother, she’s the opposite of mine.
I love you and feel a powerful spiritual connection to you, even though we’ve never met.
I love your tacos! I love your stick deodorant!
I love it when you tie me up with ropes using the knots you learned in Boy Scouts, and when you do the stoned Dennis Hopper rap from Apocalypse Now!
I love your extravagant double takes!
I love your mother, even though I’m nearly her age!
I love everything about you except your hair.
If it weren’t for that I know I could really, really love you.
-Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite
