2012 - St. Ambrose University

Breaking Bread: Three Movements
First Movement
I go to the place where everything is turned upside down
and/or inside out
and I make walls. I write on them with blue paints, so they
tell me
“Don’t come back, hear?” so they tell me: eat, eat, eat
until I’m full, and then eat more. “Did you save room for
dessert?”
maybe, maybe I should have.
I close my eyes,
don’t know if I’m making words or just
typing letters to the rhythm of the speeding train, rocking
back and forth, a cradle that night we fell through:
the eleven o’clock news murmuring away,
turning words into water, and water into wine,
singing hymns to the sound of the metronome
on the coffee table (sinners). the fourth story.
or the thousandth. it is
never enough.
write, she says: write.
with your eyes closed. with your headphones on. on your
way to the city.
with your hands tied behind your back;
write.
with your dirty hands,
write
the poems that spit and swallow,
fistfight and stab,
kill for the death of war.
I’ve been trying to wrap you like the rhythms of that train,
hold you like a baby in the night. but I think
baby baby, I am not for you. this is not for me. you are wrong again.
I think
poems are coming and coming and coming and
they all keep dying//right in my arms.
I am trying, desperately, to save them.
but always, they expire.
I have blood, not ink, dripping from my fingers.
blood: of the whip, on my jeans, in the toilet bowl,
the color of my fingernails; “this is the blood of our Lord
and Savior . . .”
I have never seen so much
running out and down
the door of my fridge;
I am dreaming in red,
or the blue-black
of this story. on the fifth story. or the seventieth.
seventy times seven prescriptions
for penitence///expiring.
this circle of body of blood / of nation / of race
of culture / of class / of city / of state / of nuclear bomb
/ of sex of love of death / of circles /
of waiting rooms and hospital beds,
pumping blood, pumping blood,
and overhead the tv’s pumping
stories, framing
colors: amber, gold, and god rush rushing (“it is
never enough”) see . . .
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