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the woman with the slurred mouth

her mouth had the look of slur
as if speech was not just audible
her husband at first found it
attractive, the slanted way she spoke
without speaking. only then an old woman
down the street had a stroke and comparison
slid easily into his mouth. his closest friend, a man
with neither wife nor street, provided the necessary backdrop
for sound. once, the woman with the slurred mouth,
upon picking up the phone, discovered her husband's
disgust. it was as if betrayal had beckoned her
to leave him. the sound of sex and complaint is difficult
to differentiate. and so she moved out of their common
house, took her slurred face, found in the backseat of a bus
a man who would truly love her. only by this time the inability
to speak had set in, more from shame
than anything. and so she spoke to her new love through the narrow
light of irises and specks of various colour. nothing about her gaze
was slanted, eyes that could defrost an animal
in the sink. and so, the woman went mute and warm into the night
of her new man's love, crawled under him at intervals, the constellation
of her thoughts distilled and almost rising.

distraction

i thought i had only the dried shells of locusts
to fear, the year of someone else's yard, year before my mother's remarriage,
before she developed the tic that would eat away her whole
left arm. my father was busying himself with some other woman's
habits and i was splayed on the back lawn of strangers

i would find out later some insects appeared at intervals
and this interval belonged to a variety of large headed things that flew right
into your hair, your windshield, and even
your mouth if you let them

the formality of hives, a politic of bees, that is where my interest
resided. i couldn't care about the spill of caterpillars from trees, the dusty
wings
of a moth on the windowsill having battered itself to nothing

that was the year of the cicada and david moffet's lurking. his fame derived
from eating glue in the back of mrs. paide's class. his nemesis was dan
wertheimer who ate
a live cicada whole.

things i have swallowed
a series of boys on a dark parking lot sloped to near falling
three paperclips in an accident caused by negligence and lack of sleep
my mother's favourite antique button

keys of a piano remind me of the back of the throat, those little vibrating
parts david moffet moved into when he finally got to kiss me and begged
me to talk while we did. i have never since left so much inside someone.
even at twelve on a tuesday between lunch and history i had everything
to say.

the first time i saw a man

was in a national geographic magazine piled
on the top shelf of my sister erika's closet. the luck
of it, the wonder at seeing what had been hidden beneath every
boy in my class. i stared at that part of them for it must have been two
years straight. girls, too. knowing the difference made everything
possible. i concocted various ways of touching,
rubbing together like sticks of wood on a camping
trip with my father and sister and his girlfriend and her
son trying to kiss me in the back seat of the car and we all
slept in the same tent only then i did not know and i turned to the stars
out the window and said "look at the wishes" and wished it was someone else
next to me, someone else next to my father in the front seat.

that was the year jimmy zito ate chalk and mrs. paide turned nathan
hitchcock upside down because he was choking and because
it was instinctive. the comedy of trees and how i ate every
red leaf i could reach worried some adults only i was the best in the class
so they forgave my long arms and sarsaparilla coloured mouth

in art we drew our families and mine went blank for some
time "your sister surely lives with you" only i did not see a clear way
to depict what went on between the hollowed out walls of the west's house,
the one where water invaded my room like a soft green lake and the slant we
lived
on stilled itself for guests. after a while, i drew nestor sandival and his
shorts, the way they revealed everything in music
class, this some time after i'd had my fill
of magazines. no one recognized nestor and the teacher
ignored the visible parts, commenting instead on the intricacy
of his hands, the way they curled like two birds parting, the way
he was the only one i put down.

trees

the shapes we made with our hands, also
my grandmother's breast

the boy in the back
yard mangling rabbits

my mother's psychiatrist, who was also my
sister's, had the longest driveway
you'll ever see

my father's disease inhabits
the whole house
his first wife

and the bottle
in the river

my grandmother
came home from the hospital in clothes
she didn't own. the doctor said hers
would remind her of what she
had

i woke to the sound of rain only it was
you breathing

also, the kitchen's sounds when dark has eaten the hall

she chose against reconstruction said
"i'm too old for sex" sat a long time
in the tub on the rubber mat with the rubber

pillow, stared everywhere but
the wall

my grandfather, her husband, put another
bed in their room said "i can't touch you anymore" turned
out the light

the apricots in the back yard that year
flourished and the animals, darting beneath

all the life in the room
of others withering

all the life in the room of others

the boy in my bed the night they cut
into her, his sleeping made a sound like someone
crying

i brought him to comfort
me

the line at the grocery store
a funeral procession
we are always
waiting

the next morning, when she was wheeled
to recovery, he got sick with the thought
of it

men's minds expand when something beautiful
passes

the hallways of junior high
school littered to ruin

all we desire makes me blank
and paper, the doll in the trash at the doctor's
when i had hope enough
to hate

my grandmother made hers into a death
bed didn't want a fuss so she

tucked herself in, placed on her remaining
breast her will, all the arrangements
she could think of

store

you know how i desire the mouth
how the first time kissing i opened so far
they had to sew me back

so long you have discussed my body
as if a river or even a house lived there
once, a boy resided in me

another time, a couple, married, moved
in

if you stare into my eyes, you might see
a small lamp beside a bed and a woman
reading

lines of drugs and liquor bottles
easing your hands and my father's

the scent of every man i have been with

the department store woman says "that which has been
discontinued"

if not a house, then at least shoes
or ladies' dresses could reside in me

a place to look
for items of little use

past

we had a lot of sculptures growing up
various women's breasts on the wall
my uncle dated most of them

coming from an artistic family
the painted legs of an artist

i think about this when i am having
sex. the red stain of pleasure, my sister
cooking in her kitchen in new york

the men of my past littering me
the homeless person in the park takes residence there, too

insects on my wall last night
sartre would do so much with this
i just lie there

one crawled into my mouth, i think
followed by the boy in my bed
need, not jealousy, drove him there

other things on the walls
paintings, brief water stains, anger hued to near invisibility
the first traces of my sister's cooking, my mother's
depression

last night, having sex
wide open
not just legs though that, too
somewhere between salt and death
i am still turning, still being
turned

all the boys in my dream go drunk
drive their cars into some sort of tree

my uncle's girlfriends' breasts distorted
warped, maybe, by heat

propensity and a house like that

i am leaning into our past, like a lily might,
the way we would lie in bed all night deciphering a dream
or hand. though shades of eye and small particles
of cat differ, we are really the same. whether your
bed or mine, some hotel bar or the history
aisle of a used bookstore, desire drove your car to
some part of me.

perhaps the role of wife muddles emotion. perhaps
the girl out the window waiving is waiving at me.
children downstairs crying, the bird you taught to speak
educated on truth as well. no pride in how we silence the live
things in the house.

perhaps the living together, the side by side arrival
and departure, makes want necessary. do you know the bacteria
in a couple's digestive system begins to correspond after a time.
it used to be legal for a man to check his wife
into a mental hospital. how my temples throb
with ceremony. how i wish my voice would level
back into itself so i could scream at the top
of the stairs "my mother's life is mine." repetitive motion
causes pain. there have been studies. if only the tree that fed her

roots would edge past my house. loneliness has a sound.
it is painted into the walls. we spend our nights
listening to colour, staring at emotion
to get to sleep.

© All Copyright, Kate Lutzner.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.