OUT OF CONTROL

or The Story of My Life in One Dream and Thirteen Lines

 

The road is never the same, never the same, 

but the dream is, its ribboning s-curves 

snaking bends and thin berms without guardrails, 

foot at the gas instead of the brake,

fast enough to wheel into sky,

into its breathy blinding blue

taut canvas stippled by clouds,

the next scene a black screen

peppered with pixels of stars and flying

the mountain, valley, meadow, a range,

axel snapping, wheel locking, but flying 

into sky cracked open by sun. Someone 

is driving. It is not me. It is not me.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

THIS:

A Triptych for The Disappeared

  Her face has disappeared. This happens

  more often than you think. --Andrea Hollander Budy

 

 

1.

She is six. 

She is a kid

in a cowgirl suit, 

strapping on a holster 

at her cherry three-wheeler,

the city steed, clomps of mud 

in the ring of its chain. 

But it has come to this:

 

Twenty years later

she is on her back,

a woman dressed up

as someone’s bed,

blood on the sheets.

She is the bed,

She is the ceiling,

She is the wall,

She is the room.

 

This has happened:

Her face disappeared

beneath the scarlet

throb of a bruise.

 

2.

This is the country where

nothing sells for more

than its whores, rest

and recreation for a global 

economy, pedophiles reclined 

behind a camouflage of pc screens,

eagerly scanning rental lists

by the hour, by the day,

by the month, for a lifetime,

 

the sexual slavery pimp’s finger

on the trigger of the cocked

crack gun, lolitot posed

like a CK ad in a flickering

light bulb dark, catalogued

child-bride, ready-made to order,

but she is not this body. This 

is not a good job for a poor girl.

 

3.

Across the sprawling green of lawn

at another Dias de Los Muertos,

pink crosses stagger the walk

for the murdered women of Juarez,

hundreds disappeared over a decade.

 

A procession of candles sputter

and spark for a school house splattered

in blood, its Amish girls gunned downed

by a milk truck driver with three guns

and a grudge in West Nickel Mines, PA.

 

Muffled prayers petition the October air

for women packed tight in shipping containers

across the Pacific Northwest, later to appear

on packing lists masked as menus, their bodies

indexed as lo mein, satay, kimchi, or pho.

 

Frankincense smolders for those who

vanish, shadows in the streets, whole bodies

disappearing under the weight of burqas.

It burns for all of those who are not,

for all of those who never will be.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

WHAT WE LEARN

...as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. 

As a woman, my country is the whole world...--Virginia Woolf 

 

 

Under the bottle brush tree 

the lovers sit, circled in each other’s 

arms, all alone right in front of us all

on our walks around the city lake, 

their kisses blind to the afternoon 

breathing down on them and us.

 

I think of my own first love, 

how a woman can learn not to take 

but to give, how not to gain a self 

but to lose one inside another-- 

natural as breathing, to be in exile 

under her own skin, colonized 

without knowing she was occupied.

 

Long ago, women in my family carried 

bundles of wash on their backs 

down to the creek bed to scrub it clean, 

later balanced books on their heads 

for good posture and the possibility 

of a cover shot on a fashion magazine, 

having been fed a diet of Cinderella, 

Sleeping Beauty, the Snow White tales. 

 

Just look at the statistics--how many 

of us have sported the split lips,

bruised eyes, broken limbs, 

how many assaulted and betrayed, 

how many isolated and afraid, 

our homes gone up in flames 

from so many hearts on fire.

 

We have resisted and rebelled, 

conquered enemies, negotiated peace. 

We have also had our feet bound, 

bodies girdled and gagged, some buried 

beneath layers of cloth. We have been 

overthrown, dispossessed, imprisoned, 

enslaved, burned wholesale at the stake.

 

We have been venerated and feared 

as Congolese leading warriors into battle

with shields and spears, as Mongolians

riding steeds armed with bows and arrows,

as Seneca ruling the land and the clan,

drumming and healing, as Balkans singing

in the company of women, just for the song.

 

Some of us now build muscles in our legs 

and take to running for the thrill of the race, 

work them in our arms wielding swords

and wrestling whatever might confront us.

We grow strong enough to carry ourselves 

to a shade tree, rest beside the fairy dusters

in the kiss of our own breath, learn to love 

first ourselves, deeply, and with great abandon.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

New!! 

Available from the author: andrena.zawinski@att.net

 

“Traveling these emotional and actual landscapes, in

the poet’s presence and with her guidance, we’re destined 

to places of beauty, textual importance and riches, in the 

best possible company.”

--Grace Cavalieri Producer/host: The Poet and the Poem 

from the Library of Congress

 

“The palimpsest theme and quality of these poems is beautiful. 

The poet is a conduit. She enters time - the child she once was, 

the father, the mother, the house in her heart, the trees and 

fields and cities we are now, the workers...even in grief and 

horror there is tenderness...and all the way she keeps defining 

what poetry is. Her poems are like tender kisses at our necks.

--Sharon Doubiago: author of Love on the Streets, Selected

& New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press)

 

“Zawinski’s strong descriptive powers evoke places with

energy and precision. These are serious, richly metaphorical

poems. Take them where they lead you!”

-- Maggie Anderson: author of Windfall, New & Selected

Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

 

Cover Art by Michel Tsouris, www.karthia.com