zoëtrope

Mémoire Involuntaire or, Upon Noticing a Woman

Her heavy scent rests in the air before your nostrils

Take an easy breath, send the particles flying

Pique the olfactory, the limbic—

A bowl of potpourri sits on a doily,

On an end table full of pictures of you—

The candy dish

A tiny bible

A lion and lamb statuette

Your grandmother’s living room:

            Peppery sweet, scripture-soaked walls

                        f

The woman stands in her bathroom:   marble-white

Soaks herself in French perfume,

Drinks it like holy water

                        f

Grandmothers shrink

Hug them

And your face is buried—

Your grandmother’s house is toxic:

Cinnamon bark

Dried rose petals

Ammonium

                        f

The woman’s husband searches

Tucks his snout into every possible crook of her body—

Nuzzling all the places that smell of clean skin

                        f

Try renting your grandmother’s apartment—

            You can’t

She fingers her way through the walls

Soon as you step off the elevator

She exhales—

The wall paper dampens, peels

Run a hot bath

She pours oil into the water

And when your eyes close—

Family Portrait Pt. 1 Grandma

Breakfast is scrambled eggs, bacon, buttermilk biscuits, from scratch, and white peppered gravy. The dark haired little girl picks up a piece of the oily bacon and takes a meager bite. Every time her vegetarian mother sees her doing this when she too is having breakfast with Grandma, she slightly scolds her with, “You’re eating Wilbur, you know.” The little girl swallows the bacon hard, her grandmother noticing the guilt on her face.

            “Now, what’s wrong with that bacon?” She inspects hers. “Looks fine to me. Eat it. It’s good for you.” The little girl pokes her tongue at the salty strip between her fingers, then decides to chew and swallow it quickly, gratefully moving on to the squishy eggs and still-hot-in-the-middle biscuits.

            The grandmother decides the little girl must take a bath before her mom picks her up. The little girl feels clean enough, but her grandmother insists. In the small bathroom she makes the girl sit on the toilet and grabs a pair of nail clippers from the medicine cabinet.

            “Hold still,” Grandma says, not yet making contact with the girl’s thin toenails.

            “Ow, ow, ow.” The girl bounces her feet up and down in an effort to fend off her grandmother’s attacking clippers.

            “You know,” Grandma says, “if you don’t trim your toenails they will grow out through your shoes.” The girl’s eyes narrow in suspicion, and then widen as she imagines gnarled toenails inches long poking through a pair of Reeboks.

            Grandma draws water for the bath and the girl hops in, her tiny naked body goose-bumping all over with the adjustment to the hot water.

            “Wash your twat,” says her grandmother over her shoulder and takes out her dentures to brush them. The girl slides a bar of Dial soap up her arms, her chest, down her stomach and lower. A little white film remains on her skin with each pass of the soap, resembling the slimy trail a snail leaves behind.

            The girl steps out of the tub and sits on the toilet to pee. It burns. Everything is different at her grandmother’s house. Everything smells strongly.

            Many, many years later her grandmother passes away gently. Her mother, cousin and uncle take her grandmother’s cremated remains up a Santa Fe mountain. The hike is long , for her, and she sweats hard, slipping occasionally in a worn pair of Converse, no socks. Five crows land in a clearing, a sign to the girl’s mother that this is the right location to give her mother eternal rest. The girl’s uncle digs in the earth, and she and her cousin collect rocks to adorn the space. They pour most of her into the red soil, sprinkling the rest of her remains around the clearing. The four trek back down the mountain, less one member of the family, and the girl looks up, unsure she feels right about leaving her grandmother up there. The girl not anticipating her future move to Santa Fe, and the closeness she would soon have with her grandmother again.

Self Portrait as Frida Kahlo

Crowblack above the eyes—

My face

            as I become Her:

All flowered and hands

Where the garland of thorns—?

Or where

The other me, that me holding

Myself

A buck stock-still in a tree tunnel

No—

Me as deer woman

            Pricked to bleeding

Arrow tips, or hand carved nails:

The acupuncture

of a cracked landscape

(torso )

Metal encircles the spine

like ribbons

            A halo of my undoing

Family Portrait Pt. 2 Big Mama

Some distance outside of Memphis’s city limits lies the sprawling suburbia known as Cordova. There is a house there, not unlike the ones that surround it in a mostly tree-less neighborhood. Inside the house are needlepoint psalms, praying angel statues, heavy, floral drapery, and the kind of white carpet that usually requires a shoes-off policy. A teenage, dark haired girl sits in a hospital-style bed along side her 90 something year old great grandmother in one of many bedrooms. The young girl holds tweezers up to her Big Mama’s chin, gripping a hair and pulling timidly.

            “Eesh, sorry, that must have hurt,” the girl says.

            “Just grab hold of one and yank it.”

The girl uses one hand to smooth out the deep grooves in Big Mama’s chin, and again grips a wiry hair with the other.

            “Okay,” she says. “One, two…” On three she pulls at the hair, but ends up giving it a nice curl, rather than extracting it from the skin.

            “Just pull harder.”

            “I don’t think I want to.”

            “It won’t hurt me.” Big Mama takes her rippled fingernails to one of the hairs and removes it from her chin with ease. “See, it don’t hurt.”

            The girl takes a breath. Readies a hair protruding from a mole between the two sides of the tweezers, and smoothly uproots the thick thing.

            “Keep going. I don’t want any of those buggers left,” Big Mama states, wiping white away from the corners of her mouth with a tissue, as all old ladies seem to do.

            Just over a year later the girl sits in the pews of a small chapel in Tiptonville, Tennessee staring past the Baptist minister to the open, horrible casket of her deceased great grandmother. It wasn’t supposed to be open, the girl never understood the fascination people seemed to have with corpses. The girl stares down the pew, noting the child-like nature of her grandmother’s sobs. Her grandmother and great grandmother were only 16 years apart, more like sisters than mother and daughter. Big Mama is laid to rest, her soul already in Heaven with Jesus, according to the sermon being delivered by the generic southern minister.

For a dead body she looks rather comical, her face molded into an unnatural grin, eyes shut and dusted with blue powder… her cheeks rouged as though flushing with embarrassment. Perhaps she’s embarrassed that her grand daughter thought it was a fine idea to lay her out all exposed like that, on display. And for whom, really? The people who fill the small chapel are unrecognizable to the girl, anyone comes out of the woodwork for a funeral, she supposes. Perhaps her great grandmother is a trophy given to the family as congratulations for dealing with death. Or is it something else, a human need to see death, but in a softer form? Painted up, powdered, sanitized.

The girl is transfixed on the bit of her Big Mama’s face that protrudes from the coffin. Bits of “Jesus will meet her at the gates,” and “she was a kindly woman” flit by her, but she thinks of Big Mama hacking snakes up with shovels, of Big Mama patching the roof at age 80 something. Of the five dollar bills she would slip into the girl’s hand after a visit. Or Big Mama’s tongue dipping into a tin of snuff. These things, to the girl, are what need to be said, these are the snapshots best remembered and cared for.

Baptism

That heavy water—

Water like blood,

Salt-tasting—

I have no hands to press

Against you

No teeth

How many times will I be born?

Changed with morning,

Floating on pieces of broken church

“I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Mark Chapter 1, verse 8

Walk me down

Rough stone steps

Breathe the water, you say

I am with you, you say

“In many sources, the term [baptism] was used metaphorically to connote a sense of

being ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘flooded.”

In a washbasin

Or among the Cyprus knees

Or that deep, deep river

            Rushes so fast nothing could live in it

            Could suck you right on under

“We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.” Romans Chapter 6, verse 4

—

Fifty or so Mississippians dotting the bank of a shallow creek, or some at the bridge, umbrellas in hand. One could, at any moment, jump right off, slide right into—

Petticoats soak quickly, grab at the soft middles of the women, feet just beginning to sink into the delta mud.

            Those too young look on from behind trees, or dip timid toes into the brackishness, only to be shooed away by the pastor, or his rotund wife, her bitty feet poking out beneath her Sunday Best.

The ladies hike their skirts as they wade to the other side, to be greeted by the open arms of the Lord. How obscene He must find them when they arrive there, all mud-covered, all skirt-flipped and exposed. Weeping, or perhaps what streaks their face is merely sweat for their effort. “Hallelujah!” they wail at their Birth.

Later that summer, when the heat of August has sucked up every bit of water in that creek and sent it, particlized, into the atmosphere (to suffocate), dainty once-white lady’s heels begin to show through the mud like clam shells.

—

Child of Mine
I call you in the water
And put my name on you

Child of Mine 

Child of Mine
I claim you as my daughter
And you will always be
A child of Mine

Walk me down, Jesus, walk me down

First ankles, then knees, waist and armpit

The head breaching the water

Mmhmm, claim me as your daughter, mmhmm

Walk me down, Jesus, walk me down

One foot in front of the other ‘til they won’t grip the bottom of the lake

Tilt the head back, open mouth, suck deeply of the water

Mmhmm

Water hits larynx—a gasp and holding of breath

Throat spasms—a lack of oxygen to the blood

Hypoxemia—functions cease, blood turns acidic

Cardiac arrest—heart fails, brain swims

Larynx relaxes—water passes to lungs through nose and mouth

Aspiration—water soaks the lungs, the alveoli, like a sponge

—

Wall Doxey, Mississippi, 1992

My tiny body struggles to stay afloat in the dark lake. The water can only be 6 feet deep at the most where I thrash and gulp it down; and the dock is so close but I can’t quite reach it.

            Water hits larynx—a gasp and holding of breath

Throat spasms—a lack of oxygen to the blood

And I’m gone. Mmhmm, claim me as your daughter, mmhmm… but momentarily, and then somehow brought back again on the shore. Water rushes back into my mouth and out through my nostrils. The tall cypruses wade in the water, their knees jutting up through the bright green film that sits around their waists like a skirt— they shadow the shoreline from a mostly clear sky.

And a big hand dipping into the water.

Keep on trusting in the Lord

Pulling the small thing up from the scruff of its fatty neck.

No matter what you face

What is this child to be called, the hand demands.

And keep your eyes on Jesus Christ

He is to be called Aaron. More hands. They reach to steady the baby’s kicking legs, not knowing that even this water can burn the eyes and throat. 

And live in His sweet grace

—

You are walking through a heavy New Orleans rain. Night. Wet blacktop. At least the weeds growing through cracks in the sidewalk will flourish in the downpour. Puddles are unavoidable, deep. You trip into one and you feel your shoes flood. Flood like a storm cellar. The water, as it fills, is measured but devastatingly fast.

You arrive at a dank bar, stand in the doorway and drip your way to a stool. There you sit in soaked underwear, shifting uncomfortably in the wet-cool conditioned air.

Throw back a vodka, inhale it, come up from it—sputtering like the first time you swallowed too much water in the lake. Feel that burn in the back of the throat, that lurch in the pit of the stomach.

You swim back home that night, splashing. And in the morning, you are somewhere different. A field, a cracked open church. You sit up, bleary eyed, the stained glass windows a mere confetti sprinkled about you. 

Scoop the fragmented glass

                                    fine as the sand it once was

Pry the mouth open with the left hand

                                                     pour in a palm-full with the right

Fill the lungs with these disintegrated saints

                                                            an amalgam will form within you

                                                                 heavier than lead

 heavier than blood

You will be altered