At My Father’s Funeral
Picture me: I wear an orange dress
thinking I am the sun, reviving the dead
only to mourn them. How selfish I must be, here
his words: It’s all about language. But what isn’t?
More: how displaced we all are.
Lyme burrows, like a small animal,
meager love curled at my feet after a meal
or they say Lyme hides, the disease a swift robber
masked as an aging man. His words again: I
began to paint again and once again forgot. Speak this:
Do I belong standing here? Father
easily drifts away, then why cling paper?
Private mourning is hard to detect. Every
thing is coded and quiet among them --
She clutches her battered poem,
rubs it like a talisman. Time passes; day is used up.
The father said angrily, “I don’t eat sweets anymore.”
swimming breast stroke as a swamped thing
“I run, a running man. Not a plant, but a man. But how will they
know? How will they know I am a man unless I wear a man’s skin?”
- Alan Moore, Saga of the Swamp Thing
i.
for a moment there is beauty -- there's a hole in my head
as big as the world -- the YMCA isn’t crowded
at 6 am I go there to change a dry, mad voice
that whispers of Earthdeath coils my hair, capped
I am tadpole I am fish I am a plant watch my toes
flex against tiled wall watch my arms become water poppies
pierce through surface tension watch I obey gravity but not here
I propel I propel I propel
flip my body in ways I can’t on land, aquatically alive
I think of the rudders, fishing lures waved at my throat, the thing
of the swamp constructs my body out of shrub, reeds, papyrus
inhabiting that which may not seem to be alive
my consciousness seeps out and thinks of the word suck
I suck to my milfoil lungs the air I’ve trapped in my bulbous mouth
ii.
in my bulbous mouth, air held captive -- savoring
the new taste of molecules, moving through the water unnetted
I think of the months I once lived as the woods
writing letters to a man in a language he could not speak
he lived in a room, investigating my disappearance, unsealed
the letters evaporated, became my veined roots, branched
like you, receding in our memories until they're no longer visible, my human
hands tired from pitching tubers, like felled timber floating the Colorado, reddening
a body is a thing that can be erased, like breasts crossed over by drowning arms
I flattened rode out rapids flexed my muscles eroded my hips
a swamp thing
a girl, but tonight
I looked into a man's eyes who seemed to see my own, glimpsed
the abyss bubbling through the chlorine, my scent submerged
iii.
sight submerged like scent underwater
gliding, knowing how to forget, I thank
rubber goggles for what otherwise may blind me
I see, everything’s a dream when you’re alone,
but the pull through the wall of water, the flip turn
tumbles my body as I try to say his name
a kind of grace I try to learn underwater
it comes out as ah ah
ah ah I gasp choke
emerge to save my life, intoxicated by the motion
we forget all the risks
I almost became flooded by forgetting
I almost became flooded by joy
almost called for him where there is no sound
iv.
I called for you, moss skin, pulsing body mantle
igneous intrusion of southern rockies, you
magma bursted peaks out from core, rudely
earthtorn hands and knees on shale rock face
I crawled the border between us, saw the line
for what it was, nothing to be seen, unidentifiable
another word for algae is pond scum, algae forms
green scoundrel stealing dissolved oxygen, suffocating
you, earthmess! -- you, bloody pollen making breath asthmatic
your air was so thin I cried for more, and then the beauty?
from up high, your mountains cut through water, I see
you are stony soil, petrified, like frozen time. I command you:
do not bring your evil into my swamp
v.
soil frozen, time petrified -- I think it matters to see the world for
what it is, where we plant our feet on earth, that we become planted
rooted, watching from 13,000 feet, asleep in the cleared path
of pregnant mountain lions while tiny spiders drape their ribs
in silk, know how ferocious is a mother lion with her cub
know how she pardoned you, leafed body, sleeping breath
in a near miss of tumbling boulders, faulted land, lizard
who walks across your chest, look down and speak to him
greet the nearing creature, and mean it, be wanting the same thing
to not just survive a desert but to live there, together, if my body is
eroded from my own movement, from the way my human limbs
arranged at birth against me, then even bones can’t agree on representation
we must still agree on a name for not just him, my lover, me,
this voice you follow, but for you, green monster of my making
vi.
you must know then that mis-arrangement is precisely the point
the answer of course is we want our bodies
our poems to represent the parts that spasm
the parts that remind us this is just a pool encased in
cement, I push off rusty tiled walls, harsh watered floodlights
here I am in what we have made, gleeful, dancing, just afloat --
thinking of my umbilical body, thinking of my mother’s sounds
her infant sleep song sung from parted lips, I struggle to impose
a structure sometimes her melody slips as she cleans, rearranges
griha pravesh puja, the red inked footprints crossing parchment
our new sister’s feet framed on the wall, I think that has meaning
on the madness that churns, to celebrate a formed body’s new entry
a home within this continent, I push off from the wall again
I am in artificially nighted waters, what oxygenates my blood
vii.
I oxygenate my blood, swim into midnight water -- please,
don't go it's lonely -- what must you do with your hate
what must you do with your hate when your object is gone
my body their bodies the body we stand on
what must you do with your hate, green, you have waged bitter
and undeclared war upon the green, think of the moonlight
think of how love is a kind of belly you can crawl into gutting
the rain forests, mile after mile, day after day, think: jailed waters contain us
if you want to do the breaststroke right you must remember it is the slowest move
you are imitating a frog buried under the Sahara dusted over like the 10,000 year old
you are soaking through to paint swimmers on a cave wall, at last I comprehend
their stance, what the scientist said briefly forgetting herself, a chlorophyll creature
she whispered it looks like those bodies are in flight
that hole in her head the way
out is
through
Juliana Versus United States AKA a Love Poem
Because I am arrogant, audacious, wanting
a way to imagine tomorrow. Because what’s retroactive
matters. What heals Weinstein-earth process, mothering
for a future due to us -- utopic or not, a chance
to be breathless, sex sweaty, crying to dream
clarity out of theater. Our monument is for expecting
our ever disappearing tomorrow. Do we get to intervene?
Even this case is doomed for an ending, even this poem
deals in matters of grey all the time. Institutions are not made for accountability, but
to believe in a story. Wake up, Agent Orange, see what is invisible! Do we have
the power to give you the relief you seek? The Hudson filled my basement
and no one drowned, plus I’m white. What did they mean by Public Trust?
Inaction is a danger itself because harms do not immediately manifest
our point of individuation within the universe. Sustain me,
please. I refuse my own suffocation, and yours, and yours
are the breaths that control and facilitate our system.
I was once told my poem was beautiful and so without merit.
I was once told Teddy Roosevelt should mean something to me
other than a Christian patriarch sitting for his portrait after a hunt.
I was once told there was space for me. Here:
I just wanted you to love me. I don’t want life to end.
_______________
A multi-genre writer and educator raised in Nyack, NY, Juliana Roth is the creator of the web series, The University, which follows the bureaucratic failures of a university in the aftermath of a sexual assault on campus. She was twice nominated for the 2018 Best of the Net Anthology for her fiction and non-fiction. Essays, poetry, and stories by Juliana have appeared or are forthcoming in Entropy, VIDA Review, Irish Pages, The Atticus Review, The Establishment, Yemassee, among other publications.
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