write about a moment when your body finally said ‘yes’.
i thought my body had finally said yes
when the affirmatives rushing out of my mouth
ripped through the walls
and woke up everyone in your apartment complex
like an evening train.
the next morning we found the yesses scrawled in pen on our faces
printed in the pillows
fluffed in the scraps of blankets on the edge of the bed
in dirty clothes fallen spilling out yesses where we’d thrown them in the dark.
but not knowing that yes
was more than not no
could be more than something said in increasingly higher octaves
left in the linens
i didn’t recognize the shapes the weight of a yes
when i was bent bound backward
buckling under nos
nos that tickled my esophagus like dandelions
gone to seed
nos like wishes on flowers in girls hair
nos like heat and power and bouquets and snickers
bars and dripping molasses
nos like the space between a chest and the heart
beating empty but heavy filled with yes like all the plates on a nautilus machine that i’ve never been able to lift
lifting me up overhead clean and jerk
nos like galloping, mutual contradictions, pinky swear secret orations
growing louder and deeper and deeper like voices in caves on beaches
nos like my own voice getting further and further away from me
nos like redolent echos
no
no
no
no
yes.
describe a hand in great detail
dora, if i think about piano lessons
and your hands on my hands on clementi’s thirty sixth opus
i want to vomit.
i think about staring out the living room window to the right of the piano
at the empty lawn and the sun streaming setting on the street
on my sheet music
for ten years
and how in all those years my feet never grew long enough to reach
the pedals without sitting on two telephone books
my mother yelled from the kitchen
over my indignant fermatas and the evening news
behind a steel stock pot of boiling spaghetti and frying meatballs
“Feel the music!”
and i could feel her mimicking what feeling the music would feel like,
waving the slotted spoon like a blind conductor.
and i want to vomit.
i hate vomiting.
i have a fear of throwing up– the last time it happened i was eleven and had strep throat and didn’t eat for four days and then the swelling came down and i swallowed some soup and i threw it up twenty minutes later over and over again– in the bathtub, i kept looking at my reflection in the bathtub spout, shiny and clean in the curved metal, which my mother almost never forgave me for having to clean up
but I would vomit the print of your hands on my hands on my minor waltzes
off if i could mute history
with a mouthful of my own sour bile.
your rings, and your boils,
the fear that my skin was going to fall of my bones and my husband would die and i’d have to leave russia and i’d be alone and smell bad
I’d sit here for a week head cocked under porcelain
if it would mean you’d never insisted on teaching me proper hand position
and i’d never learned the book of clementi’s sonatinas
and it had been just me
and mom and the meatballs and the sunset and
the music
of the 6 o’clock news instead.
