Teeth
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Crack the Spine - p.28)
My teeth are falling apart.
After braces come off, nightmares
of peeling enamel are common. Slumber
parties told me so, in the late mornings
over cold pizza on somebody’s trampoline.
It’s like that, but in slow-mo: incisors shrink
and fade at the edges, dentin gets naked, white
tiles become see-through. Sometimes I think
it’s because I am see-through that I dreamed
this fate alive. As above, so in my mouth. Nerves
on full display, feeling too much so I might be felt.
My coats are threadbare, too. Aren’t clothes shavers
supposed to keep them looking like new? Somebody
turned fifteen; we finished their pizza. In the bathroom,
I ground Ultra Brite in circles on my orthodontist’s
masterpiece. Heavy-handed striving to better my best
for the world: it laughs at me in the mirror after
decades of effort with a vagrant’s whisky breath.
This is my will to flash beauty upon beauty
that overexposed the whole picture. This
is purification left alone at the sink,
running white to clear to ghost—
drained of surface
as if to reveal
a brighter
soul.Out Like a Lamb
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Black Heart Magazine)
Your glasses arrived in the mail today.
Prescription, designer, padded, boxed.
Spring did not arrive; spring is sick like me.
It’s Good Friday and church is closing down the state.
I line my eyes with soot for dark dancing at The Vault,
what no doctor would order, to bring a sense of order,
to let the volume cover my cough, vibrate through it,
break it up. Denial of sleep is a bad idea,
but Easter is also a bad idea. The hollow
bunnies. The “suspension of disbelief.”
At this time last March, flowering trees had donned
their wedding garb all over Park Slope. Stop there
and picture the lace, the crochet, the gazebos of plantlife.
I have the digital photos to prove it all, marked
with dates that would leave you aghast. Those dates
are 3/20/12 and 3/23/12. Perhaps you were at that wedding:
the wedding of my clear lungs with fertile-frilly air,
the air those trees gave me. To create a little flower
is the labor of rages, tonight. Nature is not allowed
to take this course on me. My course is Cephalexin.
My course is a spiked dog collar and barking
from the chest. Let there be dark, then let
there be rest.
Your glasses arrived in the mail today.
The box is on the kitchen counter
with an unwashed bowl you will not see.
And you will not ask if I’d like to know
how your designer glasses look on me.Stand Clear
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Black Heart Magazine)
On the subway, where your overcoat equals pajamas, my winter skin is a leather good gone bad, hanging from hanger shoulders over two people who spread over three seats with their beanbag butts and cough away spatial competition. I hold my breath tighter than the pole. I do not hold My own. Is there any way to stand clear Of closing doors?
Initials on an aluminum panel are carved in rubber eraser: erase this to appear in the dull reflection of everyone here lest at Grand Street, they exit the closing doors and pay to stand at bars that are just liquor stores with slicker lighting behind more glass, clear sand in its afterlife.
Hologram
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Atticus Review)
A chorus of cicadas summarized a season. July had dried up in Prospect Park’s grass where the sweaty dogs leapt in morning off-leash hours. August had begun at last: a ripened romance between maize and meal, grapes and wine. One wants to commune with it, to dance the Three of Chalices, to dip the dry in deep and absorb. Lammas being obsolete outside of Wiccan circles, I had only the rite to remain in communion with my own grain. I meditated beyond my crown chakra; I wore that jewel ultraviolet beyond the two pencils crossed to hold the topknot in my hair--they could not draw out the grammar of my longings--and my form became a hologram. Hollowed whole. In the sprawl of fresh-faced sun shaking off its peignoir, my heart slowed and stopped, waiting for first wind.
What happened to the magician? He was still out there, mind of a geek and smile of a philanderer, out there prestidigitating, out there knowing fetish models, their onyx hair, their splayed latex legs, their sarcasms, their edges. China, New York, California, itinerant. On the fourth of July: in my own city, unannounced, now gone. This was not the way I dreamed we’d meet again, for we hadn’t, and it was supposed to be on top of a building.
It is so easy to “dig up” information about people these days.
Keep excavating behind the medicine cabinet mirror for that tiny tube, that near-empty antidote for aging. Cut it open and rub it down deep, all the way to your sternum. Count the notched bones between the breasts, always there but protruding through the skin more with time. Count down.
Accepting the vast geology of circumstances beyond my control: the maneuver itself is indigenous to slippery, rocky cliffs.
I did not think I’d ever be the person who takes whatever train comes next. I did not think that on bright Saturday mornings, only helium hope would float me from where I am to where I once wanted to be. By Barbes on 9th Street while the sun “sets” a day into pudding, there is an accordion player cornered in a claustrophobic’s car. “Nothing went according to plan. Nothing was planned.”
For some time, I was as almost as anxious about attending my own life as I was terrified I had the wrong address. Be by yourself now. They will all come back to you here. The old CDs in a stack by the window can be used as mirrors if you flip them over. They will all come back to you while you’re settled in the spider-back chair at your writing desk wondering what it is that compels someone to finish the story.
Sleep, Mode of Anti-behavior in Persons and PCs
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Publishing Genius)
Sleep terrorists deploy noise. The automobile is the terrorist’s cannon for shooting heavy artillery in waves, ground-based transmissions of sonar combat. Make and model of vehicle are irrelevant, as is color and scenery of crime. Picture a red light. He is there, idle, riding low to the ground. But to say you can see his trespass in color by the light of night is prevarication, folly of sprite American lap dogs undisturbed. Grade-A sleep terrorists (GASTs) are essentially motile, anathema of happy lap dogs. GASTs may come in cartons of four; more frequently, however, the terrorist boasts solo like a stomping rooster, ready to start others’ days at night with booms.
The Doppler Effect cahootes with the terrorist. Do not be duped: The Doppler is not the anchorwoman on location at the beach during hurricane Camille, standing by to show and warn. Rather, it is the Secretary of Offense, budgeting artillery equitably and fanning the fare. It is futile to target The Doppler, even with roaming thoughts of retribution.
At the end of his circuit, the grade-A sleep terrorist parks at the bar and attaches his posterior to a receptor. The bar may have aligned itself already with its likenesses in strip formation to produce the armada of woe, the commune of bass. Whether independent or in family assembly, the bar is a grade-B sleep terrorist and the stationary second home base or barn of grade-A. Here, hardy glasses of the deep amber barley fluids and these glasses’ inaudible twinkly tinklings inspire him. He knows that what he can not hear is there, and that in his vehicular rounds he helps shatter clear song. “Cheers,” the smug terrorist says unto the din and hubbub, satisfied that the din and hubbub are both too busy to listen. His eyes are swollen slits in the smoke.
The band in the back rocks a bleary-eyed gentleperson out of her warm mattress stack and she calls cops to complain. Two cops rush in with a gust of cold sweat, panting white. But common cops can’t deprive the sleep terrorists of their basic necessities the way those terrorists can the complainers theirs. The cops console her as though her flannel nightgown means nothing. “This is my computer desk,” she explains, pointing, “where tomorrow I will be forced to think. I am not a mover or a shaker and I do not wish to be moved or shaken.”
The cops do not see. The stout one fiddles with the radio at his belt because the signal is breaking up. Over and out. They do not see because she does not say: Sleep mode of person dangles like a thin icicle, a temporary crystal of dim chill, moonlit spectrum of dream. Sleep mode of PC hides the screensaver, recurrent astronaut dream of person. The terrorist is driven to wreck rods and conical suspension, to murder the sleep person with her very own dangling mode. The terrorist hates the PC because it saves its screensaver, thereby reminding the person of how things might be. They might rightly be if she could take a caesura, if taking one would count for something.
The Monocle
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in now-defunct Black Heart Magazine)
1.
Don’t go searching in the peonies or the sprinkler heads for an explanation of how things bloom--not on five hours of sleep: the result is only exertion. Consider that when the sandman comes, the next day you are lazy in the sand. What grows there? The next day you languor, reading rather than writing, Windexing the bathroom mirrors, indexing clarity. You languor long and wistfully, not making the bed of your ideas the way you dreamed of doing when all your dreaming was interrupted and thus remembered. Who do you see when you stare dead in the eyes? On this side of magic, now what?
A man in white by the pond with a Papillion. It is that time in May when rolling around in the grass quenches thirsts that have no tongues with which to speak. The colors you can drink are not the colors of chakras unless you add ice. There is a man in white with a decorative walking stick in one hand and a glass in the other who thinks “supererogatory” means “sexually advanced” and that “vagaries” are ambiguities, but you decide impetuously, completely against your nature, that this is irrelevant with a face like his. And then he says, “Your nocturnal challenges exist because you’re asleep to yourself by day,” like a doctor, like a shrink. With smallish hands. He carries a monocle to examine monocots; he crouches in his trousers, oblivious to knee strain.
During the hot, empty afternoons of summer vacations, is there any child who isn’t thoroughly perplexed when talk show hosts introduce guests who have “drinking problems”? You missed it all along: that people could invite their own declines--that the reflection pond could be filled with something other than water.
Someone had to be planting thin gold rings in the velvet bumps in your jewelry brain if you were dreaming.
2.
She was making wicker out of lined paper and the souls of words, their longitudes of intent, their études of longing. A ghost does not need to cast spells, it's true. But consider the basket case. Here, also, was loss of limb and a spill of brooding. She was weaving goodbye, going down, down, down with her pen until it hit the edge of something hard, screaming, “Hold me!” to the watercolor Page of Wands in a Tarot deck. It was no use, of course. What could he do but deliver a bodement to someone else out there--some passionate fool who drew him at random? And what could she have written, before the end, to contain herself?
3.
In order to have something to write, she would have to take everything too personally; in order to write it, she’d have to let it go. In that order. This was one aphorism. Sidewalk grates will tell you a lot about your walk. Or the way your man handles eggs: delicately, but eaten heartily? Does he wipe up the yellow splat by the burner where he attacks it?
4.
She would write books in her old age all about the New York she had not yet at this time abandoned. Knowing this gave her a reverse nostalgia that darkened the sky from underneath and isolated birds from their music. Remembering the sounds of sprinklers tick tick tick (and return) chhhhhhh and the years when clocks napped, in Florida. Remembering the choirs of crickets surrounding hot tubs in the evenings. (No, not what you think you’re supposed to say—not in the do-over. In the overtime, yes. Get it right.)
She would never own a fox-faced lap dog, she would never marry, she would feel as if whoever bought her green Volvo 240 also drove off with the life she wanted, right out of her parents’ driveway. But this couldn’t possibly be true once 200,000 miles registered on the odometer and rolled past, jerkily, completely unobserved.
No One Draws a Blank
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in now-defunct Garbanzo Literary Journal)
White space is sometimes better left empty. You will learn this on the job, designing book covers and textbook pages for elementary school. children who you’d like to color in. You will apply this knowledge to your own textbook pages, your own artwork, your own walls, your own fiancée. When your fiancée says your book cover/ textbook page wisdom does not apply to him, correct him with white space.
Children know nothing about white space, but they are growing, with iron inside. The salamander sneaks to their wishful advantage. Their blood is rushing to gush with phagocytes and lymphocytes along with the more renowned cherry-flavored porous vitamins from breakfast. Somewhere in the composition of their blood is white space.
Wand, wave like a wind-ridden flag! Ride the wind, Herald Granger! Take thy white napkin from around the maiden's throat and shove it in her yappety mouth. Then tie another to thy wrist of handsprouts, and thou will recollect yon maid girl, the one who caused thou to see thy senescent white space!
While cooking the bouncy steaks, the cooker, sheathed (handwise) from tip to elbow, takes the plates to the microwave. After taking these microwavable plates to… the microwave (and all privileges thereunto appertaining), the gloves should be stuffed snugly down the throttle of white space.
We, the patients of Humana, dare you to come around this way on a regular basis and examine the folds of our paper bibs. After making this dare, we make yet another. Come around the way to get yours. Come to 34779 South Broad Street to see what your second dare is! Soon! (In Humana, rooms expire with white space.)
There’s a ceramic cup full of pens on my desk, a cup you painted and glazed yourself. Cartoon versions of us are funnier in real life. Apery is a way of life and we have a handle on it. Would you like a fountain pen, or a drink? Why did you glaze yourself? Could it have been the white space?
When we had pancakes on the beach in February, it wasn’t cold. It was windy. Magenta sarong skirts flapped like flags. The emerald coast stood up for itself on all twos. There are only two vanishing points on the horizon. There are only two places you will never find white space.
I have given you a hand in marriage. I have two hands. Our house of the king size mattress is divided. You asked if I minded if you smoke. I don’t care if you burn. Give me my white space or give me death by fire. Smokeless fire. Give me the final frontier of white space.
White space can be useful in establishing contrast. If you use it as contrast with yourself, you must be sure of where you stop and it begins. You must know what shape you take and you mustn’t bleed at the edges. You must be able to stand on your own before you set yourself off with white space. Otherwise it will empty you. But you mustn’t blame your emptiness on white space.
Riddance
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in now-defunct New York Dreaming)
I want to use up everything. Not just the salsa in the fridge or the tube of toothpaste propped behind the faucet, but the synapses behind my snapped temper, an orchestra of “played too much,” an entanglement of cello strings unwound like scraps of twine and left on a stage. Even desire: get rid of it— increased closeness and familiarity with what one craves intensely only ensures a loss of euphoria and wonder. Get rid of it. And talking: I’ve used most of the words in the dictionary, but I’ve not used them up. I am not even sure how to do so, but I envision a gym where language runs on glycogen, lifts to exhaustion, and cramps to a halt. Leftover unused wasted mellifluousness cannot be tolerated. Later, in the shower that boils it all down to vapor (and elsewhere throughout my bathroom), near-empty samples of face ointments battle each other like Space Lego men. I want them gone. I am the opposite of a hoarder. Let’s have a stoop sale. This is hand-knit. Let me scream until I’ve said it all the floor shakes and my nebulized sugar crystal voice enters some angel’s trumpet bell between his or her angelic breaths, loops around the valves, all in reverse, exits the mouthpiece shiny and supple, and is at last no longer my own.
Tickets
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Nailed Magazine)
Night ripens with its blackberry gloss,
heavy with waiting, heaving its clove
breath in a giddy gin haze. The dim
staircase up to the Grand Ballroom,
narrow and steep with cracked
tiles, is a merry dungeon for the trample
of stilettos and stilted, slipping speech,
a tunnel of anticipation growing with the drone
of bass guitar, and then we are in it,
we are live like the band, ecstatically
untanned and reflecting computer blue
laser lights to be buried in the corners
with rats, plastic cups, and ephemera,
our rangy necks craning for a more preferred
obscured view of our hero, the Finnish vocalist,
gaunt in his Varvatos and trademark beanie,
who leans into the audience, his whole repertoire
exposed.
Once, for many years, I was beautifully
composed for another, but I could
barely hear my metronome. I told him, Wait
here, wait here and guard my spot,
I think there might be more room
for us by the VIP rope. You know, I always
buy tickets the moment sales open. Consider
the meanings of the word “concert”
and whether we are in agreement
about performance, whether we
have wished for the same set lists,
and whether you want to see this show
as desperately as the singer on stage
wants to be heard. I stood on my tiptoes
for hours for ages and felt around in the dark
for rails to hold on the way down.
Was there even a spot for you to guard
for someone so small, accustomed
to finding her own way?
Say Or it Isn't So
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Rat's Ass Review)
Because if I wrap words not around instead of weaving them through, is that commitment? Am I on an express train? If I don’t call it, I may not recall it. Right. Your face. Your eyelash blink, blank. What transparency is taped? See the fuzz strands stuck at the edges, magenta. The smell of pinking shears among the rick-rack in the tweed sewing basket, a tomato or strawberry cushion pinned up and pent up with a thimble and a thumb tack. I turned the thimble between my fingers; I wanted a Monopoly game. I was eight. I hated sewing but won 4-H district competitions with my brightly-patterned short sets. I wanted to be Atreyu. My diary’s pages held the comebacks I didn’t say locked in them with an actual lock, and my oil paintings taunted me with permanent errors in grass blades mowed through by the rough grain of canvas.
To-do Lists
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Diversion Press)
To-do lists can replace ambulances of thought. At midnight, the magician boyfriend came home from a performance needing contact lens fluid and woke me so we could go shopping at Publix at midnight where we spilled a crate of marble- colored plastic balls in the aisles because the store didn’t have sensitive eyes formula and performance is an emergency.
12 Lake Lorraine Circle
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Oleander Review)
We left not because we were unhappy, but because we learned our politicians were partially-hydrogenated, the chain in them all linked to our favorite chain in the mall, and a fat-free diet did not result in fat-free hips. Minimum rage: being on the clock at a bookstore, reading you the whole time. An oil spill was coming to rot Destin’s sugar shore. My last hurricane power outage, my last blast with that Baptist church cult seething “submit, submit”: their bifurcated tongues resenting my bifurcated genitals all the way to Revelation.
Then again, also my Volvo 240 with heated seats just for January and six mixtapes he made, ever-shifting at traffic lights along my dash, the ink on their sleeves beached to orange by the beach sun, and his black hair shining back, how halting the change of the light--that blinding glare my brightest spot no matter how far behind.
After the Flu
By Stacy Rollins (first appeared in Shantih)
After I kill this flu, I’m going to put on my Doc Martens from 1993 I’m going to speedwalk in the February sun down 8th Ave. and across Prospect Park West I know the overnight snow has mattress padded the entire park and the snowmen are gleaming sunmen in a slippery, crystalline zenith, just as the temp- erature tops 40, and I’ll be stomping with my flu-killing determination through the slush puddles to knock them out, too I’m going to inhale the glowing chill deep until my aching alveoli turn into birthday balloons and carry me to the top of the hill where the six-year olds are revving up their dinky sleds and I am going to fall, and laugh, because six inches of snow beginning a fever of its own has so much give, it is weak and glorious and dying off rapidly. A dad drapes a black windbreaker around a snowman. It’s not even cold anymore. He’s making it worse for the snowman. I’ll come home with shoes that went for a winter swim and sweat under my fuzzy hat. I’m going to bring this all home to a roaring dishwasher and ordinary things with photographs of light that magnifies light through clawed branches of gray trees pained with arthritic knots like hands of a crone. I’ll come home holding an invisible string up to the lonesome sun working overtime to lift me up through the creaking rafters of the old sky while a block of ice dislodging from the brace of itself plunks from the roof of my brownstone to the sidewalk, just missing the tail of a Dachshund.