5 poems from Cruel Futures DEFAULT MESSAGE I have thirty seconds to convince you that when I'm not home, my verve is still online or if I'm sleeping when you call, sheep are grazing on yesterday's melodrama. Does anybody know what the burning umbrella really meant? Forget it. Tell me what you need. Leave me a map. Leave me your net worth for reference. Better yet, leave me more than you ever planned. Frankly, I'm anxious your message will be a series of blurs, that you'll garble your confession, so I retract every last gesture for your same retraction. The phone is in the kitchen, but I've lost my way. VOW RENEWAL I was afraid for our little nuclear family since we is a delicate tentacled organism stretching a thousand light years, a vortex, an oil spill titanic and also the bobbing four-person submarine navigating it. Once I feared you'd eat through me with your eyes's wet mouth, so I held you at arm's length. My anxiety bolstered your will, and something like that is this marriage. Anger in women is not a negative emotion you said when I was trying to implode against the flint of your body. My cock got hard when you said that. I'd been waiting for you since I was primordial. Here's to another 100 years, my love, and here's to our upload onto the same big network. We becomes a poly-symbiotic life form that eludes eternity and also occupies self with the stink we make of our sloped marital bed. RAVERS HAVING BABIES I've tried to make my babies fall in love with the surrealists, but they only want the acid pastels of the graphic age. I gather their utterances in my viscous cloud and echo them back in art because they're brilliant about tomorrow. I'm old to them and this will be true until they are this old too, remembering how their mother had been relatively young and human or maybe they do not think of my mortality at all. We're not there yet. We're at the place where I'm a threat because of everyone suddenly seeing them with such acuity, their status perpetually in flux. Each depiction and turn of a phrase is under scrutiny and the hopelessness of correction.... Now I puzzle, I perplex, I embarrass. Then they're the world seeing me--how much I've always hated inspection myself-- which amplifies their power but also those selves of theirs that are starting to feel set, inescapable. Some nights, left alone in their mind, dreams complicating their mortality, the children wander into my bed for the harbor in my body. I inhale them in old school want, and recall a more desperate version of myself in love. That woman was all in, all hunger, all vision of unity, and all this life later, through therapy and letting go and also doing some broken things, that woman figured out she only wanted the long devotion of family. Not to replicate childhood, but to replace it. Oh, terrible childhood, what tatters you made of me. In seeking love, I thought little of outcome, only the reaping I would do. The open windows closed. The solutions. Instead: disparate wants and strangers connected by blood. Both times I was pregnant I worried about becoming full of them too fast, or that they would smother me with want when in fact, it had been me, insinuating my cells into them. There's uncanniness in their adolescence because mine is there floating between us. I was a frantic and edgy teen. I constructed so many urgencies. I had a fantasy of being left alone in the world only to set it right. My other devotion is the world, who demands I tell it. Song keeps me fixed to the page. At the end of my second pregnancy, I went into what they called false labor, exploding supernova of urgency that became my only type of consciousness, masochist psychonaut, but it wasn't time, not for two weeks, though I felt my child becoming herself, insistent storm, someone like the now-girl in the room down the hall, and then I felt it when it would really happen, which was different than before, more of an awareness of a legitimate beginning to labor, to the relationship we would have, really, and there was too, an ending I felt there because life would always be linked to death. That was the last time I was certain must be why I'm recalling it, certain of what I needed to do to retain them. That must have been what love ended up being in the long run in order for me to use it. While my babies sleep I'm furled into a ball softened by sugar and weed, trying to solve problems. I lay in dread until morning when they tarry over TV and time shortens our telemeres without mercy. They're just figuring out they pinned their fortunes to someone who's a little messy, a little loud. They're coming to terms with the terms. I'll die before identifying a single birdsong in my life, but ink drips music into my blood. The imaginary is marvel. A minute inverts my babies away from me. So much to do, so little skin for transformation. BEASTS My siblings and I archive the blanks in my mother's memory, diagnose her in text messages. And so it begins, I write although her disease had no true beginning, only a gradual peeling away until she was left a live wire of disquiet. We frame her illness as a conceptual resistance--She thinks, yet she is an other-- to make sense of the alteration. She forgot my brother's cancer, for example, and her shock, which registered as surprise, was the reaction to any story we told her, an apogee of sublimity over and over. Once on a walk she told us she thought she was getting better. Exhausted, we told her she was incurable, a child's revenge. The flash of sorrow was tempered only by her forgetting and new talk of a remedy, and we continued with the fiction because darker dwindling awaits us like rage, suspicion, delusion, estrangement. I had once told myself a different story about us. In it she was a living marble goddess in my house watching over my children and me. So what a bitter fruit for us to share, our hands sinking into its fetid bruise, the harsh flavor stretched over all our days, coloring them grey, infesting them with the beasts that disappeared her, beasts that hid her mail in shoeboxes under her bed, bills unpaid for months, boxes to their brims. The lesson: memory, which once seemed impermeable, had always been a muslin, spilling the self out like water, so that one became a new species of naïf and martyr. And us, we're made a cabal of medieval scholars speculating how many splinters of light make up her diminishing core, how much we might harvest before she disappears. This is the new love: her children making an inventory of her failing body to then divide into pieces we can manage-- her shame our reward, and I'll speak for the three of us: we would have liked her to relish in the boons that never came, our own failures amplified by her ephemeral fading quality. DEAR MEDUSA What was it like to be left with only a stone husband, stone postman, stone apprentice? Was it loneliness? A marvel? You had enormous power, which people called a curse, but you were one of the first witches. See, I feel penetrated, and I want to survive my story. I want to be both vegan and Teflon, Ms. Medusa. Despite being cursed, weren't your days the wind-- lifting swirls of dust around your feet like an omen-cat? Your deflection cushioned you with a thousand husks. I want no window into me, not even pores. I write you because they want to bury my feet deep into the earth to be just grass, just earth, like that first myth that left us in the morass. Your vilification seems like freedom. Teach me about trapping men inside their gazes for eternity. You should write volumes for all of us mortals who want even just the allegory of power. We find ourselves constrained and debased and throttled. We whittle ourselves down into bony angelfaces with paint. We drain ourselves into toilets. Too much, too much. I'll end by thanking you for your gift to pre-feminism. You are truly one of my heroes. In praise of your impiety and atrocity masked by masks, and in praise of your undulance, the hiss and bite of your brink, I write as your loyal and devoted disciple. Amen, hallelujah, and so on. Excerpted from Cruel Futures: City Lights Spotlight No. 17 by Carmen Giménez Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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