Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife: 1 by Brown Derrick

Author:Brown, Derrick [Brown, Derrick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: poetry
ISBN: 9781935904946
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

WHY AMELIA EARHEART WANTED TO VANISH

This is one of my favorite poems because Amelia is one of my favorite people ever to have graced the sky. I heard she had her first flight as a youth here in Long Beach. She was kind of manly and severely beautiful and I would stare at her on the ceiling of the boat I lived on before falling asleep.

Amelia asks for forgiveness,

looks down at the table like we are playing chess.

The larger pout of her bottom lip is imported from

Uruguay: Ooo—doo—guy.

Her R’s and the A’s become dizzy ghosts when she says it.

Distance.

The bottom lip

simple as a sentence.

But the upper lip,

a complex creature.

Amelia’s youth-suitcased in the upper lip-ready for wrinkles.

Lipstuck lipstick lipstock residue in flushed hue

like she’d been kissing madly,

like she walked off the set of an MGM ending

cast to kiss sailors ready to die.

Some are ready to die.

Her hair looks as if she’d been running with a man in black and white

through the sets of dangerous cities.

Her few hard lines are just symptoms of sleeping on her face,

Amelia ruins pillowcases with her lipstick.

Zip focus into the darkness where her lips should meet.

God, Those corners.

The black pockets-empty and full

like poverty.

These are not simple.

Endless. Hungry. Surrounded.

Dragging air like jets of the atmosphere.

Drawing it in

in slow motion,

drawing it in freehand

into those corner lip pockets.

The separations open and close

move elastic in melody with her chest.

1,2,3,4, 1,2,3,4 1…

Air marches in

and then nothing more marches out.

I could low-crawl inside those corner pockets,

grab her gums

see if they’re bleeding

to see if she wondered if she said the right thing,

to see if there was some sign of wonder or weakness or nervous,

the way dogs watch you after they’ve been hit by cars.

A sign that speaks of all normal persons having fear,

a bite in the cheek-a grind in the crowns

something that will give her away…

“C’mon Amelia. Come on. This is not chess, Amelia.”

She says “Shh. Save your yelling for sex and riots.”

Peeking at the daylight from the corners of her mouth.

The dryness chaps.

I look for bats

or sailors’ initials

but nothing.

For now it is dead in here.

The fifth of July.

January second,

December twenty sixth, etc.

I wait under the quilt of her tongue.

Unthawed.

Searching for blood.

Carving letters on her canines.

“Amelia. If you leave, don’t you ever come back.”

Alone in the cockpit, her propellers began to spin.

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