The Latest Winter by Maggie Nelson

Author:Maggie Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Later you danced like an imbecile on the roof, calling yourself The Puppet.

The heroin you carried was the color of crushed camel.

I flushed bags of it down the toilet.

Once when you were comatose, I crawled on top

and looked down into a valley of sinuses.

Sat in silence. Did not pummel you awake. Did not

insist You promised to love me through this

Words to a Woman

This woman oh I have seen her

I worried I was her and I was her

I was her and then I was her hair

I was her mouth and her birdie nipples

Nipples coming right at you

wagons, kabobs, sugar-dips, cannons

I was worried I was her and she

was not well, she was down, or

going down, in the bar over

a tender burger, that’s when

it struck me most, it was as though

she had become wallpaper, or the meat,

or the dank wood paneling

I got jealous she loved another woman

then I made another woman cry

talking about how I love men

Somewhere I must have known

how it would make her feel

How do you love men and women if you

want to love people one at a time

or one for a very long time. Where

does the other love go. Where is

love’s home. Do you love

what loves you? Do you still

love me? I love you.

You are androgynous and omnipotent,

a horse. Your words blind me, I argue

for the disorient, then flail

in the ghost of the wake. You are

talking, talking, talking to me,

to my machine, at 8:03. Severely

premenstrual. I don’t pick up the phone

because I am trying to talk to you

in another way. You always need

something—cigarettes, water, lemons,

booze, green things. Mostly you needed me

but I couldn’t help you. You

were wallpaper. Your hands were

balled up and blue. I don’t love you

anymore, that’s what he shouted

at you. Your big blue. Numbskull.

Picking roots. Writing the deluge.

Something is always wrong with you.

Keeping the kitchen neat

that goes there and that goes there

and OK that goes there, smoking,

staring, fancying yourself a butcher

picking out the bones out the bones

picking out the bones out the bones

mama said picking out the bones mama say

find the small ones the chokers make that

slab of fish smooth and pink one long

pulsing incandescent piece of flesh

boneless loveless beautiful fish

cold fucking fish

We say we have a romantic friendship

but all that means is I don’t understand

anything I feel, for years I thought

when we touched it would be perfect

but I had to make you stop, you were

so much rougher than I thought. Now

I want to write an epic about you and him

an epic of tennis courts and spilt blood

and big fish-eyes crying all day all night

rolling over each other one skinny one fat

in the white house like a globe of glass

in the suspended globule of bed

suspended music of blue

the door always closed, you and he

always in bed, except when

you sleepwalked into my lover’s bed

and he didn’t know the difference

The epic at hand seems not to know itself

Who are you, I ask of it, I am the true blue

I am the answer I am the jealous link

in the chain. You were women,

you were women.

It’s not fair to make you women

not

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