Marilyn

This is the first poem I published. I wrote it when I was 18.  I was a sophmore in college and contemplating majors.  My English professor suggested I write a poem about what I thought it meant to be beautiful.  We started talking about Marilyn Monroe.  Like most poems that you end up liking, I wrote in about ten minutes.  It’s early and full of all the mistakes that come with doing something for the first time, but I’m fond of it, because it was the first thing I published.

Marilyn

There was a time when dirt and hormones covered me in a sticky film, so thick I could scrape a trail down my arm, and see my adolescence compacted into a single black arc under my fingernail. When I was thirteen the heat of my cheek withered the grass and I could press my ear into the darkness and hear the world turning on the axis of my atoms. June bugs hissed in the humid folds of my dark blond hair, dragonflies rolled their tongues along the brackish crevices of my knees. The back door creaked and framed my father like a dark knight, the sun beating his retreating silhouette into the pits of my eyes with trailing bullets of color. The wind blew the leaves together in muted applause when I rose up and pushed the bodice of my dress taught over my swollen breasts, knotted with the fibrous lumps of puberty. The neighborhood boys walked past the back gate and rolled their damp eyes over the curve of my back. The pucker of her hard lips pressed my back flat into my bed, the short bursts of their breath spread my thighs in rhythmic worship. There was a time when I spilled out of my dress like an overripe fruit tree, onto the slick pages of magazines and left behind a legacy of sticky fumbling in gas station bathrooms. Words came out of my mouth light as spun sugar, dissolving on the pillows of starry eyed orphans. I came down like an incubus on dark haired soft bellied little girls, coaxing fingers down their throats, and teaching them to turn away from their mothers ashamed. I spent so many years crouched in dark hotel rooms chasing flashes of armor across mens faces that I forgot how the slope of my own nose looked. I woke up thirty years old afraid to look in the mirror distorting me now like a body of water, bloated and blanched and floating. Lines ran down my face the echoes of hidden frowns, tears cast into the corner where no one could look. Age walled me up like an anchoress, counting pills like days, from memory, slowly hardening loneliness. The years bring me grubby fingered minions afraid the world will forget,nailing my picture to the weeping willow overhead, lips spread, arms open. Girls tucked neatly into white cotton panties wet their tender lips with crimson lipstick, and suckled on the pink marble nipple of my grave, until their affection eroded it into the coarse teat of a bitch. In the white silence, the tuning fork of death strikes the earth and shakes loose the pollen. I can hear the morning dew quiver of the web, the roping steps of the spider on the leaf. What you can’t hear. What you can’t know.