Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what’s underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I’m the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment from its hanger like I’m choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, it’ll be the goddamned dress they bury me in.

I used an arrow to kill the spider. I used a steamroller to flatten the worm. For the ants I called in an air strike. Bee that found its way in through the screen: blowtorch. The mammals were easier— a bucket of water for submerging the cat, a poisoned word thrown to the dog. For love, only a kitchen match. That and a stove leaking gas and waiting until the dinner was good and burned.

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying, and I keep expecting some enormous black-and-white B-movie Cyclops to appear at the edge of the horizon, to come striding over the ocean and drag me from my kitchen to the deep cave that flickered into my young brain one Saturday at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless between my older brothers, pumped up on candy and horror—that cave, the litter of human bones gnawed on and flung toward the entrance, I can smell their stench as clearly as the bacon fat from breakfast. This is how it feels to lose it— not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is that helps you get up in the morning and actually leave the house on those days when it seems like death in his brown uniform is cruising his panel truck of packages through your neighborhood. I think of a friend’s voice on her answering machine— Hi, I’m not here— the morning of her funeral, the calls filling up the tape and the mail still arriving, and I feel as afraid as I was after all those vampire movies when I’d come home and lie awake all night, rigid in my bed, unable to get up even to pee because the undead were waiting underneath it; if I so much as stuck a bare foot out there in the unprotected air they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me under. And my parents said there was nothing there, when I was older I would know better, and now they’re dead, and I’m older, and I know better.

You know how hard it is sometimes just to walk on the streets downtown, how everything enters you the way the scientists describe it—photons streaming through bodies, caroming off the air, the impenetrable brick of buildings an illusion—sometimes you can feel how porous you are, how permeable, and the man lurching in circles on the sidewalk, cutting the space around him with a tin can and saying Uhh! Uhhhh! Uhh! over and over is part of it, and the one in gold chains leaning against the glass of the luggage store is, and the one who steps toward you from his doorway, meaning to ask something apparently simple, like What’s the time, something you know you can no longer answer; he’s part of it, the body of the world which is also yours and which keeps insisting you recognize it. And the trouble is, you do, but it’s happening here, among the crowds and exhaust smells, and you taste every greasy scrap of paper, the globbed spit you step over, your tongue is as thick with dirt as though you’ve fallen on your hands and knees to lick the oil-scummed street, as sour as if you've been drinking the piss of those men passing their bottle in the little park with its cement benches and broken fountain. And it’s no better when you descend the steps to the Metro and some girl’s wailing off-key about her heart—your heart— over the awful buzzing of the strings, and you hurry through the turnstile, fumbling out the money that’s passed from how many hands into yours, getting rid of all your change except one quarter you’re sure she sees lying blind in your pocket as you get into a car and the doors seal themselves behind you. But still it isn’t over. Because later, when you’re home, looking out your window at the ocean, at the calm of the horizon line, and the apple in your hand glows in that golden light that happens in the afternoon, suffusing you with something you’re sure is close to peace, you think of the boy bagging groceries at Safeway, of how his face was flattened in a way that was familiar—bootheel of a botched chromosome—and you remember his canceled blue eyes, and his hands, flaking, rash-reddened, that lifted each thing and caressed it before placing it carefully in your sack, and the monotonous song he muttered,paper or plastic, paper or plastic, his mouth slack, a teardrop of drool at the corner; and you know he’s a part of it too, raising the fruit to your lips you look out at the immense and meaningless blue and know you’re inside it, you realize you’re eating him now.

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers, bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications. Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing. And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately I can’t stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs, even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me, the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything, my hands and eyes, yours; doesn’t that frighten you sometimes, remembering the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you, beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs, don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own; I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

The rain this morning falls on the last of the snow and will wash it away. I can smell the grass again, and the torn leaves being eased down into the mud. The few loves I’ve been allowed to keep are still sleeping on the West Coast. Here in Virginia I walk across the fields with only a few young cows for company. Big-boned and shy, they are like girls I remember from junior high, who never spoke, who kept their heads lowered and their arms crossed against their new breasts. Those girls are nearly forty now. Like me, they must sometimes stand at a window late at night, looking out on a silent backyard, at one rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls of other people’s houses. They must lie down some afternoons and cry hard for whoever used to make them happiest, and wonder how their lives have carried them this far without ever once explaining anything. I don’t know why I’m walking out here with my coat darkening and my boots sinking in, coming up with a mild sucking sound I like to hear. I don’t care where those girls are now. Whatever they’ve made of it they can have. Today I want to resolve nothing. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it.

One stood among the violets listening to a bird. One went to the toilet and was struck by the moon. One felt hopeless until a trumpet crash, and then lo, he became a diamond. I have a shovel. Can I turn it into a poem? On my stove I’m boiling some milk thistle. I hope it will turn into a winged thesis before you stop reading. Look, I’m topless! Listen: approaching hooves! One drowned in a swimming pool. One removed his shoes and yearned off a bridge. One lives with Alzheimer’s in a state facility, spittle in his white beard. It turns out words are no help. But here I am with my shovel digging like a fool beside the spilth and splosh of the ungirdled sea. I can’t stop. The horses are coming, the thieves. I still haven’t found lasting love. I still want to hear viols in the little beach hotel that’s torn down and gone. I want to see again the fish schooling and glittering like a veil where the waves shove against the breakwater. Gone is the girl in her white slip testing the chill with one bare foot. It’s too cold, but she goes in, so carefully, oh.

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left for the man who was my father. I hardly think of him anymore, and those dreams I used to have, in which he’d be standing in a room of people I didn’t know—maybe his new friends, if the dead have friendships— those dreams no longer trouble my sleep. He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through or in the field by the highway where I’m running, chasing down some important piece of paper, desperate to reach it as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks or flattened and marked by passing cars, as it’s lifted again to swirl over a broken wood fence. I don’t know why the paper’s so important, or if anything is even written there. I don’t know where the dead go, or why it’s good to forget them, not to see them if they come crowding the windows or trying to lay themselves down and press along our bodies at night and ask that we love them again, that our sorrows include them once more. This morning I couldn’t get up. I slept late, I dreamed of the single sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach as it stuttered and soared over the grass and a few flowers, so that I woke with a sense of loss, wondering who or what I had to mourn besides my father, whom I no longer mourn, father buried in the earth beneath grass, beneath flowers I trample as I run.

In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet. In goes the philosophy teacher explaining the theory of eternal return, and Anton Stadler with his clarinet, still owing money to Mozart. In goes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creel of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten. Every river is Lethean, so why should we care if it’s not the same river? I hate how everything changes, tree to failing term paper, chatelaine to beheaded plotter, drug dealer to narc. The heart softening faster than cereal but then hardening to a relic which turns into another line of depressed poetry to recite to the next eager trainee anxious to be more than lint. Going up, you’re also going down, so either way, as your mother said,Be nice. When she went in, she was very thin. Earth, air, fire, water, mother. Fish pulse slowly under the river ice.

I like to touch your tattoos in complete darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of where they are, know by heart the neat lines of lightning pulsing just above your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you to me, taking you until we’re spent and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists or turns to pain between us, they will still be there. Such permanence is terrifying. So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.