BROOKE HARRIES
ON A WINTER MORNING IN MISSISSIPPI I MISS CALIFORNIA
My apartment is like a sitcom set
with multiple zones for conversation:
couch, dining table, kitchen peninsula,
tall bookcase. The bathroom and aisle
at my bedside accommodate two.
I hear the rain like an engine overhead,
a constant government. Tonight I’ll
make a salad and try to calm down.
I was up at five—afraid my teachers
will send me back to a café table
in San Francisco, where I major
in cigarettes with an emphasis in iced
coffee. Or Dolores Park, where
I’d watch frozen fruit popsicle carts
chime through the street, wagging, and
look up to study hills and hills and hills.
I moved across state then country
to fumble and strum, to write enough
to aggrandize solitude. One tweet says
the more rent you pay in a city, the better
the city is to live in, another that avocado
is mostly wasted on salads. I agree,
unless the salad is a single ripe, perfect avocado.
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*** ** ***
RESOLUTION
Last night was another moon my camera
couldn’t capture cool over the empty
parking lot. I took a circuitous route
to my mailbox with the past tenant’s name
in faded pencil taped on a note, cracked leaf,
ladybug inside. Downstairs the clean apartment
pool simply submits to a tornado, whereas
my vulnerability scares people away,
a blurry David Hockney painting, some aquatic vista
of mutual illumination. I tire buying beans,
lentils, half and half, of coffee’s reading hours,
winter headaches taking Advil, Advil, Advil.
Next year, I’ll urge beauty. Topple paranoia.
To appease it, I’ll release it to the wilds.
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*** ** ***
FORM
I saw a psychiatrist
who was big on absence,
capability. She’d ask then what?
And leap forward,
what would that mean? like truth
was always behind a hedge
or within, I could part branches
and discover it tucked
like an apple core
and choose to let it decompose,
but instead at some point I found
my voice. The disembodied voice
doesn’t know the body, doesn’t
want near it.
It was the worst at school
when dull insiders looked at me
like a pencil shaving
mound on linoleum
and didn’t trust or praise—
though I voiced so well
my dad wanted to hit me
but was afraid. Teachers knew.
One shared her Chicken
in a Biskit crackers.
When I went to a New York City
emergency psychiatric hospital
for a refill, the doctor laughed
me off for being too
sane. A wrong turn, here or there—
school, work, and then a hospital waiting room.
People used to fake-cough as I passed
smoking a cigarette. When I quit
cigarettes, I became a runner, and now
people give me dirty looks
for crowding the sidewalk.
This fact made me free.
The mind is unmolested; the voice
knows it’s fine to sing.
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*** ** ***
POEM THAT INDIRECTLY BLAMES THE MOTHER
Once, when my dad pounded the door
and broke it down, my grandpa installed
a temporary one, a thin piece of wood.
All night I trembled, thinking of danger
outside, a kidnapper coming up the long
gravel road where branches and trees
encroached, not the danger that was he,
his last name atop the blue line of rule-lined
homework and written on textbook covers
I folded from paper bags. I pecked
through school days uncertain, performing
as a leader or clown.
Violence packed further inside. I beat the tether-
ball before class. Stabbed a girl’s balloon
with a tiny twig as she walked by. What
do you want to do when you grow up? life asked.
Open the door.
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*** ** ***
TRUCE
Stairways and shelves and chandeliers and exits
from estates near rows of poplar trees and dense
fog at night couldn’t drive me away. I drove past
your limousine fire on the freeway side in a soft
leather jacket, open as the pink of alligator mouth.
Cypress knees sunk in the ground around me.
There was an annoying beep then truck reversing.
I cleaned a ceiling fan. Black dust fell wet in clumps.
A snow. Waiting like a metal file cabinet at attention.
Mosses, classic hammocks of gray-green swaying
swayed, if ever there was a breeze. I frayed, couldn’t
trace the correlating memory enough to defang it, force
it to simplicity. Pastures surrendered to tarns. Relief
came late, came never. Low warm winds lifted palm
fronds back home. You migrated with me in mind,
you archetypal, a smart iteration of me, importantly.
Time, like a damp cloth across a mantel, passed.
A box of ashes, framed photographs, unstruck matches.
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*** ** ***
PERFECT PLACE
When I was remote nothing could reach me. Maybe a teacher.
Maybe a bus driver. Once, someone did something very specific that offended me
and I rerouted my thoughts until it was no longer evidence,
only happenstance, and I could ride the same bus as him again.
If the forgotten detail comes back we will have a tune.
No more if-onlys to call into practice.
Take nothing personally, the cardinal says as it flaps out of my camera lens.
I wouldn’t dream of it, I say to some concrete before I cover it with my footstep.
Would I say hi if I saw you, probably not.
Would I rein in my contempt a moment and sink into the place unfeeling where
my sister’s silenced calls go.
No more one-days to spend, I’m all out.
You cut me loose and I am spinning around my bed,
sleeping afternoon hours, slumbering in my thoughts, dozing in my questions,
nothing to ask. I hear my voice trying to be excited about water, about following the money,
to show my students they are in the fight.
Walking around the campus the birds shake the hedges.
I am thinking about Los Angeles and I am thinking about interconnectedness
and it is nine in the morning. Every time I think about a whole city, structure,
a maze of memory tramples the first fact.
I am not at home in this world I praise or complement.
I see myself in everything,
talk it to death.
When iPhone wants you to have new headphones, they stop yours from working.
I have no dentist for this. I’ve made no-feelings into an oil change.
I’ve made an essay about fruit salad; I’ve encountered car registration like the Second
Coming. Mixed-up and drifting from reason to song, I’ve found Bob Dylan helpful in a stage
of life I’ve reached too young.
I wish you neutrality.
Why would I give up all this sadness.
Why would you.
I can hear the slow moments distorted by rain,
the sun setting behind the hill, moon pale against blue light.
Can you hold me again like the first time
when I was shocked we fit.
I won’t talk about the other guy from a perfect place, his great height.
I will keep you with all of them, other loves by a pond, never swimming, never diving,
different levels of address.
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*** ** ***
HOW TO MAKE A POEM
The old bathroom with silverfish,
my account of ants I described as insects,
crying wolf. Cherished sibilance.
Between swamp states dreaming of a pecan tree
on a slope, an evening grass blue.
I’m happy, look at me in pictures,
no melancholy sweeping.
I hope for more of the drivel the hours give.
Alongside the idiot song of cars
crossing one place to next. All interchangeable,
a pointless travel. Where does
the landscape shock, revile, drape?
What temperature does it feel like?
I want to be someone who says how are you,
but I’m more likely to ask how’s your turning radius?
How many years have circled me? Double-
parked and thrown flashers on? I’m saddened
by everything. Flattened by everything.
I took to writing to get away
from the world and I am left
only with the unwillingness of words
to act when nonfeeling.
I could have sworn by signs that fate was flirting,
but must go all the way into the cave,
no way out but singing. The other day
I made someone say I’m going to scream
and saunter away. This was in real life.
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BROOKE HARRIES
Brooke Harries is from California. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Puerto del Sol, Salamander, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from UC Irvine and is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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A Dozen Nothing 