The Tortured Poets Department
(Part-Time Poets Version)
1. Fortnight
I notice it first on a Wednesday night— light, lingering longer. Look! I say to the kids. What do you see? Four days later, we gain four minutes more. Slow change that somehow feels sudden. The next day, my fiddle leaf fig throws some leaves to the ground. Don’t give up now, I want to tell her. Don’t you feel the nine new minutes of light today? Soon we’ll open the windows, feel the breeze through our hair. She doesn’t listen. The sun stretches anyway, and I feel our family come back to life. We throw off our coats and dance in the driveway. The light of seventeen more minutes tingles on our skin.
2. The Tortured Poets Department
Lyrics linger, laze from my prefrontal cortex to lodge in my aorta. Words coursing down the trails under my skin until I am lit from within. Blood seeps through, trickling down the wall I built of bricks and mortar. Unable now to hold back the depths of me. What simple words could convey the pain and love even my body cannot carry? I try to scream, but the white noise in my brain swallows me whole. I didn’t know ghosts could swim, didn’t think witches would ever not sink. I gasp for air. Instead my lungs are filled with broken letters, jumbled words. Sentences scatter like marbles on uneven flooring, my body contorting to follow their trail. I scramble, gathering up my aching thoughts, only for them to slip like sand through my fingers yet again. And then, one, single solitary sphere of a sigh unlodges, unlatches, unlocks.
A collaborative poem by the readers of Part-Time Poets
3. My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
I caught my reflection in your gaze Shiny, perfect with a smooth façade The spotlight on this ingénue, Idyllic with a plastic gleam You bought me with affection Where futures were pocketed dreams But where we were once girls and boys The thought of letting go scares me Where pity and burning heat meet In the moments I lose And snap and crack Into short-circuits And I break Because I was your favorite The disavowal of your care Melts my glossy exterior The disapproval seeps into my ideal All by distinct design To rewind to the time where You were only mine But where we were once girls and boys In a time where it was supposed to last Because my boy only breaks his favorite toys As he twists the wind-up key Only for the metal wires to disintegrate The albatross signaling our end I can only hope you’ll find me in the wreckage
4. Down Bad
Earth twirls and the mirrorball shakes.
Light reflects, refracts
your version of me
twisting
spinning
contorting.
I’m exactly who you want—
I’m Nobody (and everybody)! Who are you?*
I scream until my throat is raw
(I’m the only one who hears).
Once I clip its wire
the mirrorball suspends
for a second and then
tumbling
twisting
shattering.
I stand surrounded
in shards of who I was
(who you made me).
You tell me I did something bad
So I tell all the truth but tell it slant —**
I’m not the problem.
Light bounces off the floor
scatters luminous on my face
because the Truth must dazzle gradually.***
I dance on blood soaked feet
and gather the pieces to rebuild
until I’m someone I know again.
I smile at her in the mirror.*Dickenson, Emily. “I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)”. **Dickenson, Emily. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)”. *** Dickenson, Emily. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)”.
5. So Long, London
How long have we been told our love Is better kept to ourselves? Don’t burden anyone With our feelings? As the plane lifts off at Heathrow I feel that old life staying on the ground Concealment and detachment loosening Into something more like freedom I laugh out loud just to remember the strength of my own voice Around me is an airplane full of women Leaving behind that which They thought they wanted Finally unclenching their jaws And flying home to themselves once again So long, London So long, isolated love I’ve had enough of the quiet I think, for now, I’m going to live out loud
6. But Daddy I Love Him
Now, I’m just another a girl he loved before, But back then, when the kisses were sweet and always tasted like his mint gum and my hand fit perfectly in his I thought we’d be end game. He promised I’d be more than another notch in his belt. My dad warned me to not fall too hard and too fast but I didn’t listen. Because I loved that boy who broke my heart because he was mine for a little while. And for a little while, that was enough.
7. Fresh Out the Slammer
What was it she said? “Memories feel like weapons.” See disjointed scenes, blackout dreams laid out on the cutting room floor. Here she is, the consummate performer, her cracked but hard-won armor, burgundy like the bruise from last December. She paid the price, did her time said goodbye to ghosts and nesting dolls of hidden pasts, forgot words that cut like broken glass. Remember what went down in flames? The regrets and pain then— midnight rain broke through all the ceilings. After five long years of healing, The buried lead resurfaced. From the ashes, rose the phoenix.
8. Florida!!!
Hey, beaches!
Ya orange-blossom
better well smell
what’s
too
hot
to
panhandle,
with the way things ron around here
ron around here.
Went to the liber-rary
to meet a guy named Mary
and
this
here
book
checks
out.
She said:
Sunshine state
of mind
done made
you blind.
Your
rules
are
a
drag.
The truth cuts
like an ever-blade,
‘cause
shade
never
made
anybody
less
gay.
See ya later,
alligator.
At the parade.
At the parade.
Orange you glad?
Orange you glad?
That’s the word,
mockingbird.
Have you heard?
Have you heard?
Face palm tree, don’t ya see?
don’t ya see?
Shore not rooting for you,
‘cause
you
can’t
live
with
me.
9. Guilty As Sin?
They told me my sins would keep me from what’s good. And for a while I believed them. Kept my head down, kept my voice quiet, smiled pretty and set the table with the fancy shit. But what good is an invisible girl? I confess I threw the dishes, flipped the table, screamed until my lungs burned. Committed crime after crime after crime. Does that mean I’m guilty? Or am I free?
10. Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
Not the witches or the dragons, the goblins or the ghouls, the bags of bones dancing on ivy-covered graves. Not the oracles or the ogres, the prisoners or the poets, the spirit or the sage. Certainly not the ghosts, the lives I’ve shed like the skin of a snake. I’ve made a home out of the woods, made friends with things that howl in the night. Painted my lips blood red, offered up my throat, ate men like air*. I buried their hearts in the garden and waited for wisteria to sprout from the sinful soil. Darlings, the truth is spun into gold — held under my tongue like the spell your mother spoke over you on the day you were born: You were never the girl in the little red cloak. My darling, you were always the wolf.
11. I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
It’s cute how you’re standing there over the clogged sink with the sleeves of your Oxford rolled up, holding a plunger and your manly delusion (every girl’s fantasy) confident you can *fix him* like you fixed the chandelier (more like chande-liar) or the wall with a hole in the shape of regret (they say that’s how the light gets in) or the bulbs that flicker as if this house is some kind of haunted (I ain’t afraid of no ghosts) Oh but darling, what if we just let it be (you’re not the only one who can make delusion look sexy) What if we left the water to vaporize (call it a science experiment) become something we no longer see (this wouldn’t be the first time) How about instead you fix me a drink (dirty martini, extra olives) We’ll take them out to the porch that sinks into the sagging foundation (add another to the honey-do list) and maybe we’ll give in to the collapse, become the only lean-to this home, this life, could ever need (no, really it is)
12. loml
You’re expecting me to talk about my husband. And our children. How they are my most important job in the Whole Wide World. But don’t forget that I’ve been curled up in the corner of a couch with a book since before I met any of them. And spent much of my time in child’s pose just breathing. My appreciation for word games and storm clouds runs deep. As does digging into cartons of lo mein, crunching into egg rolls, my version of comfort food. Nothing makes me feel 16 again like singing with abandon as I drive these suburban streets. As though the cars around me could mistake me for youth—a 30-something in her minivan. You can grow as a person and still remain who you are at your core. And what has my adult life been but a journey to get back to my eight-year-old self? Remembering how to be Not a mother Or a wife Or anything really. Just me. This body, this person is the one I was born with and the only one I can guarantee will be around at her end. Reader, Do you understand? The love of my life is me.
13. I Can Do It With a Broken Heart
I give lip service to mercy, hand it out like candy I see sweetness dissolve on my friends’ tongues, I absolve their guilt for not doing everything I hand out, take a day off work, it’s okay to rest when you’re sick I hand out, it was an accident, it’s okay to let it go I hand out, you have limits, it’s okay to say no but quietly, in the night, sin whispers, mercy is okay for them, but you have to keep working
14. The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
was still a giant among women. boys will be boys will be boys until they grow up to become crooked men — CEO. Supreme Court Justice. President of the Free World. tale as old as time. let’s skip to the end: no one believes her. if this breaks your heart, let it. women are burned at the stake every day just for trying to survive. I’m sick of choking on secondhand smoke from inferior men. go ahead, set me on fire. haven’t you heard? we’re already burning.
15. The Alchemy
Nothing is ex nihilo. Everything refracted through the prisms of your branching neurons— taken in, transmuted, and released anew. That chord in the bridge of your favorite song. The unexpected metaphor forever repainting how you see the commonplace. Light captured on canvas. Art is never created or uncreated. It dances through us, a whirlwind of shapes and symbols, altered by our blood and breath, stories burnished from rust to gold, over and over again.
16. Clara Bow*
It’s true what they say: History repeats itself, and here we are one hundred years later still hell-bent on hating the It Girl. A whole murder of crows, picking apart every cherry lip and tight little skirt and breakup, as if female success is some twisted invitation for scrutiny. What is torture, if not a voice held hostage, a story spun and laced with lies, a life of watching the love-hate pendulum swing and swing and swing? One hundred years, and we are still here, hell-bent on throwing rocks at things that shine. But we know this already, don’t we? This is an old story. Anyone can tell it.
*Clara Bow was one of the most famous American actresses during the silent film era of the 1920s. She is best known for her role in the movie “It”, which is where the term “It Girl” originated. Somewhat of a sex symbol during her time, Clara Bow was constantly tortured and maligned by the media’s vicious rumors, eventually checking herself into a sanitarium. Today, despite her raging success, many remember her story as a mere cautionary tale of what we do to society’s “It Girls”.
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I think this is my favorite of ours yet
Fire. All of you.
Thank you.