And I Am Not a Virgin

Spoken Word

My name is Mary,

And I am not a Virgin

And I like to steal.

I'm far from the Mother of God,

I'd say, though the appeal

Of such origins has never quite Settled.

Maybe if I'd meddled

With my Christianity

Instead of burgling

I'd have ended up with more

Than broken questions

To nestle in.

Where was I? Right,

Kleptomania. That.

The habit has never sat

Well with me either.

I read somewhere that all crimes are a form a theft.

That murder is robbery of a life.

Cheating? The thievery of a wife.

To litter is to rob the world of its beauty.

What then, is my life?

Are all my footfalls just crushed flowers?

Is my living just slow showers

dripping down fast drains?

I like to peel flyers off

The inside of bathroom stalls

And fold them up, stuff them

In my pockets, lining my own walls with

Upcoming plays and

Lost Cats and Want Ads for Babysitters.

And maybe you'd scoff

And say such little things don't gather

Into something larger.

And to that I say, rather,

Every ocean started with raindrops, didn’t it?

Experiment for me.

Collect coins off the street for a while and you'll see.

Walk one step a million times and feel its toll on your feet.

You know what dust bunnies are, right?

Or tumbleweeds?

Eighteen years ago my mother sat

With me in her stomach—a small

Glob of fertile cells.

In a church, she sat there,

Listening to the bells

At communion, listening, praying—

And what was the minister saying?

"God said," he said, "name your children Mary."

Did Mother sit there, knowing

That "Mary" also means bitter?

Perhaps she did—after all,

No name could be fitter.

Not for me. Did she think?

Did she foresee

Her baby through various hells?

Immaculate conception? No.

She put her ear to the bible and bred

This lying, conniving thief.

I take your attention,

I break it over one knee

and I smile.

Would you like to stay a while

Inside this preposterous mind?

Maybe then you'll see my wild

And aching capacity for

Invention

And some pretension

In thinking what I'm thinking

Is worth minutes or miles

Or posters in bathrooms

Or something, somewhere

That some eye but God’s can see.

Perhaps faintly you can hear

this little fluttering heart

Like a lost bird in her

Shiny, pokey nest

Her work of art

With the dearest hugging nearest

And the rest

Left out of fear.

My name is Mary,

And I am Bitter

I am all of creation in one body

And I feel.

Devil's Advocate

It's as though you were

Undressing me with your ears,

Picking and paring me down

And peeling my words to their

Core. Off-centered, seeds spitted—

How could you hear it all

But nothing true?—That I,

If shined on your shirt, or

Tossed to the ceiling, would land

In your misplaced palms.

Go, hold blame by your

Half-wicked candlelight;

Burn out that girl painted

Naked and cast evil

Out of your garden. What a

World you've built where your

Own misshapen creatures romp

Among reality and can

Pin sins to a ghost—

Strip me to Shame, then, if you'll listen

Beyond God-given skin.

The Thaw

This is the story of the day I helped my father

dig a hole for our Christmas tree.

It was December, obviously Cold, but not quite freezing

A misfitting sort of day, easing

From one season to the next.

I bundled deep in the scarf before remembering

The thaw—it was the scarf Eric gave me for my birthday, the one with pretty patterns of purple

and pink and a year ago I would have cast aside the garment as too girly

But I'm slowly starting to get used to this boy’s fingertips—

That day it was sixty-eight degrees

The kind of thaw that only comes about in centuries Where winter has set in too early.

December

And already, a foot's worth of snow?

The thaw was something you could expect

It was something you could just

Know.

I always say I just knew about Eric.

And I did. I just

Knew.

We met at college orientation

Him, sitting on the booth side of a table

In a place where we now, sometimes, each lunch

I remember noticing him, though only as

Part of a little loud nerdy bunch

Playing Apples to Apples

While the rest of the crowd honed in

On Smirnoffs and upperclassmen's closets.

A shuffle of chairs later they'd dealt me in

And there were far too many people making the sort of introductions you always have to make at

these things like: "Hi-my-name's-Matt-I'm-an-IMC-major-from-Long-Island-I-love-watching-tvand-

playing- video-games-I'm-so-excited-to-be-here-this-was-my-top-choice-school-you?!!!"

Now, when it comes to this game I always win,

By saying nothing. Eric seemed to play the same way, cards

Close to his chest, as though he was good but saving his best

For someone who knew how to read.

Anyway, I saw him. Saw straight through, in fact,

Saw his playing cards, too—he wasn't careful with these ones, these words

Lost in the chaos of the noisy pair across the way

And in the slough of other little red apples on the table.

I remember texting someone, I remember saying

"I've got to get away from these nerds—lol"

And receiving the reply "haha go then"

I did

Unattached

Fluid and free to do what I wanted to do

To go where I wanted to go

But with the face of this boy sticking warm in my head.

Fast forward: December

This day with my dad

I laced up my too-big boots

Tightened by bright red socks

Selected a shovel from my garden shed

Gathered wheelbarrow with plank and board and pulled the whole assembly across my puddled

yard...Thought of the time my sister and I found a hole in the January snow

And disrobed down to our shortest shorts and barest-threaded tanks and rambled through the

slick mud and tangled grass till there was nothing left to disturb

No stone left unturned

Our boots sucking deeper and deeper into the earth

Until the dirt had washed away our maturity

Shrieks ringing through saturated air

Echoes of innocence.

And as my arms strained to carry it all

I thought about how then

Everything was action

Swoop sweep dive dart dance cry crowd sing shoot stare pool park sweat kiss pick kick laugh

sing speak

How when we were little

We didn't need words to describe what we could feel

Didn't need to slow the soft imaginings of our muddy minds with the piled sticks of letters,

numbers, punctuation

You could see truths in a look

In a single glance.

They say that falling in love is a part of growing up

But really, it's childhood all over again:

It’s called unadulterated for a reason

Where the pretensions of society suddenly solidify

And our true selves can melt through the cracks.

We’re no longer amassed and matted words

No longer collections of thoughts or doubts

We are people

We are skin touching

We are lips colliding like the fated gravity that pulled us together

The mathematical forces that we don’t need to see or understand

But that bent our parallel universes nonetheless

In a burst of heat

A bright summer day

In a lifetime of winter.

So It’s almost Christmas.

I'm scooping spreading straining pulling prying wiping wicking flinging fixing

I’m thinking about how easy it was to read where there were no letters

And how similar these feelings are

Meeting Eric’s gaze for the first time

Jumping off a swing in the mid-January

They’re feelings of suddenly knowing the whole world

Of suddenly being twelve years old again and wide-eyed

Just knowing.

Just

knowing

When, abruptly, my father interrupts this hard-earned melt

With words I never thought I'd hear

Words my dad has never said to anyone

Except when he was angry

Or speaking to my dead sister at her memorial services

He says, "I'm sorry".

And I know what he’s talking about. I just

Know.

It is an apology for the alcohol between us

That had iced and broken

Until I lived in a world where bleary eyes wandered during holiday dinners

Where people who

said the most words were always the winners

Where the cold would carry on inside forever.

And in knowing this, I am certain

That my Thaw is more complete than I can see.

I know this is no temporary fix

Because I remember things in This

Thaw that I couldn't before

I remember the way my sister is beautiful in sleep

Remember how a single flower on a spring day could make me weep

And the times when my conversations read like poetry

Silent—in the eyes only

Every thing that I remember, I want to remember more

Because best of all

I remember

This.

I remember being a child because I still am one.

There are place inside, places unaffected by the slow slow poisons of estrogen and caffeine and alcohol,

places still soft and malleable and believing,

places that still cry when touched

And before, when I would have buried them

Would have attributed this wretched softness

To necessary, nuisance roots

Taken down in some freakish, unnatural weather,

Now I look into Eric’s eyes

And see, every time, for the first time.

And I want to keep it

I just want to keep it all

Frozen.