DEAR JIM
by Linda K. Sienkiewics
ISBN 1-930907-34-6Published as part of the 2003 MSR Chapbook Contest
Reviewed in CAT's CORNER
DEAR JIM
Thirty years is a long time, Morrison—
my mantra, my shaman, my sweet
erotic nihilist. It’s too weird to think
you’d show up panting
at my back door, and I’m no longer
the lone, braless freak
in a high school full of fresh-faced
cornhuskers, no more the sweet sixteen
leather-whip whose kohl-lined,
bloodshot eyes saw your face
in every Rorschach blot, who believed
she alone could light your fire.Admit it, Jimbo, the closest
I’d get to you now is a zipless fuck
with some look-alike
on your grave in Père Lachaise.I’ve found a new bad boy—
dingo-barking-mad with your apocalyptic
intensity—ten thousand watts of it
burning night and day in my brain.You think he likes older women? Okay,
so maybe he doesn’t,
but look, Mojo, I’m sick
of microwaving Lean Cuisine, washing
my pantyhose in the bathroom sink
every night, waking up in the same bed.
He’ll be the Gladiator to defend my dreams,
someone to squeeze
when my day stumbles
down the stairs into the basement.Yes, you’re beautiful, you’ll always
be beautiful. Isn’t that the tragedy
of The End? And maybe asking
the Antichrist to be an angel is a lot,
but I could use your help.What I’m saying is: please
look after him. Don’t let him
die in a bathtub in Paris or anything.
I got a big load of laundry to do.
RUSSELL EDSON’S MATTER
Maybe he doesn’t like to think too hard because it’s more fun to believe that a head might be used to house tropical fish. I seem him at his desk. He tries not to think about sex. He is about to write the word ape on a piece of paper when his dog barks to be let out. The dog is about to leave a package on the carpet which will make his wife angry. Surprises are best when they come from Russell, but then again, I never had a toilet slide into my living room and demand to be loved.
I wonder what his childhood was like. No one else writes about mothers who line the shelf with the many skulls of father, men who marry shoes and spy on them when they pee or say that the porridge on the table longs for the ceiling, dreaming of new plasticities.
I wonder because I have days when I’m swimming through the rooms in my house as it sits upside down. I breast stroke past light fixtures, somersault over doorway arches and practice my dead-man float in the blue lake of the living room.
I have days when pink nodules like mushrooms or snail antennae grow from my scalp in neat rows like plugs on a doll’s head. I don’t know how to comb it. Then a bald man looks at me and the slit in his head says, “Yes, I know what this is, there is nothing you can do for it.” So I sit at my desk and try not to think and in the end there was only an arrangement of words, and still, no matter…
EVICTION
It’s almost comical, a house turned inside out
on the lawn— lumpy sofa, table, chairs,
a shadeless lamp, nothing left to hide.
I slow the car to see a couple screaming
at each other, the woman tearing at her hair,
the man points in her face, a boy is tugging
at them both. I look away, but now that boy
is stumbling down the street alone, his shoulders
heaving hard. The sun becomes an eye,
the street: a snake I fear will strangle me.
I want to reclaim my untouched day
with the doors and windows tightly shut
but the sky is thick with stinging wasps
and secrets burn like swallowed coal.
Linda K. Sienkiewicz lives with her husband in Michigan and is working on her MFA by getting her youngest child’s further education out of the way first. She’s been published in journals such as Permafrost, Spoon River Poetry Review, Controlled Burn, The MacGuffin, Möbius, Prairie Schooner, and Clean Sheets and won The Heartlands Today Poetry Chapbook Award as well as awards from Frith Press, Concrete Wolf, Sow’s Ear Review, Flume Press, The Detroit Women Writers, Detroit Writers Voice and scholarships from the Cranbrook Writers Guild Conferences. She had intended to devote her life to visual art and remembers being eight-years-old, sitting on her front porch, making illustrated books about schmaltzy romance on folded and stapled manila paper.