The Bones Below

a collection of poetry

by Sierra deMulder

Write Bloody Publishing

America’s Independent Press

Long Beach, CA

writebloody.com

The Bones Below
by Sierra deMulder

Write Bloody Publishing ©2010.

1st printing.

Printed in USA

The Bones Below Copyright 2010.

Printed in Long Beach, CA USA.

No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.

Cover Designed by Joshua Grieve

Interior Layout by Lea C. Deschenes

Edited by Derrick Brown, shea M gauer, Saadia Byram, Michael Sarnowski

Type set in Helvetica Neue and Bell MT

To contact the author, send an email to [email protected]

For Brian & my sisters

“And then the day came, when the risk

to remain tight in a bud was more painful

than the risk it took to Blossom.”

—Anaïs Nin

The Bones Below

At First Sight

When she stops kissing you

with her mouth open,

find the screw driver.

Buy a newly cut shank of beef.

Leave so much blood in the kitchen

she has to ask what happened.

When she no longer calls you baby,

hide all the silverware

between the couch cushions.

Send her there to sleep.

If she does not complain,

let the sinks in the bathroom overflow.

Bake the wedding photos

in the dryer. Stand in

the middle of your flood.

Call her name backwards, forwards.

Wave your arms like your chest is a runway.

She is the plane you are crashing.

When she does not reach

for you, pretend

it is the first time

you’ve met.

Misplacing Their Ring Fingers

The summer my parents lost their marriage

like so many magnets kicked under the refrigerator,

my cousin and I named trees after babysitters

we never had. We lived in our bathing suits,

washed our hair in pond water and sunburned.

(Once, my mother slammed the screen

door so hard, I comforted the hinges.) I taught

my cousin how to make face paint out of spit

and dirt. She taught me to swim underwater.

(Once, I found my father weeping on the bed

they did not share anymore.) On the green carpet

of summer, we played until the cicadas, dressed

in dusk, called us to dinner. We kissed goodnight

and I ran home barefoot in the dark.

(Once, I sat between my parents and placed their hands

in my lap like a seatbelt. I do not remember this.)

To this day, walking at night on that creaking road

still reminds me of wolves.

For my Exes

1

on the little league

field we traded virginities

like baseball cards.

2 & 3

I do not regret

leaving you, but there are things

we still don’t speak of.

4a

still masturbate while

thinking about you. feel used

in an empty room.

4b

the first day we met,

I told you I missed you

already. I still do.

5

you kissed me so hard

my lips bruised. I still look for

you in the mirror.

6

If I wrote you a

love poem, it would smell like

ash. I burned many.

Silt

in this town, you don’t buy new

things before October, not until after

the back-to-school clothing has gone on sale.

you only shower twice a week, go to school

when you have to, when you can’t find a dollar

in your mother’s purse to spend at the arcade.

you go to parties where the sweating necks

of beer bottles stumble through corn fields.

a handle of cheap vodka, a lip swollen with chew.

here, you don’t go to college.

at home, your father speaks only to the wallpaper,

tells it what debt feels like soaked in bourbon.

you tack pictures of naked women

and 12-point bucks above your pillow.

you dream of floods.

Some Like it Hot

“Hollywood’s a place where

they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for kiss,

and fifty cents for your soul.”

—Marilyn Monroe

It took the embalmer three days to prepare your body.

He removed a half moon of flesh from the base

of your hairline; sutured it as tight as your corset

to reduce the postmortem swelling of your pretty little neck.

Those infamous breasts deflated as a result of the autopsy.

Under your favorite chartreuse dress, you were stuffed

like a doll with scraps of cotton.

Marilyn, you were our first wet dream, our first taste of sweat.

Your lips pursed like two virgins shivering in anticipation.

We knew you were a good kisser just by looking at you –

the kind of woman who made wives dig their nails

into the forearms of their husbands.

When did you start believing you looked better in photographs?

You were found naked in bed, clutching a telephone,

flat-line dial tone singing you to sleep.

We all pretended you were trying to call us.

O, Economy
(Part 1)

Today, I plan on stealing from the grocery store

and washing my laundry by hand in the bathtub.

During the month it took you to leave me:

I filled my gas tank to 33 dollars and 33 cents

and told you it was for you

because it was your favorite number.

I organized our belongings

(white t-shirts—books—toothbrushes—

baby, this is where we keep our sweaters)

as if using the word “our” would embed myself

into what you call home.

I bought flowers from a homeless man

because you are a botany major.

I wanted to bring them to you,

wilting and loveless, and show you how

I can nurture something worth saving.

There is a five-finger scar above my breast.

There is an orchestra on my neck shaped like your pulse

from all the nights you held me the way

you only hold something slipping.

There are 6 states

pressed like stubborn flowers

between the last time I kissed you and today,

but you still feel like a sound caught in my throat.

Paper Dolls

We are taught

from the moment we leave our pink nurseries

we are collapsible paper dolls:

light to hold, easier to crumple.

That as women, our worth lives secretly

wrapped in lace and cotton panties,

our fragility armored in pepper spray and mace.

They say one in three women will be raped

or sexually abused in their lifetime.

I am one of three daughters.

Imagine each victim is an acrobat.

Her sanity, a balancing act.

Our response is the unfailing safety net.

We never expect to see her across the wire.

You weren’t just violated, we tell her,

you are an empty museum, a gutted monument

to what used to hold so much worth.

With best intentions we tell her to reclaim it,

put a price tag on her rape and own it.

Don’t stand too tall, don’t act too strong.

We will name you denial.

Come back when you are ready to crumble

like your bones are made of chalk.

You can only laugh cutely or cry beautifully,

so cry beautifully.

We will catch you.

We are calling it theft,

as if he could pluck open your ribs like cello strings,

pocket your breasts, steal what makes your heart flutter

and tack its wings to his wall.

Some days you will feel dirty.

Some weeks you’ll remember how hard it is to breathe in public,

but know this:

the person who did this to you is broken. Not you.

The person who did this to you is out there,

choking on the glass of his chest.

It is a windshield

and his heartbeat is a baseball bat:

regret this, regret this.

Nothing was stolen from you.

Your body is not a hand-me-down.

There is nothing that sits inside you holding your worth,

no locket that can be seen or touched,

fucked from your stomach to be left on concrete.

I know it’s hard to feel perfect

when you can’t tell an Adam’s apple from a fist.

Some ashtray of a man picked you to play his Eden

but I will not watch you collapse.

What to do after you’ve memorized
the face of the person you love

Find the smallest pore on their cheek and name it.

Count how many eyelashes go missing at the end of the day and mourn.

Measure precisely how many kisses it takes to get from elbow to wrist.

Study their knees, meticulously.

To Resent the Wrapping Paper

The way

children wait for presents,

your mother was anxious for you.

I caught her looking for you

under the bed,

behind the door,

wrapped on the top shelf of the closet.

A week past your due date,

I found her pacing the hallways,

rubbing her belly like a swollen lamp.

It’s a complicated anger

to be jealous of your own skin.

2/2/08

Today is your birthday.

I wish you would answer my calls

so I could tell you how much

I wish you were never born

miss you.

Under Apron

Peach tea does not

make eye contact and asks

to steep the bag himself.

I slide the package across the counter—

no contact necessary.

Another orders

an Americano, room for cream

with a sticky accent, tells me how

her children are doing in school.

Medium skim latte watches

suspiciously as I draw the shots.

I know the names of some,

remember most by their order.

Single espresso.

Small soy chai.

Large cappuccino.

Some must think I do not

have the parts to hear them

hiss across the counter.

Perhaps they forget how

we are made of the same thing—mistake

the espresso grind for my voice.

My hair only mops.

Come. Sit. Heel. Stay.

When I took your virginity,

I did it carelessly, like a dog

left alone in a butcher shop.

I taught you the way adults love

(quick, dry, no eye contact.)

A year later, in the back of your car,

you showed me what you had learned,

what kind of man I had trained you to be.

There was nothing playful

in the way you hit, tenderizing meat.

Scraping at skin as if you were trying

to take back what you lost inside of me.

By the time you came on my back,

my nipples were chapped

and gnawed as bones. My legs raw,

newly butchered lambs.

Mrs. Dahmer

I caught you once,

killing a squirrel in our backyard with a rock.

Your 8-year-old body shivering, illuminated.

Through tears, you told me you loved it.

I assumed you meant the squirrel.

Even after I watched the news—

clips of a 10-gallon blue vat being carried out of your building,

your refrigerator sealed with police tape,

pictures of the boys you kissed too hard.

Even after I heard what they found in your refrigerator,

(two human heads and a heart in your freezer)

I could not bring myself to call you a monster.

Your father told the reporters

when I was pregnant with you, I experienced seizure-like fits,

foaming at the mouth. My swollen body would stiffen

and my eyes would peel back like paint

as if I was trying to look at you.

The day your apartment building was gutted and paved over,

I began to obsess over your baby pictures, looking for anything

that could predict the way you learned to love seeing things inside out.

Your brother legally changed his last name

but I cannot erase the stretch marks. I still see your eyes in my mirror.

The scar where they pulled you like Persephone from my stomach.

There is no reminiscing here.

No one wants to hear how you were a wonderful child,

they only want to watch your car crash of a life on repeat.

Your adolescent obsession with road kill—

how you would bike for miles with a garbage bag

filled with whatever cadavers you found on the street.

How could I possibly not see this coming, they say.

Did I hold you too tightly when we crossed the street?

Child, when your father and I fought at night, did you mistake it for lovemaking?

Did I teach those fingers to pluck families apart like flower petals?

(I love you, I love you still.)

Darling, was it the sound of the dead dog’s bones, as your father

dropped them one by one into the bucket that seduced you?

Did it sound too much like your pulse?

Was it the day I drove away from you—

freshly graduated from high school,

2 months premature of your first murder.

Did I put too many states between us?

Did you put your own heart in the freezer

next to the thought of me?

Would Mary be forsaken if Jesus had not grown

to be the son God had intended to father?

If he did not wear a crown of thorns,

but instead, wrapped it around his knuckles?

Will I be forgiven for the sins I did not commit,

but created?

When you were small, I told you:

you can grow up to be anything.

What We Hide From Others

you followed me into the bathroom

where I drunkenly pulled down my pants

and sat on the toilet. you stood at the sink

and commented on my underwear,

not looking long enough to notice the scars

on my thighs. you have never seen me naked

but this does not stop you from calling me

lover. after I flushed, we snorted cocaine

out of a parliament filter and stared

side by side into the mirror, matching

flared nostrils, renovated hearts,

blood down the front of our shirts.

One A.M.

“The destruction of the world is the last,

almost desperate attempt to save myself

from being crushed by it.”

—Erich Fromm

she is the kind of shaken

that makes me feel perfect—

pale and empty like the frames of barns

about to be torn down.

the girl isn’t old.

she bleeds green sapling branches,

ignorant to how cold the winter will be.

lonely in silence, she makes

every blinking eyelash

a collision.

the first day we met,

she kissed me

drunk on wine and gasoline.

I couldn’t taste it then,

but her chest is a hallway.

don’t give her matches;

she will kiss them.

don’t give her sweat;

she will drink it.

left alone, she will shatter your teacups

and ash on your love seats,

sit shotgun as you drive on her guilt.

she will hang up, stare dirty, laugh crazy.

she will wake you,

steal you away from dreams of leaves,

holding her forearm like a paintbrush as the blood

splatters solar systems on our kitchen tile.

she will laugh like the bottom of vodka bottles.

apologize for overshooting 11 stitches.

I wish I was the one with the needle and thread.

I would hem her hands over themselves

so she would know how it felt to be helpless.

Heart Apnea

When he sleeps,

the snoring does not bother me:

the rhythmic growl, gravel shoveled

across the sidewalk of his throat.

It is the grasping, desperate way

in which he takes in air – his gulping lungs

as if every dream is filled with water

and he is trying to inflate

the life jacket under his skin.

I babble in my sleep. He believes

I am trying to tell him how my heart works,

says he will translate the manual one day.

I want to ask him: am I the ocean?

Are you drowning in everything

I don’t say when I’m awake?

Distraction

The television whines like an ignored

child in the corner of their living room.

Arguments stop mid-insult only to mouth

along to their favorite jingles. They fight

like handfuls of broken silverware, hurling

the name of their 9-month-old distraction

as a knife: this is your problem.

When the baby begins to talk, I wonder

if he will sound like sitcom laughter.

Will he respond only to Regret? His first

words, “I’m sorry.”

O, Economy
(Part 2)

Things I am planning to sell on Craigslist:

blender

book shelf

toothbrush (used)

mint condition textbooks

gym membership

vintage lamp he bought for me on Craigslist

the still-wrapped Christmas present I bought for my sister

a road map

my stuffed panda I puked on when I was 6

an antique chest I found on the street after the flood

the sewing machine my mother taught me to use

the quilt that she made for me with it

the promise I made him

a microwave

heart (used)

27 hangers

this poem

a nice table from IKEA

When the Apocalypse Comes

and all the windows are shattered

and the car tires have melted into the pavement,

once all of the schools and hospitals

and skyscrapers have folded in on themselves

and the last street lamp has wilted like a starving flower,

I will still want to fuck you.

We both know I can’t handle stress well.

I’m anxious, claustrophobic, and things between us

haven’t always been easy—you nitpick, I’m stubborn,

and we have been fighting

over pointless things

like directions,

how you never take me anywhere nice anymore.

I saw the way you smiled at that poet

and her pomegranate metaphors SUCKED.

But sweetheart,

when a meteor crashes through

our kitchen ceiling, I will not panic.

When the locusts envelop the neighborhood

and our shower water thickens to blood,

I promise not to bite my nails.

I won’t even get angry when you don’t answer your phone—

even as the pavement begins to crack and spew like a rotten egg,

you will not get 47 missed phone calls in 4 minutes

(even though we both know it’s possible).

When the news anchor finally tell us the truth—

that there is no hope—I won’t even think about

joining the angry mob outside

our burning apartment building.

Baby, no.

I will put on my least flammable negligee

and I will find you.

I will crawl to you across this curdling parking lot of a city,

lick your body new again like my tongue

is God’s hand trying to erase and recreate the earth.

For 6 days straight, we will be

what makes the sidewalk blister.

Day 1: in the beginning,

I will find you, pull you into me.

Day 2: we will make the earth

and the sky jealous.

Day 3: I want you to fuck me

bent over a crumpled taxi.

4: in the graveyard of a strip mall.

5: on the steps of the capitol,

in every store, on every mattress that isn’t on fire.

This world is a melting candle

we’re only using for foreplay.

Day 6: You may think I’m in denial,

that I am avoiding the bigger issue here

but you didn’t even look at me

the last time you said I love you

and, shit, if it didn’t feel like the end of the world.

I know this can’t be healthy

(pretending everything is on fire), but baby,

we could be the most beautiful wreckage

in all this smoke.

When the apocalypse does come,

I will rebuild our city with my tongue.

I will suck this world’s ashes from your fingers.

I will refuse to let the fires of this hell

be the only thing that makes us sweat.

When the apocalypse comes,

so will we.

I crashed your car

For Rya

While you were in Japan,

(teaching English to children)

I crashed your car.

It made a horrible crunching sound, so loud

I was sure you must have heard it

from halfway around the world.

That’s why I waited so long to tell you.

The Other Woman

I pretend I don’t love it

when you hold my hand in public,

when you catch a wild hair in the net of your fingers,

when you kiss me right in front of the gas station cashier.

I remember we live in a big city.

I secretly imagine the scandal we could cause

if we lived in a small town, where everyone knew your name

and your bed: how our love would spill like paint cans

across old wooden porches. It would seep

between the cracks of the floorboards,

the way I live beneath your fingernails

when you go home to her.

Static

Somehow, there is silence.

People are running, their mute eyes panicking

like deer who have never seen the oncoming glare

of judgment. A single red flower blooms in the center of her shirt.

She finally looks at you.

Rewind 1 week: she sits in front of you in science and smells like ice cream.

You wonder if she even knows your name—wonder if she would ever notice your thimble

of existence. To them you are nothing but the skinned knees of the student body.

They will read about you, (the ones who are lucky,

who will see death and not meet it) how you walked like a god

unnoticed among them, planned a revolution for your fingers

to pluck pulses like arrows from bows.

Rewind 1 week: a sharpie in the boys’ bathroom screams hollow point prophecies.

It goes unnoticed. You go unnoticed in the hallways, stepped over like broken glass.

You count how many people make eye contact and don’t make it

to your second hand.

Rewind 1 week: The whole world is sleeping.

You are wrapped in a straight jacket of alarm clocks and school bells;

the only one conscious in a city built of zombies.

Rewind 1 week: the guidance counselor asks if there is trouble at home.

“You never speak in class, you eat lunch alone” but how

could he possibly relate to this Armageddon in your head,

to the static collecting between your knuckles.

You stare at the picture of his perfect framed family,

imagine each of them crying. You tell him and his photograph

to go to hell.

Fast-forward 4 weeks:

this is hell.

3 bodies down,

6, 7.

Rewind 8 days: you wonder if heaven exists

or if it’s just a Santa Claus lie to make you sleep at night

and be nice to others.

Fast-forward 7 days: she catches you staring.

Calls you a freak. You forget what is like to feel anything but fire.

The hallways laugh. The lockers punch back.

Fast-forward 1 day: you drag the weapon from your belt.

The hallways stop laughing. Their wax smiles start melting.

The sound of gunshots does not scare you, the satisfaction does.

You count shells in your head, fallen bodies out loud.

This is their alarm clock.

This is natural selection.

This is survival.

You rewind. The trigger pushes your finger forward.

The bullet comes spiraling back into the mouth of its barrel.

A single red flower wilts in the center of her shirt.

She finally looks at you.

Five Years After

You wonder why I don’t

answer your 3 a.m. phone calls.

When you say “I miss you,”

I begin to undress myself out of habit.

Masquerade

Her skin glows

with impeccable craft

like genetically

altered fruit.

Ten blank canvases of acrylic

stuck awkwardly

to the tips of her fingers.

So much concealer

blankets her face

it is impossible to remember

the color of her eyes,

the natural curl of her brow.

I will never be so

well set, like a dining room table

beautifully disguised

as a feast.

Ode to Carbonation

you taste like what I imagine

swallowing radio wires

feels like: all sparks and pop

music in my throat.

All That Blinds Us

1

You take off your shirt

and all of a sudden,

I have never seen a naked body before.

I stare as if you could be eclipsed

at any moment. I look away,

everything becomes white.

2

You can’t bring yourself to look at me.

My shoulders burn like a shadow

is trying to peel itself off.

I am the sidewalk crack,

a black cat, the superstition

of a good woman.

Talking to God

It’s hard these days not to listen,

not to crack eggshells and wait for symphonies,

snap tree branches into splintering answers.

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