Poetry |

“Phantom State” & “About the Pen”

Phantom State

 

As an orc, I slip like a ghost through trees,

my brother said of playing

World of Warcraft. I climb to the roof garden

nestled under the water tower.

Hello, my mother says, tucked into a

cumulus curve. What’s it like up there,

Mom? Sweets, we’re at the tip-top

of the world. Vanishing points everywhere.

I hear my father say, Now my remarks

the other day were rather

historically directed. But it’s the

Apple Music app my cat accidentally

turned on while stepping across the keyboard.

I think it’s a sensible way of beginning,

by recognizing the possibility of sheer

nightmare. I am still trying to loosen

my right hip, something to do with

muscles knitting together again like a

family. It’s an open question why my

body resists. This country has a history

of violence, but not a tradition of violence,

my father continues. In Texas,

a woman is forced to carry a dead

fetus to term even though it could kill

her. And you wonder why there’s

no horizon in any of my art? my mother

leans back on her cloud and puffs

on a Kent. My brother is bent

over a computer 204 miles away.

Rootlessness is not so much a betrayal

as it is a logical extension, my father

shouts. Of what? I ask. I can’t hear his

answer. Only, eventually, You were

fourteen and still a very little girl

physically and emotionally.

Which reminds me of what my mother

told me: don’t rely on a husband

to support you. At a certain point,

my grandmother refused to eat anything

much but chocolate. She walked up

and down the inner stairwell,

the fire exit. Her daughter put her away.

My unborn child appears

from behind a tree. His eyes big.

He winks and says, As the jelly jiggles.

Slips behind the trunk. Evaporates.

 

 

*     *    *    *    *

 

 

About the Pen

 

I say, I have no ink. Empty, it is empty. Stained, the cartridge.

I am empty. The skies — orange bursts against a midnight sepia-blue

like a Rothko, but this is war. Or more particularly: oil terminal blowing up,

flames spinning in the dark smoke like Catherine wheels. CNN flickers across

my devices — pulsing indigo-violet waves — and location-mapping tracks me

within six feet: shoots me linked advertising. I still have pencil nibs, I yell

at my screen. The wars continue, no matter. The discourse? Empty.

Words fall about my toes as if a vacuum bomb detonated, all the oxygen

sucked from my animal skin. Just one big mess, letters everywhere, overlapping

languages penned in dense script I can’t read. My poor education. What do

you think, I ask my rescue cat, of the state we’re in?

Contributor
Page Hill Starzinger

Page Hill Starzinger’s latest collection of poems is Vortex Street (Barrow Street Press). She is also the author of the poetry collection Vestigial (Barrow Street, 2013). Her chapbook, Unshelter, selected by Mary Jo Bang, was published in 2009. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Volt, and many others.

Posted in Poetry

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.