Gull
Sarah Hanley Blackman
A seagull tried to steal my ice cream.
Vanilla Fudge. One scoop.
(I walked three hours on the hills
and fish slick side streets, paced
the crescent harbor once, paced it again.
I threw up lunch.)
Gulls throne the pilings like voluntary
gods, throng the pier, bob dingy
jetsam in the throb of wakes. Gulls
lay their dirty eggs and let them roll.
Stinking, they swab the streets, wrap
railings with the fleshy petals of their feet.
I looked him in the eye. I
said, "I will eat." He leaped.
Battened to my hip-his flapping
weight, the cruel crook of his beak.
I hit him twice. His head snapped
back (one hooded eye) and then he
died. I think we both were equally
surprised, but I survived.
I Said Poison
Sarah Hanley Blackman
I.
Finally, one of us says poison.
In four months our mouse has grown
from baseboard shuffling to brazen
eye, pink palm, slanting shadow tail.
I find the fact of him in pieces;
the deliberate unburdening
he leaves heaped in corners, paper
shavings tidied from his bed and tumbled
into the hall. Once I stopped to watch
him wash. Steeple paws smoothing
the surge of his skull, palming down neck
to cup each of his own shoulders. His wrists
are naked. I have seen them bend.
II.
At night, jet lag keeps me busy.
I watch the bruised wrinkles of your eye
lids, the roll of your cloistered
eyes. Here is a secret I will never
tell you: when I wrote, it was me
I pictured. My calves sturdy
and bare underneath boy's shorts.
My feet burrowing into carpet
as I slit the envelope and laughed
in the center of the room.
You should have been in
that chair by the window, legs
tucked, one foot strutted
against the table. You should
have been smoking a cigarette,
picking at your lower lip:
watching me.
On the telephone we are sexed again.
"How much longer?"
"I don't know. Soon.
How's our mouse?"
III.
This is what traps do: crack
the backbone, snap the neck, mat
fur with blood that pulps
from muscle, crush
the well-oiled roll of wrist.
This is what poison does:
strips the walls of stomach,
ulcers arteries, gluts
intestine through grated teeth.
This is what is eaten: flour,
rice, the plastic coating
on the phone cord, the photo
album from which your mother
waves a nibbled stump and I
am newly eyeless, blinking a smile
at your cheek. The lining
of your bowler hat. My scarf. One
of my mittens. Some poetry. A piece
of yellow cellophane I was saving
just in case. The center of the Sunday
paper. The soles of your good shoes.
IV.
At first I didn't recognize you
with a beard, and me, six months settled
into my new skin; thin, thinner,
waving from the end of the carpeted
hall while airplanes taxied behind my halo
hair. I didn't recognize myself.
At first, I didn't know
our mirrors, my face within
and the long hall to our bedroom
littered with suitcases, shoeboxes, bags
of spine-broke books, your shirts,
your papers, your pizza boxes, your life,
the lives you'd lead for six months alone.
And me, alone while you paid the cabbie,
rushing to our bedroom, standing
on one foot like a stork, holding my breath,
waiting for the first rustle, the first
shadow, the first wary surveillance
of space and change, the mouse.
V.
At dusk we walk to buy
plums the color of the sky.
I hold your hand, learning again.
Three stories up our neighbor's
curtains still shimmy in the wind.
This is their answer: Two
mice are stiffening on the rug.
Two mice are leaking commas
of blood and heavy silence. Spent,
stiffening, swung like wind
chimes by their snapping tails,
two mice are flung from a third
story window. Two mice
plummet, learn to fly.
Eena, Eena, Eena
Sarah Hanley Blackman
Miss Lucy had a steamboat.
The steamboat had a bell (ding ding).
Miss Lucy went to heaven,
the steamhoat went to
When she's in a good mood, she hums while she cooks and we eat peppery fried chicken, mounds of mashed potatoes, peas that pop between your teeth like heat. When she's in a bad mood, we have soup. The worst mood and there is nothing at all while she does sit-ups in the basement, crying.
Dad looks down from the top of the stairs, but all he can see is a wall. She is around the corner.
I am a bull. I snap my sharp tail through the air. I bunch all my muscles and crack deep in my eyes, teeter on the tips of my toes before falling forward and running running running like thunder on my hooves. Dad's leg is the red cape, even though it's blue jeans, and he does not get out of the way. His pants are woven, crossing and crossing as I get closer, and under them steel standing straight up and down and watching. It is too late for him. I am all snorting nostrils and huge humped shoulder and I smash into him, gore him with my glittering horns. He bleeds and Spanish women throw flowers through the hot air.
Hush Hush Hush says Dad, bending over me like a single horn curving against the sky. He says it like that, in threes. It reminds me of the mice, the blind ones who walk in circles and never get anywhere. I asked her if they were stupid, to walk like that to lose their tails. She said the book didn't say. She said they were just blind.
He can't even see her because of the way the stairs run into the wall. He could see the picture on the wall if he wanted to, but he's not looking. It's of a house with a yard and a fence. There's snow on the ground and a snowstorm still going in the air so everything is white sky and white ground and the white roof of the house. You wouldn't know it was a house at all if it weren't for the windows. You wouldn't know it was a fence if it weren't for the house. I always look.
I go to the cupboard for the graham crackers. Some of them I eat. The others I build into a box to keep things in, even though I know it will fall apart by morning and crumbs will get into the carpet and for God's sake do I want us to be overrun by vermin, driven into the streets by plague. We don't have a fence; when it snows there is nothing to stop the yard from becoming the road.
When I lie all the way flat on the carpet-stretched out with my shirt pulled up and my belly and my arms and the side of my face all feeling the same cat tongue scratching-when I lie all the way flat and press down with my whole body, I can stand up again and see how the carpet has smashed down under me. I can see exactly where I end.
Hello Operator,
please give me number nine.
And if you disconnect me,
I'll chop off your
I know I am smart because I'm in the Bluebird group in my class. Everyone else is still a Robin, except for Susan Knox, who's a Bluebird too. We don't have bluebirds here. Dad says we do but they're so blue they melt into the sky and we can't see them. I don't believe him. Robins are brown and red but they don't melt into the ground. I see them all the time in the yard, with their fat breasts and the worms cut and dangling in their bills. Robins have sharp eyes and claws on the tips of each of their toes. They jump about like they've got everything planned out. If they could talk, they'd say, "just so, just so," and I'd throw rocks at their heads.
Miss Fish gave me a star in reading and penmanship and math, but she said I needed to work on my citizenship. She told me after class, and I was late getting home and had to run the last part to make sure everything was on time afterwards. It's because I use all the blue crayons, she said. I never let the other kids have them and then I don't even draw pictures but just scribble scribble scribble 'til the whole page is blue, she said. It was selfish, is what she said, and I stood there and sucked on the tip of my braid until it was spiky and slick and thought about touching her arm with it. The hair would have left a trail behind it. A thin wet trail like a slug.
I didn't tell her why I needed all the blue. When you tell people you are giving them a present, they never see it right. Miss Fish needs a home. Her nails are bitten short and sometimes the edges of them bleed. Miss Fish has two crooked teeth on the bottom and bad breath. When she checks my math papers, she always smiles and looks right at me so I look right back and see her crooked teeth and never say anything about them even though they are yellow on the sides. There are five different kinds of blue in the big crayon box, and I use them all.
When the sun is on the ocean and you are underneath, you have to look up and let the bubbles out of your nose one by one so you can see where your air meets everybody else's. I went to the beach once, so I know. I also know that sand hurts when you fall on it, even though it looks soft, and that when you bring it in the house, you can't get it out again and it grits in your sandwiches for days but you can't complain because it was your bathing suit after all. I also know how to close my eyes and turn invisible and then fly around like a bat getting tangled up in people's hair.
When I came home, she said that she was bad in citizenship too. Our whole family on her side were loners, is what she said. I pictured them chopping wood in a clearing with their backs to each other and their axes pumping over their shoulders and down thunk to the block. I pictured them standing out in the snow with their hands on the fence.
She said I got it from her like I got my hair and my beautiful fingers. She has beautiful fingers. They are long and white and can play the piano, pressing down each key and lifting up. I have useful fingers. I dig with them. I roll sticks around. I stroke slugs down their cold spotted backs, watch them shrink away from my beautiful beautiful finger that can press down on them until they press down on themselves and then lift up, soaring away into the air until it is too far for them to see. Until everything is free again and clear.
Behind the 'fridgerator
there was a piece of glass
Miss Lucy sat upon it
and broke her big fat
Sometimes it rains. Not enough to make puddles or sting your skin when the drops bounce off, but halfway there. Enough to make the world damp and pulpy. When it rains like that, I go out into the backyard and take off my shoes and take off my socks and put my socks in my shoes and put them both under the rain-spout, just in case there's a flood.
When it rains like that, the slugs come out. They slide up onto the wood of the fence. They curve over the tops of the stones. They glue themselves to the rose stems and the tomato plants and slick long x's over the top of the brick pile that is going to be a fish pond where the fish will circle and make faces and I will tickle them until they giggle bubbles. Dad says.
Tiny yellow slugs cling to the grass, big tiger slugs ooze over the patio. When you touch a slug's eye, he pulls it all the way back into his skull, but you can't learn how. When you touch a slug's back, he flinches away from your finger and around your finger at the same time.
There are things I can do. Prick the tips of my fingers on the holly bush. Mash holly berries under my thumb. Scrub my hair over my eyes until I am wild. Tip back back back so I am face-to-face with the sky. Stomp in the mud and watch it burp up between my toes. Sing to the slugs.
All my songs I sing to the slugs, and they sing back slug songs because that is what they have. They have to because I am their queen. I am Slugeena and I stomp in the mud and tear up the grass and snort air out of my nostrils like it was for throwing. I build a stack of bricks higher and higher and higher until there are no more bricks.
Come on, you slugs, I say to the slugs. Let's see you climb that!
Eeena, Eeena, Eeena, sing the slugs and I press them with my fingers until they burst and leak because they will not even try. Then I knock the bricks down, crying.
She comes out onto the back porch. Jesus, she says. Jesus, you are filthy.
She stands there and I am filthy. I look her shoes which are white shoes. Come Here, she says. Come Here she says. Come Here COME HERE COME HERE.
I wipe my hand on the front of my dress and smear slugs into the cloth. Snot drips over my lip, I let it, pick a scab on my elbow until it bleeds. I scrub a slug into my hair. I watch her eyes until she leaves.
Eeena, Eeena, Eeena, sing the slugs.
Ask me no more questions
I'll tell you no more lies
The boy's are in the bathroom
zipping up their
There are two doors in the room where I sleep. Both of them are always shut at night because dark is good for sleeping but sometimes when the hall door is shut the closet door comes open and there are white rats in there with red eyes as big as bars of soap. I've seen them.
The hallway is long, furred with carpet, sharp at the end like a tooth. Their door is just a door.
I open it, and she is reading a book that is too much for me even though I know most of the words and I am a Bluebird and I peck her. I open the door and the light is off and there is breathing breathing breathing that is almost more than the windows can hold. If it broke the windows, outside would be a jungle where tigers stood with the bamboo shading their eyes like stripes. You would never see them, only hear the brush of their tails sweeping the paths behind you. If you were quiet for a long time you might hear them roaring, far away, like their throats were all wrapped up in damp dishtowels.
I open the door and the light is low and stretching. Pecks are like kisses, and the hairs of her arms smell like sleep all the way into morning. Or I open the door.
The door looks like a door, open or closed. I open the door and it is quieter than breathing. Dad says get the hell out from the dark where I can't see his face.
When there are no rats, I am in my own bed. I can see a tree out the window and know which one it is. In the daytime I climb the tree and its bark is a peeling scrape on the inside of my arms when I let go to see what falling is like.
At night the tree is blacker than the sky behind it. It cannot fade into the sky because the sky is the blackest thing there is. I know the tree will never be anything but a tree. The sky could be anything. Who cares?
At night I count the tree. One tree. One tree. I pull the blankets up to my neck so nothing will not get me, and I listen to the inside of my ears. It sounds like roaring. It sounds like a tiger who is roaring in the Jungle because the dishtowels will not let him up.
Behind my eyes there are things that look like branches but aren't because they are different every time.
She's gotta learn, she says in a voice like lipstick, and I hear it even though the covers are up and the doors are shut.
She's gotta learn to learn to learn. Everyone could tumble down the stairs at once. That could happen, us with ours parts mixed up at the bottom: tumble bumble bump.
The slugs would know me anyways.
Flies are in the meadow
the bees are in the park
Miss Lucy and her boyfriend
are kissing in the d-a-r-k, d-a-r-k
DARK DARK DARK
Once upon a time a little girl was a dirty little girl because she couldn't get clean. She didn't want to, so she ran instead. She could run fast. She could run fastest of anyone, even the wind, because she was a queen and she was mighty.
This little girl, who was really a queen but no one can tell without a crown, ran so fast that she went right off the edge of the world, schloomp, like that. Then she was falling and falling and falling but she didn't mind really because it was so black that no one could see her. She had a dirty face and dirty hands, and the insides of her elbows were dirty and so were the bottoms of her feet. She fit right in.
She thought when she landed she would break into these tiny little pieces that no one would ever be able to put back together. She thought she would lie in a heap until the wind blew her crazy, all over the place, parts of her whirling in tiny tornadoes that caught up leaves and bark and grasshoppers and blew them around too. Sometimes, at night, someone would think about her, listen for her, not hear anything, and sigh. It wouldn't matter though. Even in pieces, she would still be queen. Even in pieces, she was still mighty. But she hadn't landed yet.
First she fell straight, like a metal rod, with her head the right way and her arms crossed over her chest. Then she fell sideways, rocking like feathers but faster. Then she got bored and fell like a sackfu1 of mud. Finally, she pulled her legs up to her chest, locked her arms around them and got very quiet, very small. She fell like a ball or an orange. She fell like an acorn or a robin's egg. She fell like a snail shell with its snail inside-sealed, heavy, turning.