by Deborah Schwartz
I hear my fizzy head ask the outside world for quiet. Forget it.
Those voices inside me are broadcasting my child labor
of anger, I ask them all to please be lighter. They’re fighters.
This page, for instance, made clearer by the margin,
I try to declutter like zippers that I sew onto the fly of my jeans
for a salary that no one can live on or marry. My mother.
The voices stay closer while I write a poem in the next room
on the sofa, her sofa. The words my body makes are free enough to coach us–
my body, the poem and the sofa. I read Faulkner–a mind that likes to sing songs
to us though faster. He is a musician with a bow he taps gently across the curtains.
As light he knew it was ok on a page as the words left him to come through the fire.
Disaster. Words I read in the woman’s locker room before swimming and again on the sofa.
I never leave my love words so plain on the page as she might find them. I’ll try to write
them but softer. Asemic pyre, my song for someone else the hell tongue of desire
for another. Desire for my own aging body that at least is not dead. Rapture. Captured,
I have kissed myself to be consumer of my fire while I waited for the right one
to live inside me, throwing words down on the page to see them mired.
Faulkner wrote: If I had not existed, someone else would have written me. Liar.
Deborah Schwartz (she/her) is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Wind of the House, Voice of the Stream, of the Dream That you Dream, While We Turn You Around (Kattywompus Press, 2022,) most recently reviewed in Rhino, and A Girl Could Disappear Like This (Kattywompus Press, 2019) which won finalists with Carolina Wren Press, Elixir Press, and Still Water Press. Deborah is a professor in the English Department at Bunker Hill Community College where she’s a founding member of the Sum Poets Collective, a collective of LGBTQ+ students and faculty poets.
Hawaii Pacific Review 