Prostitution Turns Itself Inside Out
"See Something, Say Something"
A Dozen Secrets from God
The Dying-in-Slow-Motion, The Woman Who Taught Me to Knit
The Birthday Bell Tolls
"Before My Mastectomy"
Prostitution Turns Itself Inside Out
After reading too much about child sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, girls turned out
on the streets before they menstruate, girls without fathers who find older, richer men
irresistible at the cellular level, their hunger for daddy-love understandable, natural,
until it metastasizes into love for the so-called man who makes them call him Daddy,
I think of the unfathomable evils of the world and wonder how do the mothers and sisters
and grandmothers of pimps let them eat or sleep or live, why don’t they throw them out
of the family compound, out of society, men who steal the money earned by hungry girls
they send out to be raped ten times a night for a hundred bucks? But instead boys sing songs
starring the pimp as an enviable, admired, blinged-out bad boy folk hero. After reading
too many stories of anal rapes and forced blowjobs and stolen cash and threats to sisters
and never using a condom, after reading of middle schoolers who can’t take enough showers
to ever feel clean, I imagine a world where being bought for sex isn’t a human rights violation
but the bagging of a big deal, where the market belongs to the seller, who can pick
and choose and decide whether to sell in the first place, and name the price, and the place,
and keep the money. What if I, a canny businesswoman, chose the most respectful, insightful
and attractive man, willing to pay a higher price than any other of the dozens of applicants,
and in exchange for a house or four years’ salary, decided to sell him three hours of my efforts?
Say the legend of my ministrations had reached far and wide, and noon to three with me
nets a million five, and after my vetting and his courting, after checking his references
and requisite blood tests and credit reports, I would deprive myself for a bit ahead of time,
then travel to my compound with its two dogs, armed guard and safety button, pour myself
a glass of favorite burgundy, hug myself a bit, enjoying the gloss of my freshly-showered arms,
the fine satin slip, the single-bloom perfume, then open the curtains so the sun streams in,
lie back and have a glorious go of it. The power, the worth, the profit, all mine, and the pleasure
in bestowing this noteworthy gift. Healer, not whore; capitalist, not property; philanthropist,
when the spirit moves me to donate all proceeds. We, my young city sisters, who know
to tend to and get along with and comfort and sheathe, we, supple and soft and stronger,
become the beneficiaries, the wielders, receivers, choosers, reapers, thrillers, rompers. Sated.
And safe.
"See Something, Say Something"
-- Penn Station
Shady commuters. Hundreds of them.
National Guardsmen whose camo fails.
It needs to be neon or fastfood yellow-and-red
or pinstripe or Burberry plaid. Krispy Kreme.
Guy rooting his wiggly pinky deep into his ear.
Bookstore. Knobby man in pink tutu, on a dare
or coming out. Sad kid on a backpack, looking,
looking. Hudson News. Angry career women
in stilettos, with no one to rub their feet at night.
Officer, I see a pregnant woman. Old guy sitting
beneath a gray halo on the wall, ring of hair oil
and grime. Always here. Kicked cigarette butt
skittering like a rat. German Shepherd with nothing
it wants to sniff. Crowd pulled from every direction
to four doors, fast. Lady hoisting stroller up stairs,
guy, passing her glare, muttering, “It ain’t my
freakin’ kid.” A yawp and a man shuffling, no socks.
Forty Metro sections in the trash. Same stockings
on mannequin legs for the last 15 years. Rifles of
Guardsmen. No unattended packages. Every day
I forget to be very afraid.
A baby giggles, on average, 400 times a day.
I can help you add sand to your hourglass.
Darling, calling a poem “Untitled”? Why not hand out blindfolds at the gallery?
Church has gotten me wrong.
Think of me more as the cutest thing possible,
as if your all-time favorite dogs had time traveled and had a puppy –
and raising me is your only job.
I am the one exclamation point hidden in your encyclopedia!
In my next universe, hummingbirds will sound like thumb pianos.
I am that fountain you didn’t have time to visit
at the hilltop castle garden, and you probably won’t be back,
but you remember it more clearly than if you had thrown coins.
Caution: low flying owls, and expectations.
How often each year do you let the rain fall on your face?
When your dog is listening to you, he’s not frustrated,
he doesn’t wish he knew what you are saying. You sound to him
the way birdsong sounds to you. You’re simply chirping.
The stars are just glints shining through a blurry lens; I am the big thing shining behind.
You are wine for the eyes.
The Dying-in-Slow-Motion, The Woman Who Taught Me to Knit
The diminishing yarn ball dances out in fast joy
if I know I have more hanks, feel momentum,
see a landmark reached. No extra skeins here,
85-degree apartment, steady loss, new phrases
measure it: "Mechanical soft/nectar thick" diet,
"sponge pops" for oral hygiene, to clean those
buccal folds (between teeth and cheek) when
swallowing falters. Clean mouth reduces risks
of aspiration pneumonia (but wasn't to aspire
to hope?) if she chokes and inhales. "Ejection
fraction" for how much the heart spits out.
Where's her laundry basket? Pick up the dropped,
take a step, pick up more dropped, repeat. The lift
chair, bought to protect and assist, turns evil when
she plays with the controls, bruises her head, can't
talk for two days. Still recognizes the Irish sweater
she made me. What she has lost: writing, walking,
most talking, rolling over in bed, dialing, cutting
food, reaching the mouth, counting back by sevens.
Not chewing. Not the President, the day of the week,
the difference between me and my kids. Not laughing.
Not yet.
I'd want more than the weekly drive to the friend
or the doctor, the daily phone call. I fear four rooms
of valuables, banks, taxes, mourning work looming.
But I love my daughter more for her teenage kindness,
my husband more for heaving the wheelchair gently up
into our house for a birthday dinner. And then Mom
sang into the phone, "You Are My Sunshine," whole
first verse, no reason. I had hoped to understand more
by the end. Maybe that's enough.
I had the happiest birthday ever, after my dear one's awful news.
All my thoughts the previous month: new words: resection, alopecia,
neurasthenia, progression. Protocol, port-a-cath, immunocompromised,
palliative. But sledding with the children down Library Hill, I saw the trees
moving fast, dusky, smooth, cinematic, squealed, heard squeals, and barking,
and all I wanted was what the baby wanted - "more! again!" And I could comply.
The bourdon, the largest, deepest tone in a carillon, determines
its character, like the drone in a bagpipe, continuous low note all others
build from. When you were eleven your father died, her parents beat her often,
his mother moved away mid-childhood, I grew up with a very handicapped brother,
and we all keep living. Our songs turn minor and dissonant. Our songs weave themes
we never would have chosen. We hum them anyway. Often others join in, harmonizing.
I've always feared the dark, loved the nightlight, squinting at it,
watching iridescent patterns from one speck of brightness: company.
I hate the mechanical Santa, I hate the beige hospital walls, and commercials.
If I were dead in deep night, and could see them only once a week, they'd be my bliss.
Some birthdays I've grasped at slipping fertility, worried about thinning
hair, a bigger bunion, and why does my eyelid keep twitching. Now, as I skate
with knockwood healthy, balanced children, vertical, free, I feel (the illusion of,
perhaps) (the gift of, yes) as-yet-unnumbered months, the greatest imaginable present.
An anonymous quote in “Stories of Suffering and Survival,
Told in Words and Cast in Resin,” The New York Times
I made a plaster cast of my breast
and I had a ceremony with my husband
where I honored my breast for all it had given me —
in beauty, in pleasure,
in nourishing my two children.
Then I gave the cast to the sea for safekeeping.
As we stood on a rock by the edge of the ocean,
the storm clouds opened up and the rains poured down,
crying with me and showing me that the harsh medicine of surgery
would be healing.
The waves crashed over the rocks
and carried away my breast."
Tina Kelley’s third poetry collection, Abloom and Awry, came out in 2017 from CavanKerry Press, joining Precise (Word Press), and The Gospel of Galore, winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and reported for The New York Times for ten years, sharing in a Pulitzer for 9/11 coverage. Her writing has appeared in Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009. She won the 2014 New Jersey Poets Prize, and lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children.
