Mark Bibbins

Mark Bibbins was born in 1968 in Albany, New York, received his MFA from The New School, and has lived in New York City since 1991. A founding editor of the journal LIT, he has taught at SUNY-Purchase, and now teaches in The New School’s MFA program. Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review and elsewhere, including the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2004 and Great American Prose Poems. Bibbins received a Lambda Literary Award for his collection of poems Sky Lounge (Graywolf, 2003), and was awarded a 2005 Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Just Yesterday

Before prayer in the schools we had the Crusades

and we cleaned out the stockpot once a year.

Virtually everything we ate induced narcosis,

a condition we often confused with god.

Some told of a river that ran outside the city walls

and of how it moved to avoid their touch,

a giant serpent twisting forever away. If it wasn’t the devil

it was the work of the devil, like everything else we wanted.

Remorse held us together until we died young

and most of us never realized we were mammals—

indeed we were suspicious of birds but rats, well, rats

we found charming, with their eyes so full

of sympathy, their need for warmth like our own. We also

wanted love to suffice. Flies that collected on the lesions

of the dying: angels one and all: no one could be too careful.

It seemed a flood was forever rinsing ideas from my tongue

so I said nothing or spoke louder, I was always drowning.

I couldn’t have changed anything.

All right there was the alchemist

and I loved him but I could not save him.

Once I dreamt of electricity. Was this the river,

the one that altered its course like a wounded thing?

We had no trees, only sticks.

Huge gears turned in the sky.

All but Lost

My love lives down by the butchery,

at night he keeps coins on his eyes.

When we were still called children

I clothed myself in hides and relished

the generators that shook the ground.

Tesla didn’t like jewelry, couldn’t bear

to touch human hair and claimed

to have destroyed his sexuality

at the age of forty but of course everyone

was doing that then.

I sang Piaf songs

till they burned my tongue—precocious is

as precocious does—the French

all but lost to me now. Fate

presented itself as a ghost I could smell

under the floorboards as I listened

to mice gnawing on books I had

already memorized. When the doctor put

leeches on my torso he made no effort

to hide his arousal or the anisette

on his breath. He said I would

not die yet. He said the martyr’s

a murderer locked in a room

till the saint slips him the key.

Groupie

All the money I lied about, the makeshift

stomach pump—forget everything

and the way to where it happened. The guitar

god wants me/has me/ditches me/calls me

from the road and can I wire some money, he’s

gotten into a situation: a barren tour-bus fridge

so can I meet him in Trenton and bring a bag.

The next nude reveals herself

and she’s thin in the way the age demands—

not conventionally pretty, not conventionally shaved,

but a rail to rail against if there’s time and there is.

I’m at work on a new line of lipsticks—Foie Gras,

Primordial Soup, Contusion—everyone who tries them

gets beautiful.

The girls and I wanted to be famous,

instead we love an astronaut who blows

sunshine up our asses from halfway to its source. Fuck him.

Our supply lines have snapped—no more K, no more X,

no more. I take comfort in gossip, the usual

gossip, but different: this one stitched a quilt of moths,

another painted all his rooms gold. We, the girls and I,

we pull the wings off swan boats, follow our favorite

to the stars and the capsule in which we keep

recipes we’ve saved for our successors so they do not starve.

Slutty

We couldn’t get near the bathroom

with all the models

holding back their hair

over the porcelain bowls.

The chef barely knew how to fling

parsley, so in the end    no one mourned

the hors d’oeuvres’ demise.

The champagne was another story.

A great mystery

to me as well you should be,

your legs seemed longer when

you cartwheeled under the streetlights:

Straddle me and I’ll give you

all the gossip, all the sugar.

—What would one do

with all the sugar anyway?

Caress can still be the right word,

the streets          dark and aflash

with rain    sliding through the city

on its way. A third party wants

in, that warmth. You love

the noise stars make when they fall.

In the morning              we are knocked around

by the wind          of approaching trains.

You play the drawn-on eyebrow,

you play the figure-me-out—

I’d like something too

to tear at me.