Three Poems

Brenda Coultas

AN AMERICAN MOVIE

SCENE 1

It’s okay, it’s all light, Jesus told me so.

—Uncle Bill, from American Movie
(draw out)                                       

This eye opens on Houston and Ave. A, on a mural of Princess Di, it reads:

“We fought for 200 years to throw off the yoke of British oppression. Die Di.”

The eye moves to Avenue A and 14th, mural of Princess Di and Mother Theresa, side by side.

Repeat after me:

“In Memory of royalty and holiness”

Audience repeats

“Rest in Peace”

Audience repeats

I met a man the week of back to back funerals whom I later married.

We watched both.

In the church was a basket full of prayers.

I read them.

What were people praying about, and were their prayers any different than mine?

I visit the stations of the cross

I have felt the power of prayer before.

This is written as one who’s gotten good at prayer.

I put my own in.

“Signed SWALCAKWS (sealed with a lick cuz a kiss won’t stick),

Brenda”

I move my lips, do you?

I wonder if I’m doing it right?

I say it in my head. Like this,

Dear God,

Please watch over us and please watch over my brother and my sisters and mom and dad

please watch over those in need

in Jesus’ name we pray,

Amen.

I say this every night.

Is it too dull to reach the universe?

Dear Universe,

Why do you hear Mayor Giuliani’s prayers and not mine?

Yours, Brenda

Dear Universe,

You must be a male

you are not unisex

you are just fashionably androgynous.

Sorry to bug you,    Brenda

I write poems for the public.

I call myself Brenda Coultas

I write public poems.

I write poems for twenty, that’s twenty people to a poem.

A man sells poems in the subway,

Published Poet is his name.

It costs whatever you want to give him.

I’m the same, its whatever you want to give me only I don’t want anything.

SCENE 2

The eye opens on a man who paints portraits of “retired” Beanie Babies:

Digger the Crab

Doby the Doberman

Doodle

Dotty the Dalmation

Ears

Echo

Fetch the Retriever

Flash the Dolphin

Fleece the Lamb

Flip the Cat

Floppity

Freckles the Leopard

Garcia the Tie-Dyed Bear

Glory the Bear

Goldie the Goldfish

Gracie the Swan

Grunt the Razorback Pig

Happy the Lavender Hippo

Hippity

Hoot the Owl

Hoppity

Inch the Worm

Inky the Pink Octopus

SCENE 3

Hi, I am a word that exists on the soles of your shoes,

Please stop walking on me.

Hi, I am a royal Fergie mug

I was chubby and engaged.

Now I’m skinny, divorced, chipped and stained.

Hi, I am a Cabbage Patch doll

preserved in the attic in my original wrapper.

I am so ugly I am cute. I look and feel like a fetus with an engorged head.

Hi, I am an adorable discontinued Beanie Baby.

I am the rarest Beanie Baby of them all.

Collectors will commit crimes in order to possess me

I fit in the hand like a small living dog.

Hello, I am a Pee Wee Herman doll

I have a soft body and a hard plastic head.

I know what I am but what are you?

A HORSELESS CARRIAGE

Since then’tis Centuriesand yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity

—Emily Dickinson, from #712

We traded some hay and got a pony.

But we were horseless

We got a good deal on a horse

We were full with the horse

The horse was an asshole

We sold the horse

We bought a car

But we were horseless.

I remember all the grave mowers. I used to follow Elise and his mules to the cemetery. They were majestic. Mules are pretty, people forget that. When he died I bought the old harnesses at auction. People took horse collars and put mirrors where the heads used to go. That was a fad. Everyone had harness and leather lying around that they needed to put some use to. Old oil lamps, railroad lanterns, these things look good with a plant sticking out of them. I once buried a treasure in Elise’s meadow. I had been reading about pirates. I was obsessed with finding buried treasure, since there was scant chance of finding buried treasure on a landlocked farm. I decided to make a mystery imagining someone finding it and wondering about whoever buried it. I took a cardboard box, put clues in it, a penny minted that year, a picture of me and my brother, a metal picture frame with curlicues that I now realize was Victorian. Once the field grew over, I could never find it again.

Tom, down the road, sold his horse buggies when I was a kid but I remember everyone talking about the auction. The buggies. Black carriages, stiff. Horseless now. Motorless. The end of buggies except for the Amish’s yellow, black and white tops.

There was Old man Hinkle who drove his horseless carriage so slowly that I’d pass him on my bike. He was headed down the road to where Herb and Buster held court on the front lawn in shell backed lawn chairs. Mary and Tootsie were in the house, a glass butter churn on the table. I had summer habits that kept me on the road, popping tar bubbles with a stick. (Old asphalt roads had pools of sticky tar, gets on your clothes and ruins them.) Breaking ponies. Fishing (in anyone’s pond). Exploring. The world could be as long as a mile or two. It was the way around, follow the road until you were back to where you began.

My grandparents were horseless, by the time I knew them. I have a dim photo of my grandpa driving a carriage. My grandma didn’t drive anything as far as I could tell, but she did like to call a bicycle “a wheel.” As in “Where are you going on that wheel?” Or “Put that wheel down and get over here.” Or “Hey, you on the wheel, come back here.” It was a uniquely horseless form of transportation.

Two farmers in abutting pastures died this fall. Neither of them owned horses. Cody B. in his 60’s died of skin cancer that metastasized into brain cancer. Harold, 83 who inherited the job from Elise, and meticulously mowed the cemetery with a tractor, died of stomach cancer this winter one month shy of the end of the century. Last summer, he wanted his usual garden put out. They put out a smaller one, knowing he’d never be able to see it. Now as it snows, I walk toward his grave. I imagine all of us, long horseless, walking.

INSIDE THE WEATHER

[16mm educational film titled Inside the Weather

Dumpster dived on 2nd St. and Ave. A. May 9, 00.

Note: This poem takes place in the Bowery]

I don’t have a 16mm projector so I’ll read it this way by hand

Take it apart put it back together again

I take it out and I put it back. Forward and reverse

There’s a thin spot where the real world shines through

A thin spot in thinning places from going back and forth.

This is some sort of silent reading

Weather is sometimes quiet and creepy crawls Manson-family-like

It’s raining outside, I go back to unreeling: A shot of an airplane.

Passengers buckle up, the captain greets them. Plane taxis, shots of

the plane and its belly. Passengers looking out window enjoying

marvelous weather. A planet appears in center of frame, then a

thousand frames of a curved cylinder maybe an engine. A strip of

sound on the side. Can’t hear it through fingers film breaks.

The weather is a Bowery bum penis tip urinating on a trash can.

Jars of penis tips like Planter’s roasted nuts

I enjoy formerly living things in lab jars.

Mr. Peanut walks down the Bowery, you can smell his roasted nuts

Touched by tip of Bowery bum penis, tried not to look just felt tip

touch lightly on neck.

Touching cocks back and forth on the tips.

I take them out and put them back

Holding film up to a 100 watt bulb, burn eyeballs. Looking at the

plane in the waves of the sky. More earth and now night. Could

they be circling the globe? Could they no longer be earth citizens,

rather citizens of the air.

Unspool reel with pencil in center smell of film chemicals is

nothing like the smell of clouds or the sun or rain or hail. The

smell is vinegary like a hundred dirty socks on the feet of fifty

Bowery bums.

Once I was in the sky thinking about the people in the film about

weather. Once I was in an airplane, too, smiling and pointing like

happy people in a film about the joys of weather.

Press play, a recording of Hoosier rain sounds.

My lips crackle.

Turn on rain cam www.Raincam.com. The voice spoke through

tiny transistor radio. A blue and silver transistor radio in its

original box, the top eaten off by rats. It said loudspeakerlike

“People of the Bowery, take shelter now.”

A school of blind albino fish swim inside an underground lake in

Mammoth Cave. They say “It’s all about the weather this season.”

This is tedious work, and rereeling is tuff

film twists like a pig’s tail.

I think the weather was better when I was a child.

I put the hailstones in the freezer for posterity, take them out when

company comes. My grandpa’s hailstones made the newspaper,

with measuring tape for scale. A catheterized penis was the last thing

I saw of him. And I asked “What’s in the center, a fuzzy

wuzzy bear, bubble gum, a pearl or a rock-hard cock?”

A Pile of Conflicting Emotions About Garbage

[Companion 1 to Inside the Weather]

Disgust, amusement, joy, curiosity, desire to uncover, pleasure, looking to garbage for clothing and entertainment not food, not yet. Can’t eat from it because I get paranoid that food is tainted or rotted or just gross, can wear the dumpstered clothes after washing with brief moments of paranoia because of their unknown origin. The origins of my phobia is clearly connected to the Tylenol murders, I had to check each food item carefully for taint around that time. And threw much into garbage. Bradley, our squatter hero, knows to comb out the good to eat garbage.

An Inventory of an Elaborate Pile of Garbage at 2nd Ave. and Second St. June 1, 00

[Companion 1 to Inside the Weather]

Blacken tea kettle like one I have at home, couch with living man, eyes closed, his dog and runny dog shit on sidewalk. Cardboard boxes, lamp shade, the filter basket of a Drip-O-Later, a wooden serving tray with loose bottom. A mouse’s body with eyes open and intact. Styrofoam peanuts, 2 balsa wood whiskey bottle boxes, thin wooden fruit basket. Wooden construction walls with Post No Bills painted gray. A piece of paper ordering the closing of the Mars Bar garden. A man setting out 4 candles, and 2 sets of wrapped paper plates. A junkie couple, white, late 30’s, covered in scabs and tattoos with dog, had constructed a lean-to over the couch and slept that day. I thought about what brought them to this moment and thought “Be in the moment,” thought “Be here now,” thought “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Thought “Shit happens.” And began to think “Today is the first day of the rest of …” Thought, this could be the best day of their lives.