TONIGHT [friday] I am competing in the NUYORICAN POET’S CAFE RUN-OFF SLAM. The first place winner of this slam makes the Nuyorican 2012 Slam Team. I could use you in the audience. Either way, it’s a guaranteed three poems from yours truly. 9PM. 236 East Third ST Btwn Aves B&C. 

*IF YOU COME I’LL SELL YOU/SIGN MY BOOK.

“When a reporter tried to compliment legendary feminist Gloria Steinem on her 40th birthday by telling her, “Oh, you don’t look 40!” Steinem replied simply, “This is what forty looks like. We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”

I am reminded of this quote when reading “After the Witch Hunt,” the debut book of poetry by 23-year-old poet Megan Falley. Falley is so grounded and clear-eyed in her perspectives, so attentive and nuanced in her details, and so sharp and telling her understanding of the world she exists in, that the instinct is to say that she is a poet wise beyond her years. But if there is something that Falley wishes us to know, perhaps it is that — to paraphrase Gloria Steinem — this is what 23 looks like, and that we’ve been lying for so long, who would know?

Falley navigates sometimes beautiful, but often harshly cruel world that meets young women the moment they booted from childhood, when “breasts arrived / as a kind of currency.” Falley exposes the confusing messages women receive from the media — in poems like “To the Women Competing on E! Entertainment’s Hit Reality Television Show, ‘Bridalplasty’” and “Penelope Pussycat Finally Speaks” a persona piece written from the perspective of the black cat relentless pursued by the cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew, who “pretended [her] refusal was foreplay.” — as well as their own family and friends — such as the mother who excuses a bullying boy’s behavior, telling the narrator “It probably means he likes you.”

Another rich theme that runs through the book is the risks — both beautiful and grim — that you face when allow yourself to fall in love. While Falley celebrates love in her work, she also speaks candidly about the dangers she found herself in when she fell into an abusive relationship. “Tell us who did this to you” she writes in the poem “Family”, “What shade of dusk he wears, / the floorboards he haunts— which / borough? We’d like to meet // the one who turned your body into dangling meat.”

Falley explores the full spectrum of what it means to be young and woman in 21st century America. Candid, grounded, beautifully written and undeniably real, I highly recommend “After the Witch Hunt” to anyone who wants to know (or be reminded of) what being twenty-three really looks like.”

-Cristin O’Keefe Apotowicz

You can buy or review my book HERE. 

National Poetry Month 30/30 Challenge Home Stretch Late Night Postings.

ENVY
After Sabrina Adikes

She is the only girl
my brother loves.
She is iridescent
and thin, as a butterfly’s
gown. She is staying
in the house for a week,
pushing her food around
on the plate, laughing
at perfect decibel. Spraying
his sheets with her perfume,
adequately named Love Spell,
so even after she leaves
she doesn’t leave.
When they are out
of the house, I sneak
into her cosmetic bag;
it is a candy store
for the homely
and plain. I steal
a palette of eye shadow.
(Still have it. Still 
sometimes try to paint myself
her shade of worth.)
A baseball game is on
and she is so perfect
pretending, convincingly,
that she cares.
The boys want to
carry the better TV
from upstairs
to the living room.
When she offers to help
someone utters No,
Megan can help.
You, you can be
the antenna. 

NAPOWRIMO 30/30 Home-stretch poems.

GLUTTON

It is Spring in Nineteen-Eighty-Something.
A man and a woman are on their fifth date.
The trees are pouting their cherry blossom lips
at every passerby. Calves and shoulders flirt
out of hibernation. The sun charms freckles
from beneath the skin like a lighter to tics.
The birds come back North, to New York,
and the Ice Cream Truck toots its American Anthem.
Hypnotizing children out of their houses, away
from their baseball diamonds, they wave their allowance
money like the tongue of a hungry dog. The couple
on their fifth date watch  as a chubby boy teeters
down the street, the flesh tire of his middle poking out
between a striped t-shirt and khaki shorts
that don’t exactly meet. He sings his order:
a double cone. Chocolate and vanilla. Cherry-dipped.
Rainbow sprinkles. The cone looks like a carnival. And right
before he is about to lick his first heavenly lick, a surprise
of April’s cruel wind slaps it from his meaty fist. The street
is a massacre and the truck’s music is surely serenading another 
town by now. The woman on the fifth date knows there is nothing
more tragic than this. But the man on the date throws
his head back and laughs. Don’t worry he bends down
to the boy. You didn’t need it anyway. Pokes his lard.
A year later, the woman marries the man regardless,
even though she tells this story as if she said I do
to a convicted murderer. They will have a daughter. 
Inside her will live the little boy with the spilled cone. 
He will always be hungry. She will have her mother’s heart
and will always feed him. She inherits the venom tongue
of her father. After I bury the boy in food, more, more
I taunt him. You didn’t need that, fatty. Look at all that
chocolate on your face. Whose going to love you now?

-Megan Falley

Trying to write seven poems on the last day of April to finish up 30/30. Farewell, National Poetry Month. It’s been really real.

GREED

I was given a mother
and a father. I wanted them
in the same house. Given half
a brother. Yanked his lost twin
back by the shadow. Given a cat,
her three litters of kittens.
Hid them in my dress pockets.
The mailbox. Slippers. For weeks,
I kept them all. Demanded a dog.
The whole zoo. Scooped up the lost
Chihuahua on our doorstep. Haven’t
let her down since. I was given privilege
skin and asked forgiveness. The sun
and moon sharing the same sky.
Given breasts, asked for ass.
Given smart, asked for thin,
for buffet, couch,dessert
and waistline. Had a man
who loved me quiet as snow.
Hunted thunder. Got it.
Asked for distance. Granted.
From everyone. Asked for friends,
made them up. My life was spared,
I asked for death. Given death,
I asked for more. To relive
each morsel of ache. Given paper,
plume, unbound language. 
Asked for spotlight. Stage time.
Your undivided attention. Wrote
a book. Wanted spine. To feel it all.
For everyone else
to feel it too.

Trying to write eight poems on the last day of April to finish up 30/30. Thank you to Rachel McKibbens for the prompt. Farewell, National Poetry Month. It’s been really real.

WRATH

The star of his funeral
is my face, stoic as a stillborn
whose mother suffered
punches to the gut. 

The weeping girls with their black lace
argue over who gets to be The Widow.
They brew a tornado of shaving razors,
steak knives, sick needles
and huff it my way.
 
Curse my face
and its drought of sadness.
Spit why are you even here?
Waiting for a single tear,
even a flashof tooth.

I approach his neat corpse,
grab the crotch of his pants
where he once kept his weapon,
hard. Utter to make sure
he’s really dead. 

With that, the stitching
of their skirts pop, letting down
the hems of their dresses
to conceal their ashamed knees,
bloody from kneeling
at his shrine.

When the paparazzi tells this story,
they make sure to mention I did not wear black,
but a bonfire.

These are my poems for 30/30, a challenge where poets write 30 poems in 30 days during the month of April. I’m going to stop prefacing them with apologies from here on out. 

LAMENT OF RETURNING HOME
for New Zealand

I saw the Headquarters of the Verb.
I saw a bronze statue with his toes curled forever
over the edge of a pier, just like everyone else.
I saw a rainbow drying out on a clothesline.
Three sting rays whistle by my calves. A ceiling
of ferns. I saw an outdoor cat so often,
he became a landmark. Meet me at Meow-Meow,
one o’ clock. I saw my first didgeridoo at a party
and took it to my mouth like a teenager.
I saw a Bob Dylan impersonator. I saw too much
whiskey and saw Bob Dylan. I saw a picture
of Bob Dylan’s girlfriend. I saw more whiskey,
and myself not caring. I saw an opportunity
and snatched it like a firefly in a city of dusk.
I saw a steering wheel on the right side of a car.
I saw six Americans mistake the windshield wipers
for the turn signal. I saw metaphor in that. I saw girls
snatch seashells off the shore like they were robbing
a convenience store. I saw the back of a cop car
from inside. Saw a volcano, climbed it. Saw a glacier,
climbed it. Saw a canon preserved from an old war,
climbed it. Saw a tire swing and me leaving my body
to fly again and again into that living postcard.
I saw signs for free food and followed them.
I saw signs for live music and followed them.
I saw a string of Hare Krishnas and followed them.
Saw their meals, their chutneys, their quinoa, their curry,
their vegetables shimmied from the earth. Saw their pomegranate
teas, their African chai, their decaf everything. Their 5AM
prayer. Their yoga. I saw them in, and out.
I saw cow dung and carried it to the garden.
I saw flowers grow from shredded newspaper.
The metaphor. I saw a sunset made of sherbert
and licked it. I saw a horses’ eyes upclose and I saw
the wet universe inside them. I saw a map and the perfect
hitchhiking route. I saw a lumberjack in a white van pull over.
I saw myself hop inside. I saw the trust of a child. I saw him
drive us three hours out of his way and not
kiss us. Not try and make himself a sweater
of our skin. I saw a true human favor and saw myself
terrified. So tell me—how am I supposed to come back?
How am I supposed to unsee such beauty? How am I supposed
to see a man in new york city catcall me into his car
and not see the lumberjack’s soft heart?
How am I supposed to see this landfill and not squint
until it’s a glacier? How am I supposed to see this
glass of water, and not jump in?