Bra-Burning Series // Adding to the Wreck

I have signed all of my poems
Jessica M. Lundquist.
That is my name.


But upon consideration of the Book of Myths
and all who have gone before me –
namely, George, Harper Lee, and Adrienne herself


and in keeping with the constructs
of an archaic, disoriented
and slow-advancing society


I think I will employ a fitting alias; perhaps
J. Lundquist, or even
J. M.

La Marcha (The March)

        The revolution came to me muffled at first, sounding from five stories below outside a closed patio door. The rhythmic

BOOM! Boom! BOOM! Boom!

beckoned me out to the balcony. No sooner had I slid the screen aside than the drums, in honest and brutal clarity, attacked me entirely. Pounding in my ears, echoing in my brain, vibrating up my shins, their bursts scattered into every particle of frigid air and settled into every crevice of brick. I had emerged from the box of the apartment into a world of shouted symphony, of tribal roar.

        There must have been a thousand marching, clustered and organized, eyes on fire and voices projected in song. The masses, each led by a single amplified voice, were separated into distinct ballads of equality and great, shining banners:

CONFEDERACIÓN GENERAL DEL TRABAJO

UNIÓN SINDICAL ARGENTINA

CONFEDERACIÓN OBRERA ARGENTINA

        Forward they marched: a colony of whites and morochos, of mothers and children, of leaders, of pot-bangers, of tambourine-thumpers – the working Argentina – toward their lady Cristina along La Avenida de Mayo.

        Though the wintry August air drew my arms across my chest, I stayed rooted to the balcony’s edge and leaned out as far as the railing allowed. Transfixed, I watched, I absorbed, I dissolved into this union march.

        I snapped moments through a slim Nikon until I forfeited the effort to capture a magic elusive. I recorded a segment of blaring war cry that I later discovered rendered choppy and incoherent. I watched until my eyes pooled with tears in combat against the cold.

        It was one of many, this march; but be as it may a mere line in a book, I’ll exist behind the words. This march raged below me on this evening as I stood, melding into it outside an old apartment on that avenue. I am there in the part you will never read – in the part indescribable – leaning out over the rail of a balcony five stories up, eager not to miss a blink of history in the making.

For Defense of the Lord God Omnipotent

So you know your god you’ve got him in a book
and you read words attribute speculate magnify
flip to a page and what does it say it must
apply quite specifically metaphorically to this moment
of your existence in some cosmic way you’ve got it
all figured you’ve bottled him put him in your bread you
feel so close you could touch him gold-plated and
goosebumps up your spine
taste of bitter vine and repression oh what a relief
to tell a man in garb what you did on Monday this Monday
next Monday next year but it’s fine you’ll always have this screen
to shade your eyes and words of absolution as you sit there
in your pew and feel a millisecond’s doubt Buddhism Syria
lesbians innocent Mexicans starving Africans roadside bombs
revelation
and the fall
you human how you must know
you know nothing at all.

Ghosts Revisited

Yes, the nerves are like tombs,
but there has been no death --
save the many repetitions
of a strangling in the depths

A submersion
and resurface
and a strangling once again

Four months on,
strapped to my shoulders, it remembers --
still rattling the coins
I scooped up that December

"Just take all that"
from the desk where they sat --
so I scooped them up from you.

Now each time they sound
in their pocketed place --
sift out memories
I'd not dreamed to erase

The clamor I kept just to
go back to you --
but the small pocket wore
and it shrunk -- and I grew.

So I emptied the coins,

but went back to you --

An absence,
a ghost
and echoes without proof.

Tangible the Solidarity

The nights began --

A too-spacious twin bed, all the spaces
of the still square screaming
               tangible the solidarity

suffocating, the openness --

body smell of you clinging
    bittersweet,
          precarious to the pillow.

From inside,
in my place
    against the wall,
with my arm laid across the right side
feeling phantom remnants --

and in the daytime, the remnants were true
in tiny, wiry
black pieces of you
missing from their frizzy whole.


The sheets with all the colored spots
went unwashed
      and unwashed
           for weeks
                   into months --

the scent all but imperceptible
    still --
even after burying deep
and inhaling
full.

Replaced with my own.

Obstinate body laying claim on the space.


And soon I followed suit,
letting me sprawl across
           into your borrowed domain.

while, like the musk,
your memory seeped
from me
with steady takeover
    and desperate push
of my own feeble,
                        needy mind.

October 21, 2012

seven years ago today you died and i imagine they found you in a heap on the kitchen floor but who were they and they told me you had a brain aneurysm but i wondered if they lied to me because i was fifteen just fifteen years old and i lost you i lost you someone you shouldn't lose until you're forty and have a life of your own settled but you're never ready to lose your mother or that gardenia lotion she wears or the constant softness of her skin or the sound of her voice when she calls you maria because that was her name for you and no one else or her laugh that laugh you hear sounding from your own voice box sometimes and you still don't know all of what you share with her what mysteries lie in your own body inside your own head the psychology of someone mentally ambiguous you have inherited a million traits and you miss every single one you shared with her even her bad ones you miss because if you still had to deal with them there would still be a chance to fix her but now there is nothing and she is ashes in an urn under the ground and a memory just a memory and whatever you carry on of her whatever i carry on of her whatever i carry on of you.


eyes open for any sign of you you left me a sign at your birthday the kid's shirt with your tombstone verse on the back i thought i picked the right one because it felt right and i almost cried right there in the store when i saw it the sign i knew it had come from you on your day and today is your day too today and tomorrow and the next day will all be your days because they didn't know what day to pick for your official day of death they thought it was the 21st they found you later they found you on the 23rd so they thought you died two days before that two whole days you were there waiting to be discovered and picked up and taken care of but there was nobody not until two days later and that haunts me mom that haunts me because i am your flesh and i wasn't there and you were gone you passed without notice the world kept turning just like it did after i found out the world kept turning and that was unfair everyone's lives went on and some people were really happy and that was so unfair and i still had everyday thoughts along with the surreal thoughts i had those thoughts that are weightless and the ones about you that weighed me down and wouldn't allow me to move like glaciers that i tried to cry out they were like big cold glaciers inside me that pushed all my organs down and made me 100 pounds heavier and i cried cried cried cried tried to cry it out nothing went away it's just a weight you carry the rest of your life it's just like chains connected from you to me there are chains connecting you and me but it's hard because i'm here and you're there that big "there" that i have no concept of and i don't know where you are but the chains keep me close.

La Llanura Pampeana

Blackened trees line the hills

of la llanura pampeana

expanse of swaying softness

blurred as we barrel on

and I am lost in the blue

where all the tips meet the sky

fixed in a twilight state of mind

then for something in the way

the night cloaks the day

el Rio de la Plata

rushing port side

I am met by a moment

of abrupt infinity.

And I count myself wise

while feeling plenty green

to have arrived at understanding

misunderstood things –

Así it came to me

from behind smudged glass

that every success and

every sadness

all the strangers with stories I’ve passed

all the sheets tucked in and

the how-are-yous

doubts and vices

and coffee spoons

all assemble together in the most

precarious way

to measure a life

fragilely

and with purpose unknown.

I look to where

the black meets the blue

release the worries

purposes

and belief I have

any clue -

into the river

still rushing on its way

here in this moment

as the night meets the day.