Romanticize Life Here
BY KRISTIN KOSTICK
People who die from jumping off bridges mostly die
because their bodies hit the water at a bad angle. My friend Josh writes poems
to a girl named Ramona, wailing her name throughout, Ramona,
Ramona, but Ramona
isn’t even real. In one poem
she jumped off a bridge and didn’t die, her body
swanlike, pitched at just the right angle. In another poem,
she is a small beetle, stealing across Josh’s sleeping face at night.
Is that true, Ramona? Ramona, I am stealing you.
I have questions only you can answer.
This friend of a friend I once knew in Alabama
hopped train cars for a few weeks when she was young and had dreadlocks and she said
sometimes she’d see one of the train people leaping into the cotton fields
and they’d steal food from nearby towns and every now and again
someone would try to rape you while you slept. One day her foot
got stuck in the machinery between boxcars and when the train braked
it was chopped right in half and she strapped it back together with duct tape.
Years later she named her kid Star or Astra or something celestial
but I didn’t see the connection. Romanticize life here, Ramona,
was something I read once on a bathroom wall with an arrow
pointing down into the toilet. What were you doing on that bridge, anyhow?
I imagine you leaning over the balustrade, reading missives
scrawled there, dark and unread. Here, romanticize.
Each day I cast out of myself whole paragraphs of memory. Last week
it seemed strange how many dead birds were in the streets.
These long summer days I take four cold showers in an afternoon and still
feel for a fifth. I sleep with the fan
full-blast upon my skin, drowning out
cicadas in the neighbors’ trees. I buy bumper stickers in towns I drive through:
Virginia is for Lovers or My Other Car
is a Georgia Peach. It makes me sad,
that protracted moment
in which a spider goes on weaving a web on your porch chair just before
you whack it with a shoe. Life, here. Last night, Ramona,
I was cleaning the mantle and found daisies
pressed in an old book. From what field? From what
life? Still in my possession:
seashells and seashells and seashells. From those beaches,
I never sent postcards, all of them now
nameless. Do you remember, Ramona,
what any of those missives said? Were you sad about something or
just following with your eyes and then unexpectedly with your body
the trajectory of a swooping bird? Morning and evening
my cortex casts out memories like so many fruit flies
vying for space on a ripening plum.
It is not the law of chaos but something like it
that says if four dissimilar things are in a room, say
a donkey, a book on the Roman Empire, some fireworks, a couch,
there is a high probability something will go
terribly wrong. For everything you add, that probability
increases exponentially. Ramona, I have questions. You
have answers. In tenements in the Far East, families
are getting rid of things because the houses are too crowded.
Everywhere on the streets:
old bookcases, mattresses. People have taken
to sleeping together on blankets, four at a time.
Soon there will be nothing in living rooms but kids and dogs
and lovers and the memory of lovers and then
no memory of anything at all.
People who die from jumping off bridges mostly die
because their bodies hit the water at a bad angle. My friend Josh writes poems
to a girl named Ramona, wailing her name throughout, Ramona,
Ramona, but Ramona
isn’t even real. In one poem
she jumped off a bridge and didn’t die, her body
swanlike, pitched at just the right angle. In another poem,
she is a small beetle, stealing across Josh’s sleeping face at night.
Is that true, Ramona? Ramona, I am stealing you.
I have questions only you can answer.
This friend of a friend I once knew in Alabama
hopped train cars for a few weeks when she was young and had dreadlocks and she said
sometimes she’d see one of the train people leaping into the cotton fields
and they’d steal food from nearby towns and every now and again
someone would try to rape you while you slept. One day her foot
got stuck in the machinery between boxcars and when the train braked
it was chopped right in half and she strapped it back together with duct tape.
Years later she named her kid Star or Astra or something celestial
but I didn’t see the connection. Romanticize life here, Ramona,
was something I read once on a bathroom wall with an arrow
pointing down into the toilet. What were you doing on that bridge, anyhow?
I imagine you leaning over the balustrade, reading missives
scrawled there, dark and unread. Here, romanticize.
Each day I cast out of myself whole paragraphs of memory. Last week
it seemed strange how many dead birds were in the streets.
These long summer days I take four cold showers in an afternoon and still
feel for a fifth. I sleep with the fan
full-blast upon my skin, drowning out
cicadas in the neighbors’ trees. I buy bumper stickers in towns I drive through:
Virginia is for Lovers or My Other Car
is a Georgia Peach. It makes me sad,
that protracted moment
in which a spider goes on weaving a web on your porch chair just before
you whack it with a shoe. Life, here. Last night, Ramona,
I was cleaning the mantle and found daisies
pressed in an old book. From what field? From what
life? Still in my possession:
seashells and seashells and seashells. From those beaches,
I never sent postcards, all of them now
nameless. Do you remember, Ramona,
what any of those missives said? Were you sad about something or
just following with your eyes and then unexpectedly with your body
the trajectory of a swooping bird? Morning and evening
my cortex casts out memories like so many fruit flies
vying for space on a ripening plum.
It is not the law of chaos but something like it
that says if four dissimilar things are in a room, say
a donkey, a book on the Roman Empire, some fireworks, a couch,
there is a high probability something will go
terribly wrong. For everything you add, that probability
increases exponentially. Ramona, I have questions. You
have answers. In tenements in the Far East, families
are getting rid of things because the houses are too crowded.
Everywhere on the streets:
old bookcases, mattresses. People have taken
to sleeping together on blankets, four at a time.
Soon there will be nothing in living rooms but kids and dogs
and lovers and the memory of lovers and then
no memory of anything at all.
KRISTIN KOSTICK is a poet and medical anthropologist doing research on HIV prevention and mental health in India, Africa, and Hartford, CT. Her work has appeared in the most recent Open Letters anthology and the Long River Review, and is forthcoming in Drunken Boat. She co-curates (with poet Andrea Henchey) a monthly reading series in Hartford that has recently featured notable poets including James Tate, Roger Bonair-Agard, Jon Sands, and Adam Golaski.