Maureen Seaton, diode v2n2

table of contents

MAUREEN SEATON

Fibonacci Batman

Batman, you are bigger than a palm tree.

Batman, you are bigger than a palm tree.
You are Egyptian with your ears

Batman, you are bigger than a palm tree.
You are Egyptian with your ears
and your pretty gold belt.

Batman, you are bigger than a palm tree.
You are Egyptian with your ears
and your pretty gold belt.
The sea laps your thighs, Batman.
Look how long your gloves are.

Batman, you are bigger than a palm tree.
You are Egyptian with your ears
and your pretty gold belt.
The sea laps your thighs, Batman.
Look how long your gloves are.
You could lick a cloud you’re so tall.
No one is scared of you, Batman.
Everyone cruises along in a pleasure boat beside you.
When you finish your story, they all laugh.
Ha ha, Batman, they say, ha ha.
Your hair curls beneath your bat hat, Batman.
Your toes prod little islands.
Your wings flap around like fruitlessness.

New Mexico

I am all about glass, said the glassblower to the woman who was all about self.

I am in ruins, said the woman, and everyone fears my teeth with their stars and planets.

We went to Bandolier and climbed into the fragile dwellings. The forest had burned down around us and we’d driven through crying.

“You may break a doll or an airplane a thousand feet high in the sky over a desert.”—Yoko Ono

It makes sense to be here in the orange porch with the ruby dog and the sun kicking up heat. Broad daylight. I have small and large problems and I’ve made large and small promises. Because I am alive I wear clothes. Because my head is round I sometimes wear a hat.

The women who sleep in the ground like marigold seeds don’t mind the mountain’s mumbling. They have embraced utility and settled down with it. Their bones shine with usefulness.

Leaving Rikers

In the time it takes to build a 12th generation fractal, I’ve broken the record for the most blood swallowed in a lifetime.

I can’t bring myself to pitch a number that might correspond to naught.

We spored and blues’d, bloodhounds of the Sierpinski Triangle.

What will work will work in the end or it won’t, said the little black lamb to its little white partner. We are born to bleat. We are songs of Rip Van Winkle come home from prison, where he slept for fifteen years in solitary refinement.

I want mathematics! I want the grids and the exxes of quadratic equations.

I could build a whole mansion of fractals and still not know the meaning of self, I thought, as I watched the family enfold the prodigal. He was beautiful this way, alive, and everyone came rushing in to touch him, to scrape his skin with their fingernails.

This, I thought, is a kind of measure of love, but what kind, and what measure?

When you’re gone I’ve got more books in bed than a child bride. They lounge around me with their pages fallen open. I respond in kind, always ready for a good chapter, always near the end of another.

Freedom, I said, and looked.

Triptych: Death Sentences

Before lizards grew so big I would look around at the way others fell like flies, and I’d evolve into anything lizards wouldn’t eat—kimchi or edamame.

I got the idea that I would stop by each cross and let something go, that sometimes it would be real and sometimes the dying thing would be me—or else my shoe.

I can’t promise your head will fit in my house or that your hat will fit in my pocket, or that the color of your dress will work in this green and weepy place.

Glinda

I’ve often picked web-footed partners or sibilant ones that required special hearing on my part. A clock in a Petri dish. A Dairy King.

Often, the cause of my attraction has been unpremeditated, like sodium, or magnified to many degrees of powerlessness, like Poncho Villa.

The replications I’ve squandered resemble my old high school almost sweetheart, John Meany. Before I turned so gay.

I was slinky with whores, a chanteuse of whores, borrowed from whores, the Jung of whores. I was blu blew blue with whores.

Often it was just someone playing with wigs or the idea of wigs, throwing a wig party or, later, being in the mood for wig-like silence.

Before that there were some I chose and others I thought looked too callous. I couldn’t wrestle them all, not in this getup.

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Maureen Seaton’s sixth poetry collection, Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2009. A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, is recently out from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her previous collections include Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon, 2004), winner of the Audre Lorde Award; Little Ice Age (Invisible Cities Press, 2001); and Furious Cooking (University of Iowa, 1996), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review, New Republic, Green Mountains Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals, both on- and off-line. The recipient of an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart, she teaches at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.