Two poems by Risa Denenberg

On Becoming a Geode

I left high school pregnant,
tiny pebble in the chaotic boot of the sixties.

Banished for smallminded things—
skipping class, protesting war, French kissing
in the girls’ room.

It was all so very polite and meaningless.
Stuff your leather jacket, your sandals, your poetry books.
We’re not interested. In you.

I left home the day my father slapped my face,
called me a slut. I don’t always make it
out the door before a fist or two.

Our bodies were formed

to be discarded.
to sleep in vacant lots.
to hide inside a crater.
to practice restraint.
to wait hundreds of millions of years.

to learn

how our interiors are filled with others’ needs.

 

(this photo of) My Grandmother

whom I forever never met      (my lips that never brushed her cheek)   who says
in a language I don’t speak, I didn’t know you could do that.   I have only this photo.
I go right to the eyes    they are green      (although the photo is black and white)
I go from eyes             to the slender philtrum         and back to the eyes.
Silence is her blessing.      She is a costume, a gesture of herself.    She is me.
I swap her headdress            for my backwards baseball cap      (black with Seattle
written in pink script)                her arthritic fingers                     so young,
so young                                   dead at 54                   Something is missing.
Yes, something is always missing.                  Because time and space are
the silence                  of questions                like a storm    of misunderstandings.
Such otherness, even in kin.                   Did you know that mother bears
will sometimes kill their young?               That cichlids hold their eggs
in their mouths                  while the male sprays them with sperm?
But she is kin:                    my seed/my eggs/my mouth/my eyes/my philtrum.
And what I can’t quite see              in the periphery:      the pillows of repose
the lute strings                               the pages
which are her undergarments         but
was my broken tooth                     and
is my irascible brother                    also
was my silent father                       who
is still his mother’s eyes                  my father’s mother’s eyes.
My eyes.                   The otherness of others is a type of silence.
Have you ever tried to quilt the sun?                        When you are done
turn the book                        (the one you are holding in your left hand)
to page 68 where                  you will find an announcement
of my death.                 You are not allowed to cry.