Verdad Magazine Volume 16
Spring 2014, Volume 16
Poetry by Dana Roeser
Be Where Your Hands Are
Be where your
hands are
my friend Anna
declared in
the Sunday
night
“Surrender to
Win” twelve-
step meeting.
I am
where my
arm
is. Because my rust-
colored vintaged
heathered
whatever-it-is—dry-
cleaned—arm
still has
one pristine white
stain like
a powdery
fingerprint from where
the original
bit
of ectoplasm
essence life
force prana
jism—blood—landed. The
lobster had
been so
recently alive. It was
scalding orange persimmon
piping hot I took
the nut cracker
lobster cracker and with
my race
knowledge from
40 years ago
when I
had a life of
privilege (though
in my
misery I didn’t
know it)—
and lobsters—
cracked the widest
point of the claw
I could grasp
in my cracker/vice
and squeezed.
Out flew
the glob of snot,
white and surrounded
by a splash of clear
fluid. Cervical
mucus. Fertilized
egg. It struck
my—dry cleaned—
arm. (I had
debated
whether to
wear that
shirt!) A
white spot
in a wet
areola; three
times at least
I went to the
kitchen and
patted my arm
with a water-soaked
dish cloth,
or sponge. Fat lot
of good the
tiny
plastic “lobster bib”
did! Still, I was
so grateful
it wasn’t
melted butter. I saw
them
in the
kitchen. They
weren’t running
around. They
were confined
like liquor
bottles vertically
in individual
compartments
in a cardboard
box. They had
been
shipped from
Maine. They had
thick rubber
bands on their
claws, of course. I paid
$20 for mine
and it was
delivered to
my place
at the table. I saw
the trim athletic
woman—from
my high school graduating
class, as were
the
rest of them—
“Kim,” I think,
take
them one at
a time from
the crate
to the kettle
with tongs. Somebody
looked. She
said, Don’t.
She was Hephaestus
metal worker
at the forge
and what she did
there was
not for
the tourist.
Oh, I know
it. I know
what sort of
grim business
I was involved
with. And
I wanted to
fork that
prehistoric mythic primal
brilliant
thing, crack the moment
open and find
that interstice/juncture
where it had
so recently
fought to live.
Nail the moment
to the moment. Something
to the present. These were
women I had not
seen in 40 years
and did not
think to see.
Shadowy figures
with hockey sticks,
lacrosse, capable of
conjugating
Latin and solving
complex equations.
Remembered
only as
spirit attendants
to my unhappiness. In
blazers and
tunics wearing
their cleated athletic
shoes,
traversing fields with hair
flying or talking
in the locker
room about getting
into Princeton.
After
the jism
accident, I found
I had
survived. I prided myself
on removing—
with precision
instrument tiny twin-
tonged fork—
the inner claw-shaped
meat from each claw—
and then
the tail meat—
intact. A sculptural mold
of the outer
enameled red
“mortal coil.”
They didn’t
tell me
if Kathy cried
out. I know
even four months
ago the last
time I saw her
her life force
was waning
and I didn’t
think
her capable
of crying or
anything else. We
laughed
drily. As in
the old days,
only nine or
so years
after those
I shared with this
mélange of women
I’d graduated
from high
school with and was
now
convening with
on the Jersey
shore,
however many hundreds of miles
from my
Indiana home.
But I didn’t even mention
the couple of
years
I spent drinking red wine
and whatever
with her
and her then-
husband—and watching
“Dallas.” Or the
time, before that,
before he came
into the picture,
even earlier, after
Kurt left me, when
we sat on her
sofa at 2001 Minor
Lane, vegetative
in the heat
or loaded my
car (she didn’t
drive until
she was over forty)
with yellow
beach chairs
from K-Mart, beach towels,
the New York Times,
and
our laundry bags and
set off
for her acquaintance’s
apartment pool. We did
eventually get
caught, mid-
Times and laundry load.
Do lobsters
cry out?
I just had the worst
glimmer of a
recollection
that they cried. But the
internet says
it’s “simply”
steam being released from
their shells. The
din of the reunited
school mates—
all women! a plus!—was
so loud
I wouldn’t
have heard them. We
got skunked
later through the
open window;
I wondered
if the overpowering stench
meant there’d been
a transliteration,
transculturation, a
lobster metamorphosis!
Transfiguration, tran-
substantiation . . . no more
anthropomorphosis! The women
had their
own authority. At 58, or -9,
each had
her own
tragedy engraved
(except the one
who’d worked
in an office
her whole
life and
lived on
the DelMarVa
peninsula—I
only learned
last night
what that
stands for!—was that
her tragedy?)
and hence
each was
inordinately
empathic.
I never learned
the details about
Kathy’s death
or about my
dying friend
Marty’s.
Marty said she wanted
to be remembered
as she was
alive. And not
in-between, not
on the seam,
suffering. So I don’t
know if at
a certain
moment she squirted
out her
life force
in a glob. I know
she was mean
to the nurses
at Clarion Arnett.
Maybe
agreeable Kathy
found
it in herself
to kick ass
in the hospice
she was in for those
last couple of weeks.
There was
a woman, Carrie, at
the beach reunion,
whose child
had died nine
years ago
in an accident. Had been pulled
straight out
of this life.
I don’t
know if
at the dinner she ate
the food of the
gods, or
underworld,
one of the
little Jesuses
in the kitchen
the squeaking
hissing furious
lobster. If
when she was
dying
Kathy
cried out, perhaps
it was just
vapor escaping simply.
About the poet's work: Acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland says that “Dana Roeser’s lanky poems are neck-deep in life, and relentlessly intent on learning the truth. She has her own charming and muscular prosody; she tells lively, moving stories; but it is the determined persistence of their very human speaker which drives the poems.” Rodney Jones, recent winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, says that her “overarching theme is individual, feminist, contemporary: how does a woman know herself apart from convention and duty?” Dana Roeser delivers to us a world filled with cars breaking down, young children throwing up, a mother dying, women in their underwire bras getting struck by lightning—all the usual, casual, catastrophic events of our lives folded together with other foreign objects into a child’s crazy King Cake.
BIO: Dana Roeser is the author of three books of poetry: Beautiful Motion (2004) and In the Truth Room (2008), both winners of the Samuel French Morse Prize, and The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, winner of the Juniper Prize (University of Massachusetts Press, March 2014). This most recent book was recognized by Library Journal as one of “Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014.”
She has been the recipient of an NEA fellowship, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Laurel Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Northwest Review, POOL, Shenandoah, Sou’wester, and other journals, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.
Roeser has received fellowships for residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Le Moulin à Nef (VCCA France), St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity (Valletta, Malta) (VCCA International Exchange), and Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.
Dana Roeser's website: www.danaroeser.com/
Dana Roeser's most recent book – The Theme of Tonight's Party Has Been Changed: Poems (Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry) Paperback – Univ. of Massachusetts Press (March 31, 2014)