Natalie Shapero Poems

How to get close without going over.
How to feign lust for whatever's on offer.
How the largest possible quantity
of anything is a lifetime. A lifetime
of oat bran. A lifetime of timing belts.
A lifetime of saying, sure, why not,
i'm only on earth x number
of years, and not knowing what
to make x. Sometimes I pick a number
I've already passed. I remember
the gambler's credo — when you only
have fifty bucks left in this world,
you'd better get rid of it fast; the last
thing you want is money around,
reminding you every day of the money
you lost. The recommended
retirement plan is arabesque, then leap
and smash on the seawall. We made
a promise not to catch each other.
...

Some people say the devil is beating
his wife. Some people say the devil
is pawing his wife. Some people say
the devil is doubling down on an overall
attitude of entitlement toward
the body of his wife. Some people
say the devil won't need to be sorry,
as the devil believes that nothing
comes after this life. Some people say
that in spite of the devil's public,
long-standing, and meticulously
logged disdain for the health
and wholeness of his wife, the devil
spends all day, every day, insisting
grandly and gleefully on his general
pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly
considers himself to be an unswayed
crusader: effortlessly magnetic,
scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of
the devil's several advanced degrees,
a luminous autodidact. Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they're having a fair.
...

on seventeen, I come from hearty straw.
My grandpa wore a gallon
hat. My grandma, like a shogun,
bun and shawl. For their honeymoon,
they went to the movies. No one
knows what they saw.

You arrive with licorice, cigarettes,
the documentary on Woody Allen.
Don't feign a passion for his start

in tv, or his clarinets,
or Love and Death. Just skip to the Soon-
Yi part.
...

Dirt on my chin and I wonder: am I already
in the ground? Like a toy turned real, I cannot shed
the sense that I have died. The German word

for Heaven's the same

as the German word for sky. On hearing a cruel
prince was in danger, I prayed for him to thrive,
not for his own sake, but for the concubines,

sure to end up buried

along. To my real face, a man once crowed
i ruined you, and though he did, the joke's
on him: he ruined me only for this world,

and this world is not long

for itself. The Earth, that ever-loving
but distrustful kin, keeps leaving us just a little
pocket money when it dies, never the land —
...

Mossy and thumping, bare of logic, red:
why do they say your other head

and not your other heart?

The snack cakes of Smut Wonderland
turn Alice smaller than her dress. She stirs,
nude in the folds of so much baby blue.

To think, they called this lesser art.

I ate mostly orders then, and you—
you were thinking with your other heart.

I took in a dog the way some might take in
a dress (I had become just skin).

It coughed. I cried for it

to stop, I fed it meat, its malady
recurrent and untreatable. I had
to give it up, like some bum body part

whose incidental benefit

the human form has out-evolved. Don't start.
That dog: I called it Help, and I cried for it.
...

The comet taught us how to watch the war.
The comet contended that fire

is romantic and recommended we each behold it alone,
envisioning out there somewhere our next
lover, craning up at this same sky.

Was the comet simply endeavoring
to keep us divided, I asked it, and the comet

did not reply. Then we discovered the men
who wanted us dead
were convening at night on the site where their hero

had been unceremoniously
interred. And so we exhumed the guy, burned him up,
and fed his ash to the rapids,

to be churned into marlstone and mud-rich
air. Good thinking. Now he's everywhere.
...

Where can the dead hope
to stash some part
of themselves, if not in the living?

And so when I had a daughter,
I gave her your name.

She does not use it.

She goes by a silly, other
thing she was called once in fun,
and then often enough

that it stuck. But oh her hideous pill-
eyed toys — to them each, she has given
her given name,

and so it is you

I hear her again and again calling to.
It is your name she shrieks

to the bale-head farmer, the woven
goat, the cop made of buttons and rags.

Your name, to the squat gray

dog on wheels, tipping on its side
as she drags it by a red string.

That dog, always prone
and pulled along, as though constantly
being killed and paraded

through town to make an example.
What did it do — 

Whatever it did, don't do it.
...

What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it's a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day
when no one thinks of anything else, least of all
that bug. I know how it feels, born as I've been
into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody's
busy, so distraught they forget to kill me,
and even that won't keep me alive. I share
my home not with horses, but with a little dog
who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps,
makes her muscle known to every statue.
I wish she could have a single day of   language,
so that I might reassure her don't be afraid —
our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.
...