Brenda Hillman Biography

In a side booth at MacDonald's before your music class
you go up and down in your seat like an arpeggio
under the poster of the talking hamburger:
...

—Once more the poem woke me up,
the dark poem. I was ready for it;
he was sleeping,
...

After Ed Sanders
We'd been squatting near the worms
in the White House lawn, protesting
the Keystone Pipeline =$=$=$=$=$=$=>>;
i could sense the dear worms
through the grillwork fence,
twists & coils of flexi-script, remaking
the soil by resisting it    ...    
After the ride in the police van
telling jokes, our ziplocked handcuffs
pretty tight,
when the presiding officer asked:

— Do you have any tattoos?
— Yes, officer, i have two.
— What are they?
— Well, i have a black heart on my inner thigh &
an alchemical sign on my ankle.
— Please spell that?
— Alchemical. A-L-C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L.
— What is that?
— It's basically a moon, a lily, a star & a flame.

He started printing in the little square

MOON, LILY, STAR


Young white guy, seemed scared. One blurry
tattoo on his inner wrist    ...     i should have asked
about his, but couldn't
cross that chasm. Outside, Ash
Wednesday in our nation's capital. Dead
grass, spring trees
about to burst, two officers
beside the newish van. Inside,
alchemical notes for the next time —
...

Each day the job gets up
And rubs its eyes

We are going to live on in dry amazement

Workers push the granite bed under the avenue

Bed of the married
The re- the pre-married

Making a form as forms become infinite

The scrapings scraping

Graywhacke chert

People wait for their bumpy little pizzas
Theories of theories in gravity voices

Melpomene goddess of tragedy bathes

Mostly the bride never the bridesmaid

Angel food in whole foods

Consider Tanguy whose lunar responses to childhood
Made everything a horizon

Those walking upside down don't know what to think

The finch engineering itself to deep spring

Or you life tired of being cured

How many layers
Of giving up are there

One of it

Two of everything in the arc you save
...

A brenda is missing—where is she?
Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch
with the crowded beak; a little pretenda
is learning to read
in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy
caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher,
a skinny pretenda is learning
to read till the missing brenda
is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro.
Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays
& sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow
or blue will find the brenda in 1962,

Nancy who has no mother,
who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them.

Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference.
Click of the smart dog's nails on linoleum.
Nancy bends over the clues,
of brenda's locket & dress. Word by word
between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn—
are they missing too? Maybe Nancy
will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew:
"neat pretty sly cute." Syllable by syllable
& still no brenda! Nancy
puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing
girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?
...