Eliza Griswold

I woke to a voice within the room. perhaps.
The room itself: "You're wasting this life
expecting disappointment."
I packed my bag in the night
...

I'm through! I'm through!
she says and resays.
The years pass.
Her feathers gray.
...

You have a beautiful mouth,
Luigi, the man-boy says.

The rubber raft
...

The pack is filing
from my nowheresvilles
filling the halfway hotels,
...

The naked man in the caravan
has peace of mind. He whose covering
belongs to others is uncovered.
...

We meet midway to walk white cobbles
under a fish-flesh gray sky.
Europe is collapsing; we are collapsing
...

A spring day oozes through Trastevere.
A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs.
Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimples
pushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun.
...

When you said no,
I went for your dresser,
opened the top drawer,
broke the paper seals
...

Do I still long for my virginity?
— Fragment 107
I never longed for my virginity.
I heard it on the radio after the hurricane.
...

My transgressions pile against the garden wall
(built when Rome began to weaken, scarred

by a cannonball.) I gossiped; I snubbed
a dinner guest. I watch until the wall writhes
...

My earliest wish was not to exist,
to burst in the backyard
without violence,
no blood, no fleshy bits,
...

In the Bedouin's foam mattress,
a bedbug mother tips back her baby's chin
and pours my blood down his throat. You wrote
in all my wandering I risk my chance
to give birth. That's hardly true. All over
the earth, I've fed my flesh to bugs.
That's some kind of mother for you.
...

Do I still long for my virginity?
Fragment 107
I never longed for my virginity.
I heard it on the radio after the hurricane.

There, in the aftermath, was the voice of a man—
once the sweet, screwed-up boy whose hooded,

jessed spirit I tried to possess with the ruthlessness
I mistook for power. Here he was on NPR,

so gentle, so familiar with devastation,
his timbre woke the teenage falconer in me

who once saw his kindness as weakness,
saw a boy as an unfledged goshawk—

a creature to trap and be trapped with
in darkened mews. I knew the rules:

neither of us could sleep until the molting bird
grew ravenous enough to take the raw mouse

from my hand. Breaking the falcon
broke us both, left us scared

and less aware of  love than fear.
...

You have a beautiful mouth,
Luigi, the man-boy says.

The rubber raft
has floated far
from shore.

The choice
is this:

medusa sea,

a boil
of   jellied lashes,

or

face
the kiss.
...

I'm through! I'm through!
she says and resays.
The years pass.
Her feathers gray.
Her eggs
lay themselves
less frequently.
The sky falls.
...

A spring day oozes through Trastevere.
A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs.
Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimples
pushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun.

Every hard bulb stirs.

The fossilized egg in my chest
cracks open against my will.

I was so proud not to feel my heart.
Waking means being angry.

The dead man on the Congo road
was missing an ear,
which had either been eaten
or someone was wearing it
around his neck.

The dead man looked like this. No, that.

Here's a flock of tourists
in matching canvas hats.
This year will take from me
the hardened person
who I longed to be.
I am healing by mistake.
Rome is also built on ruins.
...

The naked man in the caravan
has peace of mind. He whose covering
belongs to others is uncovered.
He who has luck will have the winds
blow him his firewood.
He whose trousers are made of dry grass should not warm himself at
the fire.
He howled before going mad.
He led the lion by the ear.
Like the sparrow, he wanted to imitate
the pigeon's walk but lost his own.
Walk with sandals till you get good shoes.
Where the turban moves, there moves
the territory. Men meet
but mountains don't. Always taking out
without giving back, even the mountains
will be broken down. Penny piled on penny
will make a heap. Only the unlucky coin
is left in the purse. As long as a human being lives
he will learn.
Learn to shave by shaving orphans.
He who is to be hanged can insult the Pasha.
In the house of a man who has been hanged
don't talk of rope.
The small donkey is the one that everybody rides.
Fish eat fish
and he who has no might dies.
My belly before my children.
...