- Jul 8, 2024
Updated: Jul 30, 2024
The Queer Picture
Because she adored me
she will marry me when I’m dead
She will find me stamping
like a stallion in a petting zoo
my father said to my mother
who said to me
when the eulogies ended
and the guests departed:
Chaps on, cowgirl, you have pleasure
and happiness waiting
Giddyap, cowgirl
lasso yourself our stallion
and marry him marry him marry him
now that your father is dead
The Unspoken
When I was a girl, my family camped
on an island in Lake George
We grilled fish for breakfast, read comic books
swam off the stony edges beside the dock
I loved one book: The Swiss Family Robinson
During August afternoons, I tumbled through its pages from my nests of pine needles
as the others swam, searching for dimes and minnows
Dear falling down tent
Dear campfire and speckled metal kettle of boiling coffee milk
Dear bats that watched over me, dear Milky Way, dear sunrise
Dear memory that erases what the heart cannot bear
Dear second-grade teacher, Mrs. Reif, who showed me
how to write poems, which proved I was alive
Today a breeze pulls me from the east shore to the west, from the future to the past
I loved my father up to the sky and back
When I grow up I’ll be like him, I said to myself
at seven, at twenty-three, at sixty
Now the lake is covered in tiny waves
It swallows the clouds, the herons, the dime-shaped sun
When I grow up I’ll be a boulder in the forest or a bear or a lake
When I grow up fishes and grasses will bloom inside me, dragonflies will touch my skin
On a recent morning infinite O’s of light reminded me
I too contain multitudes
You’re such a worrier, my father said, my mother said
my sisters, my brother teased
in the brick house, in the stone house
in the toppling tent on the island
A cougar shaped like a cloud ran across the sky
The cougar became a headless horse
The horse became a woman resting on her back
with a child on her belly
My mother wept and didn’t weep enough tears to fill a lake
My father’s sad and angry patients wandered in and out of the telephone
over the front lawn, where they followed the sheepdog to the basement office
and into the chair across from the desk that once was the dining-room table
The patients’ lives were written in pale green steno pads and stacked
on shelves, then stuffed into filing cabinets
All the voices in the house rose through the floors, they sank through the ceilings
One little piggy, two little piggies, three little piggies, four
Happiness rolled us between the lightning bugs and treetops
between the dock and the long flat stones we leapt from each summer
as I imagined we were the Swiss Family Robinson, with no need to be saved
Then happiness released us to the concerned, the kind
to the seemingly unaware, to the cruel, to the perpetually cheerful yet miserable
who released us to the buoyant loneliness of our sky-blue suffering
which released us into a current of perpetual solitude
as if we were little beavers swimming into the absence of everything
believing in our connection to each other, to childhood and the lake
that had long ago reflected our bodies and faces into the dumb anguish of forgiveness
The Sisters
I am the no in the throat of their eyes
fractals of fences, ceilings of string
Three heads smile from a wooden frame
then fall asleep in solitude’s scheme
Wherever they are—on a boat on a beach
at a metal table on a city street
I remember them in their naked need
at three at six at seventeen
The cards in our hands fell over the house
and scattered like bunnies in the fox’s dream
There was no one to catch us except for ourselves
Like cards we scattered, weightless with need
No to the palm of kindness and love
that carries the bag for payback’s high price
No to the I-owe-you of strife
as if sacrifice can forfeit time
No to the thrum of hunger, greed
No to pleasure: what gives will take
No to the penalty: joy as pain
No to anyone calling our names
No to friendship, debt’s thick breath
No to the rage of attention’s reign
No to his thumbprints’ virile gain
No to her melodies of blame
No to the voices like flocks of birds
whose decibels fall and rise unseen
No to isolation’s domain
with its choke and throttle and empty brain
No to the condemnations claimed
when achievements mollify childhood’s mark
Comfort? The solace of memory’s gain
This is our twisted rope of shame
Family as Fractal
Who is the dreaded, the loved, the cruel?
Is the murderer father?
Was I murderous, too?
Was I his rescuer, rescued, participant?
Am I my mother?
Was I murdered too?
If I am my father, if I am my mother
if my sisters and brother are mirrors, one face
Can one aberration offend replication
and alter it fully?
What is pity or hatred?
Is loyalty warranted?
If sister is mother, if brother is father
if father was grandfather, everyone, same
is my difference their difference?
my failure their failure?
Is their hatred self-hatred?
Is my sanity sane?
If my niece is my uncle
is my nephew my aunt?
Is my uncle my grandmother?
My lost child myself?
Whose laughter and boredom
spin silk with disdain?
Is my shame my brother’s?
Is his shame my father’s?
Is my rage my sisters’
my mother’s, my own?
Does geometry prove that we replicate history:
family, oligarch, innocent, mute?
Then the future is written
my life is determined
my desire, my love
my own grief like row houses
precise replications
of what I escaped
Jan Freeman is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Blue Structure, which was championed by Ilya Kaminsky (Calypso Editions, 2016). She completed her new manuscript, The Odyssey of Yes and No, during a recent MacDowell fellowship. Poems from this collection have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, North American Review, Plume, Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salamander, and other publications. She is the founder and former director of Paris Press. Long ago, she earned an MFA at NYU, studying with Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Ruth Stone, and Nina Cassian. The work of David Shapiro and Louise Bourgeois are her constant companions. Currently, she teaches ekphrastic poetry workshops and the MASS MoCA Writing Through Art Poetry Retreats. www.janfreeman.net.