Scattered Rhymes: Christie Ann Reynolds

[audio:http://www.scatteredrhymes.com/poets/CAR.mp3|bgcolor=0x000000]

REVENGE OF ALL THAT IS CAPABLE OF BEING REVENGED

Stand underneath my window
I have a piano for your head
And O sweet sunset you
Are only beautiful because
People who are finished making people
Smoke cigarettes
And those cigarettes are made in factories
With smokestacks
And those smokestacks release poison into the good sweet
Air like the mouths of the people letting out their smoking
And all of this letting out of poison marries the air
And the air marries the poison
Invisible as wind until it lifts
A skirt and a woman shows her beauties
To the entire boardwalk
How come beauty gets all the silence of eyes
And ugly is committed to the dumb of the mouth
I’d like to be so ugly
So that someone would want to let a piano
Love my head
I’d like you to be so ugly
That no one in the audience will listen
To me because they’re busy telling their love
How ugly you are and how if you were beside
Someone uglier
Or just as ugly
You would cancel out
Like the light through a prism
And both of you would become the base of all that is beautiful
And this is what I want to happen
This is what I want.

 

– – –

 

REVENGE FOR ALL THAT IS FRESH

I’m on a mission to do nothing but rise up inside of myself
To plant flowers inside my brain
And deny them a prairie
And once upon a time this solution
Was an easy A
Until I loved a man so well
I killed him with my breath
I was so much about beating
The air between my lips
And hovering around him like he was the last
Delicate fawn in the forest
I made him believe he was a god
Then our neighbor drove up with a dead Irish Setter
On his leather car seats
Because he hit the dog trying to make a left
And my man saw he wasn’t the only god
He was just another heartless handsome
In a pyre of desperate fires
Which means he was wanted by many
But only I had him
And he realized he was only a drug
I sometimes took to feel sane
About myself to prepare the world
For people who didn’t want to know what a woman
In a black dress looks like when she’s alone
Fuck the first tree that sprouted in a treeless field
And called itself the only of its kind in that part
I will have to reinvent the rectangle
So that it falls somewhere between a cube and a square and a parallelogram
And a placenta when it still has a baby

 

– – –

 

REVENGE FOR REVENGE

Just like you
I am alone in the world
I am alone just like you although no one is really ever alone
I only said that so I could enter
What it means to be alone
In the world
Even if no one
Ever is
No one ever finds a way to be
Entirely alone
Even when you are dead you are the most
Unalone even when you are sleeping you are the most
Unalone because so many are dead and sleeping at the same time
Even when you are the only person in the planetarium
There are all those stars
And planets without names
That have the possibility of life
Even if that possibility is in the inkling of a paramecium
And the paramecium with its almost-brain
Has a millennia or a thousand millennia until it has
To consider that being alone is a lot like
Being in a crowd of people you don’t know
Yes I think that is closer to being alone
Being with so many people
And not one knowing
If you believe in a god
Or if your dining room is bright and welcoming
With comfortable wooden chairs
Or if you are really a woman who sometimes feels
A little bit like a child
Trapped inside of her mother still

 

– – –

 

from I am going to save your life

Be my sister and spit into me.
Or spit into me so you can be my sister.
I’m hollowed out and its high time the coyotes hauled
out from the woods and gave mothers a good run for their babies.

They smell the way I smell between.

It took eleven minutes for me to lose my virginity.

He said thank you.

 

—

 

If I were a zombie, you would not be a zombie.
You would be the first time I touched myself
on a bicycle. Or the dynasty in China with all the white
and blue vases. I keep fucking up in love and not even by fucking.
I think of friends, O my good and tiny friends in Nate’s seaside house.
How easily friends laugh,and their ha-ha’s slide over from the summer
into September. We watch zombie movies that show zombies touching.
We discuss relativity and space
and we beat off to the flowers
until no one knows the difference
between us and the sun.

 

—

 

Being as small as me is a very large feat.
I am small.
Smaller than you have ever imagined
even though as a woman I have very long fingers that look like it—
but will never touch a piano in a way that makes it surrender.
We are always living in the same oval. I think we are so elliptical
that religion is just a way of keeping my grandmother and all her ghosts
on the treadmill in the guest room. I sleep in that room and know its scent.
I know its scent as if a fox has come and gone.
Come and gone and into the sheets
I screamed as I was coming.
You know how small I am.
A very large scream, a scream as loud
and howling as mine is also very beautiful if you know how to get it out of me.
Get it out of me.

 

—

 

November 3rd, 2001. November 4th, 2001.
I made a grave of my car and left Nick dying.
I couldn’t save him. I still can’t go to his grave, not even as a woman.
I can’t see a pile of dead flowers and know how everyone else’s
mouth touched his name. (Nick touching me in the treehouse.
Me in his velvet mouth.) The SUV hit him and fucking
is not like dying. I never wince when I run over a dead cat.
Like I’m finishing something twice.

 

—

 

There were rocks in the back of my high school
called The Love Rocks.
They were huge and wide and flat and Suzy
loves Davy and Miriam love(d)
Paul but someone came and bulldozed
the rocks when I went there to lose It
to some tall blonde boy. We decided to do it against the bricks.
It left scars where a pressing of hers into a pressing of his. His erection
was like the Empire State Building
from where I knelt and from my apartment
I can see the Empire State Building
when the leaves fall out.
I stare and stare and stare and think of you naked.

 

—

 

I stand just far away enough so I can cover you
with my thumb.

We fuck in between all the fighting.
You’re over me, hovering over me and I’m reminded of Pompeii.

Watching bulls gore men that look exactly like you.

I’ll stand just far away enough to look like a painting.

I’ll build and build and build and build and build and build, build, build, build,
build. I’ll say I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

 

—

 

You lit my cigarette and it would be years before I would bust your lip open
with a closet door. Circumstance after circumstance you misappropriated
my salute to the ocean and dropped a dinghy on top of me every time
I came with my mouth against your mouth. In the event of an emergency,
take the fire fighter and spray it all around. When I said fire fighter I meant
a transitional phase where all the pronouns associated with you will be
little smears of butterfly on the windshield.
I disguise myself in good teeth and dance moves.
I cloak myself in men I don’t care about.
Everyone misinterprets my pretty.

 

– – –

POSTSCRIPT

 

Get
Get (scroll down a little)
where Christie Ann is co-curator

Some of Christie Ann’s work online



(British online mag!)
(includes an earlier version of the first poem she read from her chapbook, Idiot Heart)

&c
More about

responds to two of Christie Ann’s poems that were in Lit. She reads one of these on the show, too!