Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across Read online

  look up, look up.

  It knocked the wind out of me. It was just the way

  it happened—farm houses dotted with

  Christmas lights, the air too cold to breathe now,

  a sad Christmas song on the radio,

  my chest caving in on itself

  I pulled over just to see what it would feel like,

  but the moon disappeared, I’m not lying

  pulled from under my feet, the moon, it was you

  you were there and then you were not

  and this isn’t a dream.

  this is what dying feels like,

  what it means to knife and be knifed

  by the one that you loved

  and to keep driving home anyway—

  oh, my love, what have I done

  FIVE

  Started from the bottom,

  now I can pay my bar tab

  June 2013, Singing at the Staples Center and Everyone Looks Hungry

  My dad was a blue shell of a bad man. Mom talks about his brain surgery, says it like this: “it changed him,” says it slowly, says it deliberately, nodding her head to agree with herself. She is slow like this because we both know what happens after. Clusters of dirt in my hair, forgotten meals, the bright lights, empty, empty, empty, and the pit. Shame is a pit. Fills my name with a bunch of songs I don’t know, don’t care to know, someday will wake up and sing them out loud. It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, stupid white choruses of apology eyes over and over. I say stupid in this way because my mom acts like I remember. I don’t remember anything. I’m crying in the green room. My body isn’t mine, it’s my father’s, it’s father’s day. They’re chanting my name in the arena. Get it together. Ten thousand people tonight.

  We both know what happens after. Bright lights, empty, empty, empty, crying to my own pitless song. Ten thousand people singing my stupid name, nod, my body isn’t mine. It’s Father’s Day.

  Mom says slowly, deliberately: “Your body is an arena.”

  I am a blue meal of remembering. Ten thousand people in the pit tonight, they’re all bad fathers.

  The Talk Show Host

  I.

  the question they most grin with crest-white teeth and artificial inflection translates to: “aren’t you so much better than who you were before?”

  I don’t know, billy.

  I feel the same. I feel love all the time.

  I feel invaded sometimes.

  I feel happy tears when I see people holding hands.

  I am still many pages in a fucked-up book,

  illustrating all the ways that trauma creates art

  you know what. I feel powerful, billy. I feel seven years old. I am doing okay. I am sad that I can’t even keep a plant alive and I miss my family. I love to sing and I love to write and I love that it is my job, but it also complicates passion for art when you depend on it for rent.

  My friends are my employees and that feels weird, but is also fun.

  It is complicated.

  I am so hungry for their tan-faced questions to be genuine—

  for eye contact on a red carpet instead of glancing at the evening sheen of other more important people

  Mary! How different is the world now that you’re a star,

  not just a bartender anymore!

  right, sweetheart?

  does the sun

  glitter when you shit now,

  cupcake?

  During the week I performed at the 2014 Grammys, I was promoting my single. An interviewer asked me on live television, without warning or relevance, to talk about my rape and how I overcame it. I will not tell you what I said. I will tell you what I should have said.

  II.

  Billy, do you have a daughter

  Does she smell like christmas morning

  Do you laugh at the way she dances in her socks in the kitchen

  Do you sometimes cry knowing that her coming of age is equal parts grieving and pride

  When she gets excited, does she cyclone out of herself like balloons in the wind

  Is it beautiful

  Are you proud like a gold bird

  If someone hurt her, would you wish to decapitate them slowly with hawklike precision and burn their eyeballs out with acid

  good

  because that is what love is

  In a parallel world, I am your daughter

  Maybe at the kitchen table crying, you ask me

  about the night I was raped

  You hold honest eye contact,

  not two strangers; vacant cells, oblivious

  you take my hands like churches,

  praying for another reality,

  you let me tell you about the teeth

  of the wolves at my thighs

  You want to kill them with your bare hands

  without a thought

  you let me ruin your crisp TV shirt

  with my sobbing

  I want to rewrite everything bad

  that ever happened to me

  Billy, I don’t know how this works

  I’ve never had a dad

  The Taking

  Let this be called the Taking

  Let it be called Gorgeous Art

  Let it be called Bad Contract

  Oh, friends, how bountiful your cups

  are from all of the gifts you took

  I watched you adorn your thievery

  in articulated eloquence,

  meticulously package it, calculated—

  And then call it business

  Yes, we should call this Business.

  I say it again with hot tears on my cheeks—

  Business.

  Let this be called

  Rich curtains that hang in a home

  so extravagant I cannot even fathom

  Forget all I said before—

  Every Man For Himself

  Every Man For Himself

  Every Man

  Every Man that ever Took from me

  Could have called it business

  Park Avenue

  There is music sweating in the heels of Manhattan today

  I mean to say Everything is sticking to Everything

  Above ground, the clothes are clinging

  to a woman holding her child’s puckered hand

  Frank Sinatra echoes from a storefront that sells

  half-priced boots

  When I take the train from New York,

  the landscape undresses for us

  We are voyeurs to her dance

  See the neighborhoods that have swept

  their ugly secrets

  underneath the chevron rugs of new american restaurants

  and cupcake shops

  The high-rises on the east side don’t know how

  to hide the kids who cling to the gates further down

  Park Avenue covering their ears when the train passes

  It isn’t always pretty, the train says, but at least it’s honest

  the train is telling a story about power and money

  who gets a piece of the pie

  and who owns the pie factory

  I don’t even like pie,

  but I keep buying pastries in heaps

  because I can

  I Wish Powerful Men Would Stop Being Fucking Terrible

  I listen to Debussy because he moves me

  the harmonic intricacies swell around mangled trees

  thirsting for Spring

  I wonder if Debussy was an asshole

  or if he cried a lot

  and what would his favorite cupcake be

  and which BuzzFeed quiz would he take

  and I wonder if he ever bought flowers for a lady

  Or what he would choose for his cover photo

  If he would have a hard time unfriending old university colleagues who post annoying stuff like

  “I ate a sandwich today. Pastrami! #blessed”

  I wonder if Debussy would hate me because I like women

&nb
sp; Do we love Picasso and Renoir and Schumann

  the same way we loved Bill Cosby?

  Would you love Starry Night

  or Mozart’s Requiem just the same

  if you knew the artists beat their children or raped their neighbor’s daughter?

  Can we separate art from the artist?

  Is television an art form?

  I don’t know—

  The internet has emptied a lot of secrets

  of people who did not want them known, people

  who were banking on the silence that shame makes

  I wonder if my children will watch The Cosby Show

  A Poem to Cheer You Up

  When you think about it, there are a lot

  of people that haven’t died yet!

  Think about it! How many dead people

  have you met today?

  You used to be one tiny microscopic insignificant thing,

  swimming aimlessly in a nutsack

  and out of all the other spermies,

  you made it to that egg first!

  Then, you survived childbirth! Can you imagine? Wow!

  Then, you survived middle school!

  A locker room! Somehow!

  and now, you vibrant, stunning, living thing:

  you get to love other people

  and that love doesn’t ever expire!

  it is endlessly perfect!

  Whenever I think that there might not be a god,

  I think about that

  Uber Driver #237

  I came home crying to my girlfriend

  she says who did this to you, and I say

  My love, that man was a small gun

  I say that you are a 27-year-old who never kissed anyone

  I say you are a shard of glass I clutch tightly on purpose

  A world I don’t know

  A suit of silence

  I say you are sorry and that you didn’t mean it

  That you are a crocheted knife

  Now tucked in the folds of my memory as a list of men

  who took without asking

  I say honestly

  You are a driver I had at 2 a.m.

  after I drank tequila with drag queens in

  Colorado

  And I wanted to be your friend

  So when you forced my head to your mouth with greedy hands

  All I could think of was how quickly I will forget this

  Because a man violating a woman is a boring story A dumb horror film

  how I recoiled and shook and lost speech

  That I said loudly you don’t mean to do this

  you can’t do this

  I am not for you

  instead at the shower tiles

  Sometimes when I turn the stove on for tea

  I don’t remember even doing it

  Of course, ten minutes later,

  the shrill whistling startles me like a horror movie

  And I am reminded of what actually is.

  Glamorous Dressing Rooms Are Just Locker Rooms with Fake Plants

  Over cocktails in the Fanciest Place I Have Ever Been,

  he tells me sometimes he wishes the plane would crash

  That the world does not look like what he thought it would

  I say, me too.

  I say, humans were not meant to live this way

  I say, fame is a terrifying sword,

  and I know how the luxury gleams in the light

  and yes, you can sing with a blade in your side

  Hit all of the right notes

  and never let them know

  Their eyes will marvel at your composure

  But at some point,

  the tide rises

  you are snapping

  And not in the teen angsty way of snapping

  but in the way the slightest thing can undo you.

  like how the weight of a feather is not much,

  but it is everything when you are an insect

  We spend our days in this macabre waltz

  That because millions of people would break their legs to

  stand on a stage like this

  That it is somehow not okay to cry

  Or say “I miss my family”

  Or “today I hate my body”

  Or to question “why me?”

  You are the real Truman Show, friend

  And everyone is watching tonight

  I know all too well how to paint your face after crying

  and the recitation of

  “I’m so humbled” and “everything is surreal”

  become part of a language that begins to feel disingenuous

  Are you not the same boy

  that cried in your room wanting friends?

  Is this not what you wished for?

  Are you not the same boy unfolding in front of millions?

  Isn’t that the crux of it all—

  To be loved by all, and yet not believe it.

  Dear friend,

  May you walk out of a dark dressing room of fake plants,

  May you never forget how the light looks at sunrise

  How every day it is new

  and how it wants nothing from you

  Think of the birds on the tarmac

  They congregate obliviously

  like they might not ever die

  May you claim your own path to what

  makes you feel the most alive

  The greatest thing about your life,

  is that you’re in it and you are awake

  And you can do whatever you damn well please

  I Don’t Think It Was Milli Vanilli’s Fault

  1.

  I am in a conference room

  with nothing in it besides some money eyes,

  an absurdly long conference table,

  and swivel chairs that recline

  My eyes glaze over the panorama of Los Angeles.

  I am a product. I am not really here.

  The next day, I am in “cool executive dude” room #3

  Platinum albums hung up around the room, a low

  brown leather couch, more sparkling plaques sit lazily on the floor (Perhaps he is too busy to hang those ones up. Maybe he has been installing solar panels in his silver lake dude palace)

  I am trying to remember the youtube video I saw about power stances and awkwardly place my hands behind my head and recline slowly, nearly

  Falling backward. This does not feel

  like a feminist move, it feels like a skit about what not to do in a job interview put on by angsty high school kids.

  I leave the meeting. I return a year later a different person

  Maybe worse, I don’t know.

  I have more shoes than I did before.

  I remember the feeling of all the snakes

  fighting for the mouse

  I remember all the nights I whispered to the moon on all the red eye flights, asked her to pull me to space, end this obnoxious ladder climbing, this not-good-enough, this rocket to hell

  I wish the car would crash

  The year is a garbled phone call and it sounds like guilt

  2.

  don’t squander this don’t

  you want success you really should

  be so lucky to

  cut off your arms no one cares

  if you a c t u a l l y play piano we’ve got

  twenty pianists focus on

  you, the star, you’ve really

  got something special can I just sink my teeth into

  your

  musicblood I hate to say this, but Target

  (We) won’t care/won’t carry your album if

  you talk about rape

  in the meantime Here’s a song by Sia

  a song by Pink

  a song by Colbie Caillat’s guitarist Can’t you

  just sing it If you

  do this ridiculous thing now Jesus don’t

  be difficult You can do what you love after

  the after the af
ter the after the after the after

  the a f te r t h e

  after the after

  after the afte r th e a f te r th e af t

  er th e afte r t h e af t e r t h e

  af t e r t h e

  a f t e r t h e afte r t h e aft e r t h e

  after after after after after after

  after afrerafer t affert affret after afret a

  fffffter t h e

  radio hit.

  don’t be ungrateful.

  anyone would kill for this.

  Blockbuster Hit! A Girl Cries in Her Hotel Room!

  [LOS ANGELES. IT IS MORNING. CHARACTER IS NOT BRAVE]

  VOICE 1

  [calls from SL, crying to no one, is cyclone of herself]

  VOICE 2

  nothing nothing nothing

  VOICE 3

  the perpetual shame of every kiss, every cauterized song

  ENSEMBLE

  your love does not exist

  VOICE 4

  [over the shoulder] “not good” a dress climbs out of her mouth

  VOICE 5

  slut, [windowless room, curtains grating on themselves]

  VOICE 6

  every pair of eyes, a dagger

  VOICE 7

  every pair of eyes, a bathtub

  VOICE 8

  [exit laughing, twirling in a gown]

  ENSEMBLE

  how will you love like this

  [CHARACTER DOES NOT SLEEP, MELTS INTO THE CARPET, OFFERS EMERALDS TO NO ONE]

  VOICE 9

  They’re watching you [shaking, head tics up, head backward, alien self]

  VOICE 10

  They’re watching you as a black hole, hiding a dead girl

  VOICE 11

  [to self] bury her on hyperion or in a park or in a dream

  VOICE 12

  “thirty-one stories up”

  [CHARACTER’S ARM DETACHES, PLACES IT GENTLY ON THE STATIONERY]