Poetry – Corinne Shearer
Drafts
by Corinne Shearer
They ordered you like new furniture,
picked out your delivery date by jabbing a finger at a pocket calendar.
You came out unclean. Offended by the fluorescents,
you were subjected to the airy speculations of the doctor
that ended up being true- those limbs were made for movement.
The family cat did not like you.
He avoided your sticky, probing fingers and the gaping
vacuum that was your mouth- a door always left ajar
which let loose from its basement a human’s cry ancient
as the ribbon corridors of bowels.
But someday, sooner rather than later,
the crotchety Maine Coon would entrust you with its sorrow-
cast up at you its dying gaze that flickered on and off,
like the orange porch light you will kiss your high school boyfriend under,
as the maggots set up their suburbia inside its lower intestines.
When you were one there was a snowstorm.
The world welcomed you with ice and a full body
rash, made you wait years for the luscious little girl hair
you would become known for. When you were three
you unlearned how to breathe, began turning blue when overly-excited.
They told them your clothes were too tight, but it’d be years before you’d have
the weight problem, and subsequently the eating problem, but much later
you’ll invest in Thich Nhat Hahn and the inspirational tags
on Yogi tea, realizing how “just fine” you grew up to be.
You’ll remember too nostalgically the timbre of self-hatred,
the illusion that clenched fists can feel like a grip
on a wheel you know doesn’t exist- but you hold your hands
at ten and two anyway, just on the off-chance there is a God.
But before all that you turn six and learn what momentum feels like.
You beg to be spun from anywhere on anything
until your vision and stomach flip on its side.
You’ll crave disorientation all your life,
you’ll make a career out of falling.
At eleven you understand what it is to be lonely,
filling her absence with self-sufficiency,
and quiet, and a hunger for excellence.
But this is around the time you grasp the concept
of mortality and nothing can make you forget the imminence of death.
Even when you visit the expensive sunlit café you can’t shake off the dread,
can’t look at your mother’s face without seeing it white-lipped and dead.
You’ll feel something similar at thirteen,
lying awake in amber shadows (you still use a nightlight,
not subscribing yet to the salvation of ignorance)
suffocated in equal parts by the way people can break one another
and the irony of existing at all.
Looking back you’re still transfixed by your first kiss
At fourteen during truth or dare at dusk behind a half-
crumbling historical site. You hone your love of contradiction,
betting the Moravians would never guess that their meeting house
would someday be reborn as the place where
your tongue met Dominic Fetter’s, which was too big
but impossibly warm and soft like bubblegum.
At sixteen you get high.
The scope of your existence is as narrow as the creek
where you will negotiate barefoot between rocks as you search
for a glimpse of those iridescent tricks of the eye- fish.
You fall in love somewhere along the way,
you will break each other’s heart at more distinct points.
Almost twenty, you leave on a plane
fourteen hours and a horizon away.
Home dissolves in your wake
but you will still cling to those few months as
a glittering gift; sweet, dense and messy like mochi.
You come to know that he needs you to say it more than
you need it to be true, and how not all loss feels like losing.
When you return
you’ll move away, following through on a threat for the first time.
You hide out in a city of 8.5 million,
dissolving into the rusts of the Harlem skyline.
You learn how solitary a thing freedom can be.
At twenty-one you write poems.
Villanelle
by Corinne Shearer
Your palms like valleys catch the rain.
These hands turn over empty,
there’s no refrain.
These are the things that remain:
The tenor of your voice and labyrinths for fingerprints,
your palms like valleys that catch the rain.
You waited but I never came,
too preoccupied with speculation, why
there’s no refrain.
You are this thing I scrub out over and over like a stain,
but I’m not one for self-restraint; I visit this place often just to watch
your palms like valleys catching the rain.
It’s not well maintained,
all the houses are overgrown, their insides spilling out across the lawn;
there’s no refrain.
What did I gain–
the blaze of this city pales in comparison to
your palms like valleys that catch the rain.
______________
Corinne Shearer is a recent BFA graduate from SUNY Purchase. Freelance writer, dancer and choreographer currently based in NYC.