catie rosemurgyseq & longline

8/12/2019 Catie Rosemurgyseq & Longline

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CATIE ROSEMURGY

Mostly Mick Jagger

1

Thank god he stuck his tongue out.When I was twelve I was in danger

of taking my body seriously.

I thought the ache in my nipple was priceless.I thought I should stay very still

and compare it to a button,

a china saucer,

a flash in a car side-mirror,so I could name the ache either big or little,

then keep it forever. He blew no one a kiss,

then turned into a maw.

fter I saw him, when a wish moved in my pants.I nurtured it. I stalked around my room

kicking my feet up !ust like him, making

a big deal of my lips. I was my own big boy.

I wouldn"t admit it then, but be definitely cocks his hip

as if he is his own little girl.

#

$eople ask me--I make up interviews

while I brush my teeth--%&o, what do you remember best

about your childhood'% I saymostly the drive toward (hicago.

)eeling as if I"m being slowly pressed against the skyline.

Hoping to break a window.*ostly +uick handfuls of boys" skin.

&ummer twilights that took forever to get rid of.

*ostly *ick agger.

How do I eplain my hungry stare'*y )riday night spent changing clothes'

*y love for travel' I rewind the way he says %now%

with so much roof of the mouth.

I rewind until I get a clear image of myself/I"m telling the !oke he taught me

about my body. *y mouth is stretched open

so I don"t laugh. *y hands are pretendingto have !ust discovered my own face.

*y name is written out in metal studs



across my little pink !umper.

I"ve got a mirror and a good idea

of the way I want my face to look.When I glance sideways my smile should twitch

as if a funny picture of me is taped up

inside the corner of my eye. picture where my hair is combed over each shoulder,

my breasts are well-supported, and my teeth barely show.

picture where I"m trying hard to say %beautiful.%

He always says %This is my skinny rib cage,

my one, two chest hairs.%That"s all he ever says.

Think of a bird with no feathers

or think of a hundred lips bruising every inch of his skin.There are no pictures of him hoping

he said the right thing.

)rom The Stranger Manual

Miss Peach is a Cross Between

missing tooth and a fang. bloom and a sandstorm.

love letter and a trapdoor.

can opener and a kiss.

maraca and a spear.

0owered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow !ob.

baro+ue flute flourish and an eerie silence !ust beyond the cabin door.

tube top and a biohaard mask.2oldilocks and an actual bear.

little blackout on what you think was Tuesdayand a little black spot on your latest chest -ray.

little black periodthat holds down words like a tack

and a bright little universe

that loves to turn black.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is Miss Peach

3ou know that you think the flower is beautiful, but what else do you want to know

about the flower' What else can you know about the flower' What can you do to know



the flower' 3ou can pick it, sketch it, wear it, put it in a vase. Hang it upside down to

dry it. $ress it in a book, or read up on it in a book. 3ou can write a book. 3ou can get

access to a microscope. 3ou can give it away. 3ou can stand beside it and cry forthe brain4s tendency to create beauty and then perceive it as unknowable. It isn4t like

smashing your thumb, is it' &o you pick the flower. It could be a daisy, but it might be

a rose, the kind of rose that has lived its entire life sipping the mist from the air, thekind of rose that has a throat, a throat that is always moving, the kind that has petalsyou can watch getting further and further apart and you can see growing more and

more petals in its center, the kind of rose you can watch until your head becomes

heavy, saturated, and eponential and starts to loll. It could be that kind of rose, and ifit is, do whatever you have to, but make it stop.

eigh!or" Miss Peach#s Bo$y %i$n#t T&rn O&t Right

5ut whose did' &he4s crumpled where she4s supposed to be unfolded,

something bad written on a piece of paper. Her walking

is a devolution that hunches and shrinks everyone

as she moves up the tree-lined street. I4m on my porch waving to my neighbors

and having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don4t know who I am.

I know everything else, though, and it4s ringing in my head. Then there she is

in a pool on my front steps, laughing, asking about lunch, as if the bones

of at least four different animals weren4t loose inside her, scurrying this way and that.&omeone needs to find her a place to live, a hidey hole we can cram food in

and get away from +uickly. We could call her part bird

and be done with it. 5ut everyone is dying right under the surface these days,especially around the eyes. 6eath has crawled up into the face

to nibble away whatever blocks its view of the stars.We4re riddled with it. It4s pulling our flesh

into outrageous, unwilled positions, like the huge smile on my face

as I lift her onto my lap and hold her together for a minute before I tell her she isn4t welcome here.

The 'on$ering Class

I think the stomach means we cannot love one another properly.I think the stomach is our one true eye.

I think the stomach is an ingredient.

I think the fingers mean we are too small inside one another.

I think the fingers mean our roots became bone and we lurched away

with a new agenda.

I think the eyelash means we can float to the ground like snow.



I think the eyelash means we must not appear burned.

&ome of us have been burned, but that is not what the eyelash means.

It is unprepared for. It is the other side of the world.

The other side of the world is intricate with the lace of forests.

The other side of the world is a euphemism for disease.

I think disease means the cells have rearranged to mirror something fast and !aggedapproaching from the sky.

I think disease means full epression.

I think disease means the river truly was as golden as it seemed.

Miss Peach( )e*ale I*+ersonator

(all me depressed, but does he love me because I"m low calorie'

5ecause I resemble a particular statue

but can move my tongue'(all me (assandraic,

but aren"t we getting a bit comfortablewith being plain, with being shown up by small birds

and their braggart little names'

(all me tired,

but the world is hardly a stage. It"s too clutteredwith trees. 7specially the budding ones

which always steal the dying scenes.

(all me gloomy,

but don"t I have a lover here somewhere'

8nderneath all these eyelashesand 6aisy raors'

(all me sentimental,

but remember that time I was born'

9pening my mouth came so naturally to me.nd what an outfit. (osmic spill.

(all me ambitious,

but what you thought was the whole world is

!ust my gatehouse. 3our staringis my tree-lined driveway.

(all me mannish,

but I pole my gondola down the river that rushes into any gaps between wanting and having.

&o call me scary,

and please sit on my lap while you do.

Tug on every hairy and hairless part of me.

:emind me which parts are real,



and I"ll wear cotton candy

garters and clean out gutters

you didn"t even know you had.0ike everyone else

I"m a sucker for being held close

and absolved of weaknessesI don"t necessarily have.(all me an optimist,

but I believe that inside every girl

is someone who is not a girl

but who looks like one and laughs.(all me closer is all. 5y a name

you"ve made up !ust for me. 0ittle $istachio.

6ull *eat, (olored &hell.

;ame anything you like

and look harder. (all me that, too.

'inter in Gol$ Ri,er

$retty girl. The weather has knocked her down again

and given her to the lake to wear as a skin.

Why am I always being the weather'

There were days in the winter when her smile was so lovely I felt

the breathing of my own goodness,

though it remained fetal and separate.

I was a scavenger who survives

with a sling and stones, but whose godnonetheless invents the first small bright bird.

nd it was like flight to bring food to her lips

with a skeletal hand. 5ut now she will always

be naked and sad. &he will be what happens

to lake water that is loved and is alsoshallow enough. The thickening, the slowing,

the black blood of it, the chest openedto reveal the inevitable heart attack.

2od, the silence of the chamber

we watch from. What happens to water that isn4t loved' It undergoes processes.

It freees beside traffic.



5ut the reaching out to all sides at once,

the wet closing of what was open'

That is a beautiful woman.

&o of course I stand and stare, never able

to pinpoint the eact moment I killed her.

Miss Peach" The College Years

I. $ledge &ister

7veryone looks at me as if I4m a rainbow

drawn by a slow child. 5ecause they can eat withouta ringing in their ears. They can ask for gravy.

They miss the point I4m always

aiming at their heads. The pills I suck are like me/

pink, fiy, and totally legal. They turn listening to noiseinto a type of eating.

7veryone wants to know about my pubic hair.

They say they4re looking for signs that I4m dying,

but what they really want is the food melting on the fork when they finally say none for me, thanks. They worship

the pain they think I4m in. *eanwhile,

I4d eat a beetle if I thought its legs

could make my lashes longer. I4ve got all theseorgans inside me and I can4t resist teasing them

to see if they4ll go away.

7veryone likes it when I finally die in the magaine article/

the cries no one heard, the love I needed massaged

into my hamburger meat. ;o one knows I am the flower,the bee, the wind, the rain, the dirt/ all the vectors.

;o one knows how well I sleep, how well I lie in bed

not sleeping. I run and sharpen

the bones of my face. The other girls saythey don4t care if their shadows aren4t museum +uality. They4re happy

!ust knowing they4re made out of marble. They have no respect

for the chisel I would take to the human race.

II. &pring 5reak 0ove isn4t above starting this way/

you can drop me from a second-story window

if you pin me against it first. It doesn4t want to start this way,

and who can blame it. There4s the electric outlet and then



there4s the baby finger stuck into it. I was both.

couple nights later, on a busy street, I recognied his walk the way a mouse must recognie a hole it used last winter.

&ure, I wish the universe could clear its throat.

&ure, I4m sick of the source of great firealways being the sun. few nights ago he peeled off of me

as if he were my own skin and he didn4t want the !ob.

5ut afterwards he kissed me as if to apologie

for every brutal thing he was strong enough to have !ust done.

0ater he walked me across town, and we ended up

in an epensive place, in the middleof a loud song. He looked right at me

the whole time, as if I were still the one thing he would choose,

even though the damn thing couldn4t stop spinning

and was clearly broken.

III. The 7ssay

It is dumb to know what one has longing for.

I am moved by the orange stitching on a girl4s corduroy book bag.

I, too, wonder what I am happy about.

There is always something natural in pieces

like sand or snow. If early Western cultures

had perceived the surface of the day as wrapping around them like a shell,

I wouldn4t be here right now. ;ot eactly me, not eactly here, not eactly now. The world spreads out

from how we look at one thing. I tell myself this and then I look at things for hours.

6on4t think I don4t know how stupid I sound. $lease, do not think I don4t know.

I<. )ifth-3ear &enior

7verything tastes like love. That4s what

makes me nervous. That and I wish I knew what I will act like

later today. I watch myself being kind sometimes

and I think, is there nothing you won4t fake'

5ut that4s unforgiving. smile, a purse, an a,

these are all things you pick up and carry.



0ately, I pick up the lightest things. I am floating and honored

to drag myself back and forth like a huge feather

across my sleeping boyfriend. He thanks me

by actually changing under my touch. He is smooth

and I worry that I barely feel him,

but doing things no one should see

seems the only good use of my time. He buys me

!ewelry I never wear. I love it because it piles up, which proves

I4m alive. The boys my age cry more than the girls do.They4re always losing games, and those are very symbolic.

*y girlfriends and I can4t get off the couch anymore,

and summer is seeping in under the doors.

*y friend says people are wrong about us.It4s the ripe fruit that gets eaten. I say the truth is

I don4t work at things because thenI get them.

<. 2raduation ddressI like to be at the end and look back

at the beginning and see all

the stupidity there.

I think we are young.

The posters all say so,and though no one ever officially

!oined our clubs, we designed many logos.

The beautiful, dumb girl you lovedwas everyone at our lecture,

and what a strange boy we all were in the corner

with our walking stick, talking too muchabout the board games back home.

*any of you were net to me at the talk where I becamehyper-aware of the creeping in my heart.

s you know, I became obsessed

with the on and off inside my chest.



)ailure seems to be one half of the deal, which is why

I have occasionally climbed on top of some of youand then left the room. 5ut there is another way

to look at it/ like you, I am a house

for a wet animal that is sneaking up

on something it is terrified by. What is that something'

The wet animal doesn4t know.The wet animal doesn4t even have eyes.

There4s no way that wet animal isn4t brave.

The Monkey 'hose Jo! It Use$ to Be to Sit on Miss Peach#s Sho&l$er

Takes U+ Ol$e Ti*ely M&sic

There is a cartoon about everything

I4ve ever done.Whoa whooooa whoa

:emember the episodeabout the tiny ban!o the pink-gummed monkey thumps

plink plink plink with his dirty nails'

The 7aster special about his one good friend being gone'

I wait by the petal-sick river

for the hatred to subside. *y belly at leastis soft to me and kind

in the way of getting full. *ost things never doooooooooooo.

Have you ever woken up sideways with a small carcass and fleas

only to become the inspiration for all flowers made of other tiny flowersthe very net day'&trum strum strum

The past is not so bad.

It4s full of lights.

(hord chord chord

0ike the past, the monkey sleeps in the trees at nightunder an unflinching moon and brushes

his own smart, flying tail.

Tittledy tittledy toooooooooooooooo In the morning

sweet sunshine between his hairsis no crime. When you wake up and there4s his big smile that seems very borrowed,

please remember/

he learned it from yoooooooooooooooou.

The Pirates o- Gol$ Ri,er

Chapter 1



3ou want a place to keep it, a place for it to be, a repository, a source. )or the gold.

The gold you feel all day burning inside you, gaining supernatural value,

threatening the leadership of your head. The gold fighting to display itself in your eyes, pulling you toward other people, turning the heap of togetherness into something

permanent and musical.

3ou were mined from a hole in the earth that you belong to like larvae belongto a honeycomb. We all have a home, but it"s a law of dispersalthat not all of us will fit back in it.

To be loose at a time like this is to lose your teeth and be a pirate entering the sun.

Chapter 2

3ou begin with a town because a town is where it begins. town is always

lost or buried. It"s always obscured by raw mountains. 3ou are always in the dirt

digging it out. Hunter, drifter. &pecies/ marauder. With your thora boat

and your old face whipping at the top of your sharpened mast. With your forked armsand your improved relationship with the monsters of the air. Water and dirt

serve dutifully as your two emotions.

Chapter 3

2old :iver collapsed on itself, but before that, so did everyone in it.

The hand in front of your face became rapid and disturbing.&o much for the preciousness being stashed in the body.

7ventually our bones became the spoons that stirred us.

Chapter 4

We are safe, the body is ruined.

Chapter 5The real voyage begins as the !oints unlock, every instant a shining hill or valley

beyond ownership=original, unseen, utterly remote and detached from the placeyou were a second before. The living room walls are a new form of sea, the sensation

in your knee another bo inside a bo sinking with its treasure through the silted bottom.

The main island is no longer your head. The self becomes a desperate way of holding on,

of stringing things together, but that"s been true for a long, long time.

Chapter 6

metal city grinds in the distance. His fingers rest in pieces on the seams of her face, bone on bone. The other option is to turn to !elly.

Chapter 7

When the pirates finally arrived, desiccated and coughing, 2old :iver was back in full swing.

&trings of lights had been hung between the houses, and the pirates found

that the festoons and the twinkling were eactly what they"d been missing.

Chapter 8



&o you are a polyglot, fluent in water and digging. With no clearly demarcated head,

your hair"s no longer sure where it should grow. &ea creature.

3ou gave up your body and went to live in the foam. 3ou stung peoplewith spiny ridges that weren"t yours, floated up under their chairs

with contagious tentacles. byssal plane. 3ou float in and out of your cave

with no arms and legs, newly electric. 3our old body bloats in the corner. Harbinger.(ontaminant. 3ou and your kind. ;ow you want to go home' To be alive'

To have a tiny house, a sweet and personalied eplanation, a hole you can swim through

in and out of this world' I don"t think so.

Chapter 9

>indness. table pulled out under the sun for several generations.

Eplogue

0ook at the insanity epressed in the mechanics of the knee.

The winged desperation of the pelvis. The wind passes through it as if through a curtain.

What do you think' *aybe lace. *aybe cut flowers near by.

The Ri,er .That is 'ashing /er Away0 is a Sy*!ol -or Se,en Things

To the !lass "that sn#t there$%

9nce we have fully described how the evening arrives

?it steps out of the trees@, we can turnour attention to the area of the tongue

that eperiences sourness.

&s'e/

The rain is sideways, and *iss $each a vulnerable powder.

5y now a paste.To the !lass "n a (la!k 'ress lke a (o) nto *h!h she puts herself$%

*en of a certain age, a certain %background.% Shuffle papers+ They will ?%awash,% %cloven,% %indolent%@

ironically detail the, for them, crushingly unknowable streets

of rural )rance. :ural )rance will once again

be a stand-in for your tight bottoms, ladies. The irony will once again be somewhat instructive. ?&ee #Ath century, the@

The sense of being crushed will, once again,

be the source of the erotic in the story.

&s'e%

&ome girls inevitably form a thin paste, a rime of high voices on the stems,a layer of film over the fronds that seals off the roar coming from the forest.

The +uiet wears a human lace.

To the !lass%

The senses are. We"ll leave it at that.

&s'e%

What do you cross girls with' re you kidding' &torms or debris

classically. Telephone poles or trees, depending on the century.



The sounds of a cat unable to deliver her backlog of kittens

because of the design failure of her own body. 0inks of sausage,

stone-ground flour, a vat of maple. The dust of ultramarine pigmentin the corner of the painter"s studio that you shouldn"t breath.

)ill out a form, man. re you going to eat her

or do you want her to burn down your home'6o you want to die from the inside out or the outside in'Would you rather have all the smooth, round stones turn into eyes

or have all the eyes turn into smooth, round stones'

To the !lass%

%To describe% is probably not to %to know%=you"re all devils. ut the !halk 'o*n+

&s'e/

*y glue. *y child. *y runny miture.

3ou"re separating into simple parts. 3ou"re in reverse.

&oon the ingredients=baking soda, flour,

the sickness after great laughter=will be back in my hands,

the gasp of revelation will be shoved back down my throat.To the ar a(o-e the stu'ents# hea's/

;ot again.

To the !lass/

If you turn and look out the back window, you can see what some might call a face

pressed against the glass.

The Stranger Man&al

Try having a home eclamatory with lit windows and try

to be what is lighting those windows. Try new curtains. Try to be

what is new about the curtains.

*ake sure you have a home. 3ou4re going to want

to hurt yourself a little inside of something you own.

&ooner or later you are a winged creature, a whirring sound. 3ou are the powder

that made the wings work until the fire became your whole head.3our house is the enormous, upright state of flying.

3our ownership of it is the glow

disappearing behind the rising, castle-like dome of your thora.

7ach day is a section in your endless abdomen.

3ou4re a unit of time, a greeting, an oidied bead,

the body hung in the air and infestedwith the bu of life. 3our instructions

will be carried to the four corners of the earth,

though they will alter slowly and become unrecogniable.

3ou will become unrecogniable. &trange wing markings.



3ou will land on a window and be called tlas, 0una, <irgin Tiger,

on a door and be 7yes of the &phin. Hush.

(an you hear' *icroscopic pieces of your faceare being eaten in the shadows of great mountains.

A )oo$ 'e Once Ate is Mentione$ !y a*e

nd we are filled with a fog-like discontent.

nd we are unsure of even the personal value of our observations.It4s as if we4re asking one another to sleep in small beds built for children.

It4s as if by walking we4re disfiguring those underground.

5eing present at the initial event was deemed unsafe in 9ctober #AAA.

5eing present was like holding sparklers that wouldn4t go out.When we lost 2old :iver, the trees became metaphysical and our brains wooden.

When we forgot our families4 faces, we became more lovely at sunset like a toic cloud.

6ogs were everywhere, sniffing and tracking, and a wonderful thing happened.

6ogs were nudging us to get up, it was wet, we looked down, and a thing happened.

fterward, new role models better demonstrated not knowing those we love.fterward, with needles, we made our symbiosis more frankly biological.

9nce again our former home is preserved inside the mountain on which we4ve awakened.

9nce again each speck of dirt is a frontier.What will be tossed down the well'

What will be the first words of the covenant because that4s all we4ll remember'

The dead and the living hang from each moment like bats.

The dead and the living are a pattern that can be hummed. ;ow even I am being held in someone4s arms and it turns out the river is a type of bone.

;ow even the dead, when seen from close enough, turn out to be moving.

catie rosemurgyseq & longline

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