The Poetry of Carmen Speer

I live in the Sonoran Desert of Tucson, Arizona. I'm 16 and I go to Pima Community College. Language is my first love. I love anything to do with it and I'd like to learn at least five languages (I'm working on it). Within that broad category, my favorite things to do with language are writing poetry and acting. I also write plays and prose, but they're not my favorite; it's more fun to act and write poetry. Poetry, for whatever reason, (maybe because my Dad's a poet), has a special fascination for me and a place in my heart.

© Carmen Speer

The Light

She dances
with the brown broom
worn down like a bald man
to a sad and shiny top,
and sees herself lit up
in lace, soft-handed
and plump-fingered
with the backs of her hands
pink from kisses.
She sees herself
with servants, shining
floors, glowing
carpeting, giant
oaks overflowing
gardens, tea, milk,
sugar, easy,
never another potato
and never another crack
from her mother
about her loose dreams
of light--
light in doorways,
light in windows,
light on paintings,
light on ceilings,
spilling, seeping, brightening,
light in dim rooms
light in boot-prints
light on bare floors
light on trousers
slung on side-chairs
light on pale breasts,
light on buttocks,
light on slapping thighs,
light on stomachs,
and on spread legs,
light on bored eyes.
A trail
of light leading
from a dim-lit kitchen
buckling under boxes, barrels,
sacks of flour.
A dusty
spill of light
from the glow
around her head
fading under a red dress
frayed from use
and there is a loose
slipping space beneath that girl.

Lost Boys

A boy walked up, his body swaying with his grin.
Shaggy black hair, the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip.
He asked for a cigarette and wrung his hands out like two dishcloths.
I said, "I don't have one," and dismissed him.
He said, What about a pencil, you got a pencil?
"A pen," I said. He sat down and looked at me
seriously, with wide black eyes
solemn as two stones. He talked about his life
in California, of pulling a knife
on his fifth-grade teacher, of his mother with her yellow bruises
and the pimp who sold him into a ring of boy prostitutes.
He looked at me, gauging my face, and I grinned.
Come with me, he said, I'm going back to Cali, and held out his hand,
as if we would dash off someplace
and find peace; and suddenly I could see us, I could see us
being bussed to L.A., riding under the desert palms
through the hazy California day
I could see us, together, inseparable: selling drugs, panhandling
taking refuge in parking lots with overhangs
making money, spitting shit, surviving.
He still held out his hand, his eyes full of something,
a dream realized or his pills wearing off.
We're just alike, he said, come with me,
and I almost accepted; what would the reaction be?
My parents, my best friend, where is she?
She went to the park one day and never came back.
I returned to my novel, his breath on my neck.
Are you coming? He stared at the side of my head.
Come to L.A. with me, you'll love it, it's so full of sunshine and drugs.
I said, "I told you, I don't have a cigarette."
He started to rise, and I turned, looked up,
with the sun in my eyes. "It would have been fun," he said.
How could I tell him? What did it matter that I knew his life
and all his anecdotes but not his name?

Beautiful

The man smiles at me
his teeth white piano keys
in a black face.
Real chompers.
He says, "You're a beautiful woman," and I think
girl.
He says, "Your eyes are the color of the grass," and I think
beer bottles.
He says, "Your lips are curvy, like a woman, like yourself," and I think
too fat.
He says, "Your hair is like dark honey," and I think,
brown.
He says, "Your skin is like peaches-and-cream," and I think
sallow.
He says, "You are an intelligent woman, I can tell by your eyes," and I think
hallelujah, he has finally said something true
something attestable, something as solid as the awards on my dresser the way beauty
cannot be measured in glances.
He says, "But I gather you are more proud of your intelligence by your smile," and I think,
Bingo, and apply more lipstick,
watching the man who watches me with the crotch
of his jeans and realize the inseparable
nature of the two.

On the Day I Died She Was Eating Cake

On the day I died she was eating cake.
I rose up with the sun in the morning and shimmered before her, winking on and out
like a strobe light, watched her contemplate her fork,
run the shiny tines through her palm,
swing it like a pendulum, and dismiss it.
What more is there to say?-- It is her birthday, and I am an old woman,
hanging around, waiting for the body rituals to be done.
I am not gray hair and pretty feet-- I am the climb up Tumamac Hill
the cactus thorns that plead for jean cuffs
the aching muscles in your thighs.

Death, as always, is something to dress up for.
Put on your nicest clothes-- your sorriest face--
put on forgiveness, put on kindness.

I died on the end of a deep sigh.
I exhaled once-- closed my eyes--
and there I was, gazing at my own face,
as my husband had each night-- the lovely smile
beginning, the camel teeth
baring, springing out like a row of gravestones
as if a last plea from my family--

No, no not the ashes
let us put you in a box and saturate you with our tears,
easily replaceable as the priest who reads for you--
well, they weren't getting their way
not in this last thing, not in this final rampage.

It takes three days for my soul to be vacuumed.
I left to find the child, and realized
I must have died on her birthday, a sly omen;
she was eating cake.
It seemed the only proper ritual anyone came up with.

a moment of wildness

The fire is taking over my life.
Can't my father see that
when he stumbles with Frankenstein grace into the room
and coughs up a wad of phlegm and smoke?
Can't he see it's burning down the house
and the block, and taking me with it, the quickness
with which it is moving, licking
across my vivid body, each focal point
sweetly clear, nipples, moles, gold hairs, this fire
would consume them all and hold them up as offering
to him, a handful of womanhood.
Like Venus from the smoke, he said.
Fire is similar to water that way,
it is the oracle which illuminates, and water,
the oracle which reflects;
either way, an accurate reading,
better than mirrors or talk or praise
is that fire, an exaggeration of everything candid, unseen, and feminine.

Saying My Name

Sometimes, you smile across the room at me
and I am struck with how we are alike; in the shape of our mouths, in the shape
of our minds, if I were to neglect my passion.
My fire that fuels me, without it I could be a lot like you;
I walk behind you and collect the waves of unused love that fold and drop
from your heels as you move. Your face reveals all of your lies, even in its smoothness.
One day, talking to you, I can't stand the break of your brows,
or the way you can see someone and know them by their walk, or their stance.
Do you realize how much you reveal through your own revelations?
I look away, bend down and catch my breath; I have the impression of your
half-moon gaze on my face,
going over its lines, the strength and clear dark outline
of my nose and the pink jut of my closed mouth
searching me while I am turned away,
and knowing me by the sudden, girlish blush
beneath the loose locks of hair that hang straight down, motionless
to cover me
you are shaking your head now, and brooding again as you arch your body
over the desk, crackling the bones
rolling the slow muscles disguised behind flesh.
"Carmen," you say clearly, looking down at your papers
holding your pen and staring at it as if you don't know it, or how to use it
and I hear, for the first time, the intimacy of my name
the sound you have to make to say it right, in the back of your throat.
I slide deeper into my chair, my heart speeding up
wanting you to say it again.

Tales of the City Bus

Monday, back in business, a man said to me,
the fat riding in smooth hills through his jealous
rage-filled cheeks, "I like a woman who smells of bread," and I shifted in my black
skirt and tight cream shirt with the shadowed hole hidden by my shoulder
a roof for where the hairs poke out, three days defiant
of the razor.

Tuesday it was an old man with tar-paper skin
and uneven hair, a white curl among the black like a surprised eye.
He watched me, watched the way my lip curls
and my eyebrows play with each other, one up, one down,
skipping the ropes that criss-cross my forehead.
He kept watch like a beacon on a lighthouse, my little
aching savior, homeless and as anonymous to the bus driver
and the rest of us on our way to jobs and friends'
as the bedroll perched beside him. He watched me
weary but fascinated, and I felt privileged
that in such a dried-up casket of a man I could light
a remembered spark, a fire in the funeral home,
and told him that I loved him when he was a boy
who fished off the docks in Portland, who put out his tongue to taste the air
of every woman who walked by.

Wednesday it was a bleary-eyed junky, who gazed at me out of one puffed
eyelid, red forks stabbing the plate of his iris,
forearms flecked with holes concentrated over one vein like the work of a woodpecker.
He fixed me with his heart-stopping eyes, asked me over and over
to help him, to break the needle
off in his arm and give him
no surrogate, to be tough
and scrub him until he shone
like a chrysanthemum, until he was enough
to lean forward for.

Thursday it was a man in a wheelchair
whom I tested with my newfound
callousness. "Life is hard," I said, "we all
have it hard, but we aren't missing an arm or a leg
to prove it," and waited to read his face, for the crinkled
pained paper of his skin,
for the cliff of his forehead to wrinkle and push his orange curls forward, listened
for his ghost toes to throb and call out
vengeance from the leg-shaped dirt in the battlefield where he lost them.
Instead he said, "That's right, that's right, I'd rather be legless and happy
than full-bodied and divorced," and laughed with his uproarious
mane thrown over the metal chair.

Friday it was a black-haired boy on his way to joining the ranks
of panhandlers on Fourth Avenue. He was the dearest,
with a dovish swoop of neck and a lank
fringe of hair, soft eyes like coins of jelly
sewn into his face, and a muted way of speaking, as if his words were first filtered
through flowers, and then through air.
I helped him up with my hand as he boarded the bus
and let a light into his eyes which was never there before.

Saturdays and Sundays
there are no desperate dear girls with their babies big as they are
and no troubled young men with their cautious cell phones
and self-conscious pagers. There is no bus-laced scent of sweat, no aroma
of ground-out cigarettes and sorrow, not in the streets where I use my feet
to walk off the scroll of cares that stretches me
like taffy. Saturdays and Sundays
there is no smell
of unwashed hair, feet, bellybuttons and beer slurped too quickly,
no oil-based reek of ridges and a thumb's
print loops on the yellow bleeping tape, no flashing light
of politeness, "Stop requested," no walrus bus driver
smelling like whiskey.
There is only me, sunning myself
hedonistic in the back yard,
far away from the rows feet fall in
forced to cramp together in the back seat.

Doubtful Heroine

I

Riding the bus today, I looked at the escape hatch
and wondered, if it tipped over, would I butt my head against the door
like an antagonistic goat, or would I sit quietly in my seat
and bleed? If the bus crashed head-on into a hillside
and the door lever popped off, and ten of us were caught, shaken like soda pop
out of our tranquil pools, stuck inside the gutted and exhausted
framework of the bus, and ripped, ripped enough that glass came out of our eyes
would I hike up my skirt, let my flesh roll out, a few ripples
caked with blood like an unprotected woman,
would I wrap these two warm and intimate legs
around something as steely and as stubborn as a metal pole
in order to squirm my way out of the top, push my unbeautiful
body through the door, feel how wet the wind is on the back of my bloodied neck?
Would I then be all unsullied by scars, the way it is in movies, no feathered
lipstick blending with the blood, every feature lovely and distinct, or would long scars
grow like pasted branches of dim spaghetti
across my body, would there be red tomato gashes
turned to pasta later on in life?
Would I dip down back inside, like a diver
all brave fins and big lungs, ignore the gas and the bus driver
with his head attached by a white strip of spinal cord, ignore the puddled
baby on the floor, swoop down to tug on those whose limbs choked,
the ones who sit frozen, legs open, their only movement
a sliding of the eyes to ceiling, to the floor.
I think about exploding
like the bus will soon, losing it,
dancing an Irish jig in the blood on the floor, each red stomp
a painting on the canvas of the bus walls, punching at the windows
with my crumpled hands, smacking life into the frightened girl
who sits and stares, yellow ringlets of her hair
red now and wound around her fingers, peppering
swift jabs at the inert old woman with her shopping bags,
the scarf stretched like gauze
up the steep sides of her pointed head, their faces
bursting at my touch into fireworks of spider veins and red trickles.
The bus groans in the road while I crawl across the seats,
legs bent in the wrong places, explaining
as I go to the dazed patrons
how they've gotta wriggle their own
limbs to the hatch, naked on the pole.

II

My mind snaps back to the coal tip
of mid-century Wales and the children, half of them
worthless in any monetary sense, the children of laborers
who would grow to shovel coal
until the mines dried up, with their same
pale muscles laboring over black buckets, carrying coal, stumbling, staggering
in the crack of the ancient hills
where soldiers slept and picked their noses. The other half
like my mother, with curly hair and the faun
Welsh look, wind-squinted eyes, long teeth, begrudging feet, the other half
who would grow up and break their parent's hearts
moving from the valley, only as far as Cardiff
perhaps, but the same. The dreamers, the ones with pointed jaws,
freckles grown wild over their noses with the same
eager abandon as the dandelions decked in yellow on the hillsides,
with caps of black hair
and sheep-curly brown, blue eyes soft and white-edged
as the sky overhead, the ones who doodled lazily
in the corners of their slates, bent small heads together
as if to drink, leaned in with slender limbs
like saplings in a circle, giggled with gap-toothed grins
at the bunched stockings
of the schoolmaster and her long rhinoceros snout. The ones who only whimpered
when the coal came down, smoothing out their giggles.
The coal tip slid and sacked the ground, a load of black snow
tipped right off the smiling chin of the hillside,
and the living ones who planned to leave
screamed until their lungs went heavy and black, looked to see
the last few cracks of light before the coal pushed back their eyes.
The ones who feebly waved their fingers like antennae despite the biting pain
in every tiny joint. The ones who mewled like cats and cried fine mud
because already they saw the files of men and women
in the bleak and gray church with their eyes as packed with red as the children's
were with earth, the ones who saw their parents
tangled together in the streets, calling for them in the bushes,
remembering the slight mischief in the gleaming teeth,
a renegade who may have hidden out
playing hooky in the hillsides, just now
going to pop out of a tree and laugh.

III

I blink my eyes
and am back on the bus, shrug off the Welsh grief
like a wet raincoat, see
that the Mongoloid boy on the bus
cannot support himself correctly, and promise to swing down
with the glass tearing my eyes and catch him, ignore the blackness settling in
with a final shudder of the broken bus, ignore the smell of
leaking gas, the air numb as the children were with a ton of coal on top, I promise
to squeeze him through the last inch
of the closing hatch, breathlessly calling his name.

Himmel Park Hobo

He came from San Diego on a Greyhound
with his bed curled into itself
like a pillbug. He watched the coast towns pass, thirsty,
looking for a drink of desert stretch,
looking to watch the mesquite
grow, and pluck prickly pears, pink
to his tongue, and see a tattered jackrabbit,
and then to end up
in a neat cubicle of grass,
with benches and picnickers and the rest of the urban
types, and lie on his bedroll and write to his beach bum
buddies back in 'Diego
and still dream of the desert, if only he could get the fifty-cent bus fare.
So his eyes light up when two young girls approach him
in their happy college sandals
their eyes still lit and furious
asking for a smoke.
He takes a ginger time to roll his Bugler
cigarettes, to watch the light catch the boyish
peach fuzz on their arms, and talks to them about California
and dreams, and how he loves the ocean now that he is separated from it,
like a woman.
They ripple their shoulders back, sarcastic smiles flicker
like Autumn leaves on their faces,
waiting for him to roll the unfiltered tobacco.
The red-haired one leaves a pair of shades
in the grass. He slides them on, raises his brows
above the rims, sinks so low in the desert soil
he swears he can smell the sea salt.

Sitting Still In Susu's Apartment

Her mouth is old and dry
it recedes back into blond bone.
She smiles at me, a twitch of wrinkled
paper skin at the corners of her lips
there is something raw in her hair, in the fragility of her shaky wrist
that could be snapped in half like a wishbone.
I wonder at the wetness in the sockets of her flint chip eyes,
I ponder this as I weave my way past her things, chosen for their rickety
stance, they remind her of herself. The wicker table, the carved birds
I wouldn't break their wooden beaks,
the glass coffee table dotted with crystal wine goblets, cup holders made of melted
glass, glass, glass, white downy carpet, I pick my way through her rubble
and seat myself on the flowered couch with wicker arms.
She talks and her voice, too, is damp and cracked,
the air filled with smoke from a waning cigarette
clutched in her thin fingers.
I hardly hear what she is saying, so conscious am I of my hugeness in this room
of the exuberance I thought was gone, reminded by a palace of glass and other
things which can be broken.
There is a wildness in her which I have seen before, in cribs and carriages,
a similarity between her rarity and that of an infant,
and I think about something we lose when we learn to walk and gain again confined to a chair.
Is it called soul? I know it is deep and bitter, wet and sweet,
and covered in the mind's marsh grasses.
I have an overwhelming desire to leap to my feet
and scatter the glass, spill the flowers in their wilted vase,
snap the wood and wicker, trod her ruins with my life.
I open the door and lean out into the fresh air,
the smell of death and old people, phlegm and cigarettes pervading this place,
and think about the time when I will be old
and alone.

Beginnings

A young black man sits opposite me.
He is drawing, an artist, his hand skating over the stone.
His skin looks alive, his nails clean and well-kept,
fingers darker at the knuckle.
He is not a forlorn ghetto boy
but a noble African, sent out on his journey for life at sixteen.
His girlfriend is perched next to me;
her fingers fly as she speaks. Like a hummingbird
in her quickness, the sharp nose and treble voice.
She is not a white-trash trailer daughter; instead a pagan queen,
dressed in rough Saxon robes spun of sheep's wool.
If we all went back to our beginnings, she would not be so homely,
she would shine like a light, the white of her skin
lending her a bloodless honesty.
And her beau, he would wear bright colors
and sing softly, with intelligence.
He would not be drawing a low rider
and leaning back to catch the breeze, his life whistling past his ears.

An American First Kiss

First times are always awkward
especially when the two of us are high
and perched on a car curb,
the fender of the Mazda
an ashtray, the joints slipping like magician's coins
between our fingers.
A little sloppy I would say,
and I tasted some of your muscular
sadness, in the petrified rims of your lips.
First times are not to be forgotten, or the wrestle of two dominant tongues.
I liked to kiss as if each resounding smack
kept me alive, I liked to humble myself
with gasps of air, while you, hard little boy,
grinned, rocked back, and smoothed your butter-licked hair.

A Memorial for the Living

a villanelle, in memory of my Isabelle, my friend

In death, so lovely. Bitter and clasped as a rose.
And she raised her head, said, "I won't survive this,"
such candor, to know.

We see we can still surprise, no pose
grey ruffled hair, the quick camera's kiss
in death, so lovely, bitter and clasped as a rose

without the redness. My confidante, a mother temple, and still the cancer grows
a gnome who crawls like lichen, what a long, bitter list,
such candor, to know.

The quick stained grin, morose
the turkey wattles falling loosely, her plumpness whittled down to this
in death, so lovely, bitter and clasped as a rose

pressed in a book. Still in stocking feet, the girlish toes
the grim moon of the face, lined with what she doesn't miss
such candor, to know.

And it shows,
the cancer shows. Fawning in the rubble, a queen still with her torch and fist
in death, so lovely, bitter and clasped as a rose.

We can hug her, we can cry and ward off life's cruel blows;
still only a gist, and when the breathing slows she knows
such candor, to know.
In death, so lovely, sweet as a rose.

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