Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America

Secrets

Laura Mullen | 193 open, on her face the streetlight gleaming, the shine of tears. Even then we thought we made her up: out of our own distress, out of the unhappiness which filled us and about which we couldn’t speak; we thought we made her up, we needed her so badly, we needed her there and so desperately needed her not to be real: for whatever had happened to her, broken loose upon and in her, to stay far away from us; to be no one’s fault; not to have happened at all. We didn’t believe she existed, we didn’t want to believe. We wanted her even then to be something else we would never admit the existence of: she was the last piece of proof we needed, the last lost scrap of evidence the witnesses keep, to themselves. She was a special double-edged gift the night had given us, we thought; she was a test we had failed. She was a young woman running down a well-traveled street in the middle of the night screaming out of some pain we could not speak to or touch, who flashed between us, her face wet with tears and distorted, in her hands something . . . maybe her shoes? I think she may have been barefoot, or in her stockings—there was no sound of heels on concrete, as she came down heavily—and she was running, but her shuddering indrawn breaths were not for that, but because she was screaming, screams without words in them, just screaming, loud enough to hear from a distance as she came toward us, and in the distance, as she went away again, until the darkness and the silence took her back as though she had never been. . . . from After I Was Dead Secrets They were “warehousing” all the empty apartments here, and now The building echoes, empty, with the sound Of the roller as the painter paints The hallway, with the sound of the heels and toes 194 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century Of their shoes when they come to measure the windows, Of their tap on the door when they tap on the door to come in And measure the windows and take—sooner or later— These windows I like so much away. The new ones, I imagine, will be simpler and harder to open From outside. They won’t show me the outside Cut into so many even pieces, each framed In white . . .—I stopped there for a moment, held Back (but you can’t see it on the page), as if by bars. When I saw that the easiest, best image—still— For that was something I’d said before, used before; twice. Now I can’t be sure I’m being honest anymore. Or I have to Let stand as the sign for being honest this effort to give it “all” Away. Just the first effect of history. Having drinks One night with my lover and a colleague the latter Asked me how many men I thought I had slept with, Right there, like that. We were drinking a lot and later I knew I, at least, Was drinking too much. But I said I’d stopped Counting a long time ago, and I meant it. And then he said Roughly, and I said Forget it, and then he told us How he counted the women up, at night, in the dark, like sheep. His wife was away doing graduate work. What’s the point of this, What’s the point of “all this”? Somewhere up there I was thinking— It could have been the second line—The need for money, the need for sex; Something I’d decided not to say (I couldn’t see how it fit) Finally got said, or was being said the whole time, or came out. Not all The apartments here are empty. There’s someone living Next door I’ve never seen I know is there because I’ve seen The small bags of garbage he or she puts out in the hallway When it’s late, when it’s too late to all the way out. At the top of one bag the dried, curled-back-down-as-in-birth, dead Laura Mullen | 195 Ferns from a florist’s arrangement stuck out, and a glass Bottle. If I was ready to really look...