Tame Dog, Wild Dog

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations and Theses City College of New York 2012 Tame Dog, Wild Dog Coriel O'Shea Gaffney CUNY City College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/441 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Tame Dog, Wild Dog By: Coriel O'Shea Gaffney Advisor: Michelle Valladares May 7, 2012 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts of the City College of the City University of New York 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Hunger / 3 Summer of Echo / 5 Surrender / 6 Gemmy, I Fully Blame You / 7 Swim / 8 Bag of Bags / 9 Talking Rock Park / 10 Chase Bank / 11 Subjunctive / 12 Have a Nice / 13 J Stirs / 14 Happy Mother's Day / 15 Occupied / 16 Professor Letterhead Requests Some Letterhead / 18 Hallelujah / 19 When You're in the Middle of a Lecture / 20 Girl Scouts Mother Daughter Spa Day, Queens / 21 After Matisse's “The Green Line” / 22 I've Already Had this Conversation / 23 For Tyler Clementi / 24 Unwish No Strings / 25 Office / 26 What You Do / 27 Dementia / 28 Dear R / 29 Pigeon Flyer / 30 Battery Life / 31 Niagara Falls / 32 Sister / 33 Appetite / 34 Fork / 35 Things to Do Behind the Guard Rail / 36 Erasure / 37 Sustain / 38 Hymn / 39 Origins / 40 The Medium Myth / 41 The Chicken / 42 Green Lust / 44 Mark in the Book of Sky / 45 Fall Blizzard / 46 March 2011, Japan / 47 2 Solar System Diorama on Sidewalk / 48 Zeroth / 49 “Tame Dog, Wild Dog” / 50 “Tame Dog” and “Wild Dog” are titles of audio clips included on the Golden Record, which, at the time of this writing, is “in the 'Heliosheath'— the outermost layer of the heliosphere.” (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html) Also, Topdog/Underdog is a brilliant play by Suzan-Lori Parks. 3 HUNGER I. When I say elote I am trusting the spark of the t to transmit my hunger Elote: this dripping thing I offer you II. Walk with me through the woods by the beach With feet striped in light let me “th” through your teeth III. Here is a bouquet of knotted shadows I salt your roots; you stir my seas Flip my tongue upside-down and bite it, remove me from sloppy language to taste you true IV. You drive, I lean into curves Sideways everything shape-shifts A field of eyelashes blinks by A picnic bench warbles, bursts into flame The sun bounces to stillness, curtsies, dives deep V. I've got a catalog of memories looking for a new home A pale tummy untucking itself from an elastic waistband The smell of damp towel beyond clean or dirty My finger tracing an index Newsprint on my wrist Sunday comic strips 4 VI. I am an ant on my back Take me in your palm Let's live earnestly 5 SUMMER OF ECHO We live in a sky cave; stories ricochet upward, warbled as heat off concrete. Corn chips soften, chocolate pools. The pigeons find their diaphragms and bleat like pregnant goats. A big whoop straddles the bricks, squeezes. Sun creams across windowsill. Heat is pornographic and I am hungry for juice. It's June; it's July. We are bodies within bodies fanning feet with feet. The mailman whistles and the children take him for an ice cream truck. A ceremony commences lick to lick. The mailbox floods with nickels and dimes. The day steals your pants. We meet at home unsure of where we've been. I peer into the dinner you're overcooking. A marching band emerges, disperses. I peer into their absence. In my dreams I speak distortion. A motorcycle fades; a bee yawns on a lip. A boy yelps at a cloud; I tuck a bouquet of beaks into his knapsack. You flicker between birds, laughing in pieces, carefully assembling joy. You want witnesses and who can blame you? It's a dangerous thing to be happy. 6 SURRENDER Lanky men are bedding flowers in Brooklyn today. With bean-stalk legs and shocks of face, they pad the dirt and hike their pants. Children convene nearby, goading summer with Push Pops and coquettish Shut uuups. You would love this vision feeding me between errands: the van with pockets of trowels and split bags of soil leaving a trail of sprouts in its wake. The planters' wiry fingers whisking air, whittling earth. Tomorrow tulips will tantalize like bowls of sugar-cereal, violet and gold. The soil will grow contoured as roots web beneath. The sidewalk will erupt like your big-belly laughter and we will understand this stranger-love, how it buried you. 7 GEMMY, I FULLY BLAME YOU for how often I must sit on my hands. You answered the phone "Go to Hell," tipped a quarter if the waiter was haughty, knocked your ketchup on the floor. You took me in like a stray cat every summer, unlocked the door at sunrise, said play. You microwaved fish sticks, sloshed flat coke into a tumbler, set everything on the card table, said eat. Your laugh, loose rattling rocks hinting avalanche Your bourbon Your black and white westerns and once, Casablanca Nights you purred to Dusty the dog or was it Dusky against moths plunking into windowscreen. I knew I was your student but I never knew the class. Yesterday, back east, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. I found your daughter sculpting wild rice mountains in the kitchen. She says your brain is a river now, a current of children and horses: some buried, some grown. Gemmy, when I become river, I want to be the river of orange twine necklaces. Bury me in undies and mud boots. I want my last wisp of light to bend across the cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Yours was the class of thunder and thirst, how to holler, door against hip, how to fall asleep on windy mountain passes, how the movement shapes the dream. 8 SWIM In the basement, an album of old-world-thighs, pages of puckered white bowing to gravity. Before unearthing the book, she never knew the Irish could swim, that the topographical map her body demanded she wear contained ocean. Why all that blue. She proposes through thighs— from Down Dog, suspending disbelief. As her heels touch ground, a fleet of fleshy bottoms is unleashed; a row of sisters settle cheek by cheek on rocks by sea. Their bodies pool around the edges, soften the edges. She says Marry me, everything matters the same amount or not at all. Marry me; it's rhetorical. Marry me tomorrow as a girl gets into a car thinking of nicknames she'd like to shed, how to sandwich apologies between farewells. Love, we have no control over the truly consequential so marry me. For stupid's sake. For fantasy's. For the vein-waves we've ridden through time. For Peggy O'Driscoll's immortalized thighs. 9 BAGS OF BAGS I wake you with my cunt, Buenos dias. My ears are too prudish for truth. Who can stomach the work of the body? Buenos dias, mouth wants relevance. Body wants to be cocooned in guilt and thrown against a wall. Sex invites the darkness to dictate. Your earlobe is smoked ham. Sometimes we are a sliding door, bump shutting into a room of our own. Your chest hair catches me off guard. Often I think you are me. Your face is sunny. Your eyes are squirrely. You're rhomboid, rhombus. Fractal. Axis. Adenoid, adenoid, come along my spine. Only one pleasure can compel me to cease wording words like extricate. Your knee cap smells shiny like a brochure. Your vertebra? Nothing should follow vertebra. Diane di Prima says the only war is the war against the imagination. We are married now. Thankfully, no one showed us how to do this right. In our kitchen, plastic bags of plastic bags, a carton of tangy wine. 10 TALKING ROCK PARK In Denmark ol is beer. Tak is thank you. This was all we needed as we roamed the clean-swept streets. No one dashed anywhere; they pedaled, they strolled, they waited on corners for lights to change. We gaped at them like visitors from the distant past as we ate our lunches standing. Ol we said. Tak, beer in one hand, hot dog in the other, both slipping from our clumsy grips. We rode bikes to Kierkegaard’s grave. I watched you navigate the windy paths, your shitty jacket inflate with wind. We ran out of money day three, spent the remaining nights in hostels where I molded you into unnatural poses with too many props: children’s book on your chest, box-wine in the crook of your elbow, cigarette perched on your bottom lip. Look pensive, I said. You raised an eyebrow. The camera was disposable— everything came out grainy; an arm was lost to flash. One morning, Madrid was bombed. We watched the BBC until our eyes were burning then went out to face the sparkling concrete. I sat on a rock with a scarf up to my nose. The rock said something in Danish. (We were in Talking Rock Park.) I said what— and you backed up against a fence to let a man pass by. He said tak.

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