The Story You Tell Yourself

Heather Kirn Lanier

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776620
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie américaine

"Heather Lanier's The Story You Tell Yourself may be a first book, but Lanier's firm intelligence and lyrical artistry make poems that are clearly the confident work of an extraordinarily accomplished, even thrilling, poet. Lanier isn't kidding when she says, auda-ciously, 'I found a shape and made a world, /then crawled inside. Where else was I to live?' Her poems make a world that is a plea-sure to enter, inhabit, and learn from."—Andrew Hudgins "These poems are small miracles of naming that summon a world into existence. The poet doesn't merely name things we know, she re-creates them. By speaking to a phone, she invents dialogue. By calling the birds as they fly south again, she raises a scene from her past. The past, in fact, haunts these pages and yet the book, feels resolutely triumphant. It teaches us how to celebrate in the midst of loss. Even 'knowing the sun will erase it, /' we can move forward in the company of this amazing poet, writing our own 'faint psalm[s] of unknowing.'"—Jeanne Murray Walker

WHAT SHE CALLS ETERNITY

What’s this, that each cell now aches
like it’s a little palm cupped

for some key or coin, for the one verb
it thinks it’s made for—holding?

Biological clock, say Redbook, websites and mothers,
the shorthand for some internal meter

ticking as each egg

passes through a tube like a thrill-seeker’s hips

rotate a silver turnstile

at a theme park. But I’ve never been one

for roller coasters.

When the cart hits its peak

and descends,

I grip the bar, believing

I’ll lose something. Like here,
at the Rosen Cancer Center.

Another dose of radiation
completes its orbit

around my mother’s abdomen. Caution:
Radioactive, read the doors

she walks through each afternoon,
the two menacing trefoils

like black, three-pronged fans
encased in yellow triangles,

and though I can’t join her
the young nurse does,

the tall one with the basketball-belly.
I worry her burgeoning shape

could get caught

in a toxic machine, but she just shakes

her waist-length hair

across her back and says hello

to patients as pale as spackle,

then escorts them through the doors.

L-O, spells the top line

of her T-shirt today, and V-E,

spells the bottom,

stretched across her pregnancy like a grin.

I envy her

ability to wear it without apology,

without caveat or asterisk of irony.

No, it’s not a clock, or a ticker, this thing

that’s asking I follow her lead.
It’s a wa-wa pedal

wavering every cell, insisting I fill a hole
my body learned ten years ago.

My father had weeks, they said.
His belly ballooned

with fluid in another cancer center, my first,
and my mother asked, How long

will he have that? The doctor paused,
thought up an answer

but then revised it.
Forever, he said,

which is what my mother now says

when she hails the virtues of some cancer-killing tea

she’ll drink from now until
what she calls eternity.

HEADLINE: BABY LEFT OUT IN SNOW OVERNIGHT

Winter lies upon her like a lullaby of ice.

Her toes get caught in the teeth of icicles

and before she falls asleep, she blazes

illusive heat, believes she’s growing backwards.

Her fingers came from nothing but a telegram

of tiniest stars: the hand—big bang—was a nub,

a web, then a candelabra. Nerves spindled

around her flesh like blue-yarn booties over feet.

She had an orbit in the warm, finite world.

Is she shrinking back to the molecule or star

that started it all? Is each cell surrendering

its christeni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Writer Repents
• Ode to Seven
• Call the Old Man to Angle Up
• Skipping Stones
• Deserted Base
• What She Calls Eternity
• Headline: Baby Left Out in Snow Overnight
• The Three-Second Moment
• Some Storm
• L’esprit de L’escalier
• Father Jim Shows Me Twelve Jesuses
• “Free Bible in Your Own Language”
• Letter to Self upon Completing Autobiography
• After Excavating Your Inner-Child
• The Last Word