Extremely Lightweight Guns

Nikki Moustaki

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780822966241
• eBook ISBN: 9781597094658
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this bold debut collection, Nikki Moustaki explores femininity in contexts that grapple with violence, mental illness, loss, love, and relationships. She investigates these themes through a variety of provocative narratives, settings, and forms: from a prose poem about a gun shop owner ranting about the Second Amendment, to more intimate lyrical poems, to the intense stamina of three long poems that anchor the book in three striking and imaginative settings—the disintegration of an abusive relationship in a backdrop of often-surreally connected narratives; diary-like entries featuring three generations of superstitious women living without men in a strange world of their own creation; and a dressmaker trying to make sense of his changing world while dealing with his ill wife. This nuanced work is intense and articulate, crafted largely by shattering traditional poetic elements, creating new forms, and driving language that never surrenders.

II

DREAMING OF CHICKENS

Sunday: All our men are dead.

Mother’s body full of nicotine and lead, she smokes

Camels and kingfish in the yard.

A cock springs upon the chickens like a hammer.

Grandmother’s black-holing

the earth with her old earth-pick.

Bury the names of the dead and the sick.

From the holly the cock declares

hallelujah, hallelu-eye-ay in his silvercock,

come-hither-chicken way. Nobody brought

him here: iridescent feathers

and copper mane, razors on his bronzy dino-feet,

he shreds the chickens to chicken meat.

Mother can’t catch him. Grandmother can’t catch him.

We can’t sell all these chicks or all these chicken bones,

all this cracked calcium mown

under with Grandmother’s mature

manual mower, 1956.

Mother invites the third child from every house

in the neighborhood for chicken fricassee.

Grandmother’s afraid frogs are next,

duct tapes over every orifice in the house.

The cock comes

full on into evening like a misset clock.

The neighbors are all having suicide dreams.

All our men are dead and cigarettes are free.

Death is a priority.

Grandmother doesn’t close her superstition-holes

anymore, children get snared in them and sink.

There’s a nicotinic halo in the stained glass lamplight

over Grandmother’s genuine

nickel, fiftieth anniversary plate.

Mother waves the nimbus off like advice.

The chickens gorge on salt and chickenweed.

The neighbors’ children have more children,

come knocking at our door, two by two by two by three.

Grandmother sells the poison chickens

to four-sins-or-more ladies from the Ladies’ Rotary.

Today Earth hangs 91.4 million miles from the sun.

Saturn stationary. No one laughs.

Grandmother listens to each egg

before she smacks it against her aluminum bowl—

barely fertilized go to the white cake she’s baking

for tonight’s partial lunar eclipse.

The bloody almost-chickens

kicking in their translucent sacs go into the stew.

Lots of calcium in the unborn, Grandmother

says, stirring writhing blood and bone into tonight’s dinner.

Mother comes in with a carton of menthols

and another death threat.

We must become all the men that are missing.

Mother drives me to the locked

psych ward west of downtown, signs me in, and leaves.

I brownout during lunar events.

Last time Grandmother almost lost a finger.

There’s new violet carpet now. The turkey’s still thin and green,

plastered with fake cranberry goo.

Pale turkey bones mean frost or gall stones.

All the apple juice you can drink.

One cigarette an hour, though whining gets you more.

A cigarette lighter on a string.

At four, a walk on the walled terrace,

the whole town spread in squares, perfect green,

as if a delicate knife cared

for this cake like a daughter’s birthday.

I want to stick my finger

between the two churches, slide it up the interstate, lick.

At ten they lock me in the room next to the nurse’s station.

I wake with the half-moon itching my spine, sweating,

night calling like a siren:

I will come into the possession of secrets:

Mother struggles to put forth the appearance of happiness:

Grandmother desires a journey:

I will never marry.

Because it’s Saturday,

Grandmother retrieves me

from the mental ward in her toothpaste-blue

Chevy Nova,

cigarette filters rolling in the foot-wells

like excised tumors.

She unwraps a wedge of cake

from wrinkled foil,

eyeing my first bite from behind

the knitted steer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV