Beautiful Zero

Poems

Jennifer Willoughby

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781571314802
• eBook ISBN:
  9781571319425
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

From love and war to Shark Week and college football, this award-winning poetry collection "makes both the marvelous and quotidian buzz with brilliance" (Matt Rasmussen).
Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like "a knife you don't see coming." A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos.
A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because after all, "Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are."
Winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

KAISER VARIATIONS 1

You’ve had ten years to tell me everything

you know about the Atchafalaya Swamp,

the mangled devastation of its buffer marshes,

the spectacular ascension of egrets and two-

winged anhinga. Remember sliding shirtless

into the hospital bed while I was circling

the drain at Kaiser Permanente? The man

on TV driving the convertible in a gorilla suit

was Robert Wagner, his middling skills

nobilized by the death of Natalie Wood,

she of the alabaster hands and green bikini.

Love cannot be our tragedy. Recall how, while

cracking my cast like an icicle, the night surgeon

said: The more you love, the more you turn into

an object, a beloved horse standing in the rain.

KAISER VARIATIONS 2

I was bleeding profusely at Kaiser Permanente,

sky-high on morphine like the sad vampire

in Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla.

Why must age and degradation always stick

together like fungus on a rock? Thank god

you came along to braid my hair and play

checkers, just like old times, before the polar

bears were dying and we all got poor without

even trying. On clean hospital sheets, we re-

enacted July 20, 1969, where I was the moon

and you were the lunar module. The night

surgeon arrived with my missing digit in a soup

bowl and said: Kids, we may not be able to see

the stars from this window, but they’re there.

KAISER VARIATIONS 3

It was the fourth quarter of the Badger-Buckeye

game and I smashed the neutrality rule eleven

times in the psych ward at Kaiser Permanente.

The QB landed a hook and ladder pass, I dissolved

a little Librium under my tongue and the night

counselor talked about emotions. Big or small,

emotions were cocaine and I craved a billion while

poor Vivian got defeated by a group hug.

Counselor said: The speaking is easy but the feeling

is hard. I was stuck in throes of accuracy, unplugging

my childhood of unimproved love. Man down!

Man down on the field, Bucky oompa’d a cute

tuba player, one more field goal to go and the kicker’s

toe rose like a flag, true north and beautiful. Night counselor

said: It’s a gift from god, motherfucker, no two ways about it.

KAISER VARIATIONS 4

I was having my heart started with sizzling

paddles in the pale sinister halls of Kaiser

Permanente and I was feeling revived as an old

steel mill on the first day of a brand new war.

Then you blew in with pictures of Indianapolis

and your Meyer Lansky trench coat and what

could we do but snuggle? There is something

about a hospital that makes it easy to redefine

desire as the absence of wires. The night

surgeon tied up my loose ends and said: It

would have been fun to be in Havana while

Eartha Kitt sang “When Smoke Gets In Your

Eyes” to a roomful of New Jersey gangsters

but even romance can be ugly and survive.

KAISER VARIATIONS 5

I was riding high on my slim artificial limb

courtesy of the good people at Kaiser Permanente.

The way the prophets tell it, I had nowhere

to go but up although it’s just as easy to go down

with a hinge in your fibula. While I was forbidden

to operate heavy machinery we found fresh

ways to tingle. We drank the apple juice

provided and banned conversations ending

in why. The remaining bones grew fidgety

and shy, wary of the stranger in their lives.

The night surgeon arrived with extra-long socks

and said: Sure, getting old is a process of getting

burned but there are always fresh words to find the hurt.

KAISER VARIATIONS 6

One night after you told me anything

that moves is headed for destruction, I

ruptured a muscle trying to imitate a brain

in action. Propped on orthopedic boxes

in the terrycloth warmth of Kaiser Permanente,

distance was collapsing between me and the lives

of people I had never been. When I was my

mother, I smoked Kools by the community pool,

trying to remember the music that summoned

the monster. You smuggled in salami on rye

just as the night surgeon arrived with my file.

He said: Lady, a treasure hunt will soon begin.

Then you will see something interesting.

KAISER VARIATIONS 7

I was hard at work on the next generation

of parks that featured naturalistic plantings

in the ruins of grain silos along the spastic

Mississippi when I was struck by lightning.

Airlifted to the vestibular therapy ward of

Kaiser Permanente, I twisted like fiddleheads

in the wind. You brought me the book of Rilke,

his inner ear so finely tuned to insular human

music trying to get out. For old time’s sake,

the surgeon arri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Come Close then Back Away
• The Properties of Women are the Properties of Life
• Do Not Be Broken by the Day
• The Whole Ugly Empire
• Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers
• Fun House
• The One You Have to Love
• Shark Week
• Their Joy is Right in Front of Them
• Bringing in the Noir
• How We Love Geography
• Ranger Buster Jangle
• St. Deceiver in the Garden
• We Seek a Shepherd or a Sign
• Losing the Plot
• These Bones Will Rise Again
• Country on Fire
• Memoir so Far
• Blunder
• This Year has My Name on It
• Kaiser Variations 1
• Kaiser Variations 2
• Kaiser Variations 3
• Kaiser Variations 4
• Kaiser Variations 5
• Kaiser Variations 6
• Kaiser Variations 7
• Kaiser Variations 8
• Kaiser Variations 9
• Kaiser Variations 10
• House of Sleep
• Your Problem is Forest Fires
• Wave If You See Me
• I Have a Secret Admirer
• The Sun is Still a Part of Me
• It is Not Entirely My Fault
• Wisconsin Space Odyssey
• Fun House II
• I Am a Person of Hidden Talents
• We Work the Dark Like the Moon
• A Hundred Efforts Have Been Made
• On Track At Appomattox
• Compos Mentis
• I Am Free to Destroy Myself
• In the Absence Lives the Feeling
• The Universe Contracting and Expanding
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author