Chouteau's Chalk

Poems

Rosa Lane

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780820354576
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Chouteau's Chalk, Rosa Lane's poems take a deep dive into the emotional and the erotic. Gender bent, her poems reside amid a tomboy's emerging sexual identity within a world confined by heterosexual construction and its persistent mores. Her collection piques a countermythos that unfolds within a small fishing village opening a forbidden and hidden world with sensorial intensity and lyrical momentum.

An epigraph from Audre Lorde's notable work The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power hovers over every poem from birth through marriage, traversing calamities and holograms of desire, giving the "I" permission to assume full agency with power and dignity in a manner that is as acute as revelatory.

III

Calamities of Desire

When Air Has No Weight

I am king. On my side, I turn sleep

in a room, yes, a woman inside me

now, desert wind lifting cross cacti:

pick ceremonies, single-noted if at all, rib

cage—more sharp than soundless, and this is not why

I must forget her. You see, her muteness

empties

me at the extreme digit, hurt

mouth open she rides my hand, embodied

one more time. Her no-name stands

inside me still

but you see, I made her

mute and, thank god, blind. In fact,

she doesn’t exist at all. I am

talking about the one who leaves me. This,

I forget

each time a small death in air.

I well know

this raises questions. But you see, those

many evenings, my mother kept going,

a pinto racing the kitchen in heat—I watched

when nothing came of it. I spoke to you

of this, at exhale

in front of the front door on pivot, unhinged

your leaving. I knew

the cost for avoiding,

finding my backside empty, but I backed

off anyway. And you won, all

encased, unimagined, unreached. And since you left,

how I have made dying king

so august, so damned shut.

But before Peace, War

After Carl Phillips’s “Bow, and Arrow”

grows a small fist

lying on the surface, strikes

one word with the index

pointing toward ugliness. I

should have made myself

stay

out of earshot or foreseen

how tinder gathers heat

under the kitchen table

from smallest sparks: sink,

cat can, cup, key. We

risk

everything for the peal of it

mostly. & how each word

aims for perfect

wreckage.

*

So, I say:

Go.

Open pistil

inside bootless petals. Go,

do ennui right now for you,

not for me is what I think

you think I said.

Anatomy of an Ox-Eye

In June / when the Atlantic slips across the oyster bed / laps

lupines uphill / wild ox-eyes froth the whole harbor / whipping

frenzy / each yellow eye pilling a perfect hurricane / swirls

its daisy disc / lashed / bleached blades / love / love-nots /

At dusk rays draw their close / button / Green cradles of anther

& filaments tent / night-lidded drifting neutral / coast dawn

when honey opens for business / swarms all over again // You

close our day / petal by petal / & before turning off / the lamp

tucked inside its paper shade / & before its golden aura fades

the upper wall / nocturnal insects dive the incandescent bulb /

each shadow snaps its suicide against hot light / The top sheet

stretches our oyster bed / a storm raises a knee / wind

picks up an arm / blankets tidal / I drown each time / I reach

the soft green ovary on a love-not / your rays bound for the night

Calamity of Desire

Thousands of vortices

stir the bed. Look, I am guilty

circling the terrene at recesses of the fecund queen

where more often than not, the rose

bed grows far brighter

in fog.

For a moment your hunger

flowers on a tongue, but then you cut

to the next room, close the door behind. Ergo,

what choice do I have but to hold

the pivot & its hinge, wait

for a turn

or another spring? So it seems

to me, you wish simply to be rearranged—

September annuals stuck in a nosegay doomed

on your table, all done—the undoing

of which I fall for every

single time.

Short Tenure

After Carl Phillips’s “Late in the Long Apprenticeship”

She’s here finally, I think,

but each time I forget how quickly her her(e) becomes

not her(e), I mean

how her mind hardens lava behind a wall, despite my endless

hope for land to flow her(e) now fusible immediate. Instead,

she uncouples, afield

solidly distant: resistance, resistance’s body, windless

resistance. & (t)here, I too become

exactly that.

When You Shouldn’t Go Where You Think

I went home

with a woman

once

just for sex (she said).

& after we were done,

I asked about the elements:

basic weather

& if she was with anyone.

He’s back east (she said).

I noted

she did not (return the question, or)

ask about the wind

at my back.

& I thought how could I

redact a lay, like take it

back? Then I thought

what was I to undo?

Obvious, isn’t it?

She had no concern

for my broken wing.

In the early morning

before coffee,

she walked me to m...