What It Doesn't Have to Do With

Poems

Lindsay Bernal

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780820353944
• eBook ISBN: 9780820353951
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Lindsay Bernal's What It Doesn't Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems. Through quick turns and juxtapositions, Lindsay Bernal navigates the paradoxical states of grief and love, alternating between vulnerability and irony, despair and humor. Her wry, contemporary voice confronts serious subjects with unpredictable wit.

II.

Fin de Siècle

Weren’t you always deplaning somewhere warm

with different hair & no job

beyond a less-than-part-time gig

tutoring a dilettante for 1,200 pesetas a week,

all of which you’d waste

with your imagined slam piece,

someone cruel said—a composite

of wants, really. (He loved the Latvian

bartender-model who ate only lemon wedges

dusted with salt.) At twenty, the turn of a century,

you chose a life without texture,

a half-dark, predictable plot.

The elevator to your host mom’s flat

smelled like bleach or what bleach tries to block.

During the breakup talk,

when he said your melancholy,

you heard a contraction

(you are) instead of what he meant

& threw a plate. Those days

you couldn’t see

Hemingway’s misogyny,

sought him out.

Love has changed

says your dying matriarch

who grew up on a dairy farm

that’s now an airport.

Why buy the cow when the milk’s free?

A friend texts that her fetus

kicks her hardest, wildly, right after orgasm.

For the life of you

you can’t muster a response. Haha

you finally text back,

followed by the hotdog emoji

(a mistake). She’s the kind

who writes poems about being suckled

raw, “wet with milk in Starbucks,”

always writing while walking,

chai in one hand,

tram in the other.

The model becomes a peach,

a woman waiting for what.

Her hands cover her genitals

from behind & underneath

but Man Ray leaves her ass exposed,

a portal bathed in soft light.

Tender or horrific?

As you exit the exhibit

you feel manhandled,

not moved.

Or cell phone service is stalled

again & again, not one neighbor

you know. The guys at the 24-hour

car wash on 4th gone

& gone the false Polaris

of their neon sign

on your stroll home from the Slope.

No traffic at all

now that the ecstatic

sun’s gone too.

What to do in a blackout?

Masturbate? Down

this pint of pistachio

before it spoils, before

the Milky Way & Cassiopeia

redden the horizon.

Fuck Nick & his body like a rock,

his paratactic problems

across a big two-hearted river.

You have one heart

& one’s enough. Two-minded

would be better, more spiritual.

You were in the Tyrol or Lowell

when you figured out your body.

Did you shout from a mountain

or fire escape, I have a body & it is useful?

You remember stowing your bag

above your seat, showing some skin,

a glimpse of belly,

everyone’s eyes on you.

Apologia

I’m sorry I subjected you to such bad art

that rainy morning you left me

—as bad, I think, as that wisp of a woman’s

performance on Governor’s Island:

she drank pink lemonade, then urinated

through her tights & tutu over & over.

I didn’t get it, but she sure was beautiful

in her cube on a swivel chair, on the floor

resting or stretching her lithe body

like a cat, yogic, wholly dismissive

of her hipster audience. Me?

I was crouched in a corner of our home

unable to stop the flood.

Not even by swaddling myself

could I sufficiently diminish the I.

Nothing’s less arousing than a woman

weeping, a bird confused by the weather.

The street cat hasn’t been ravished yet

to which she, too, will respond by crying

just like the toddler next door

whining without end while I fake-sleep—

which is it? A child not trained

to self-soothe or routine cat-rape,

his barbed part inside for far too long.

Femme Maison

after Louise Bourgeois

Head in a whole leaky house

bought at auction, Masson’s bird-caged

mannequin reinvented with two sons

in diapers, a gold-plated cross

around her neck that’s strained

under all the brick, the immense

mansard roof needing repair,

needing paint, they, all three of them,

listening for the drips. The thickness

of the curtains bugs her most.

They block the sun, so rare here,

and part of her but not the wet.

Too much mind-clutter to work

and no spine, her mother’s voice now

entering her head—house.

What makes her tragic, self-defeating,

to her own children even,

is that she doesn’t know she’s exposed,

half-naked. She’s caught hiding

but doesn’t know from what.

Venice Is Sinking

and so am I—into this wrought-iron chair—

distracted by laundry, a stranger’s blouse blown stiff,

and my own mosquito-wrecked legs: that’s what I get

for getting lost in the half-light.

There was a rushed introduction, the Giudecca

slack, sky-colored. No, I’ve never been atta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I.
• II.
• III.
• IV.
• Acknowledgments
• Notes