Vulgar Remedies

Poems

Anna Journey

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807152218
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Anna Journey's poetry is really magical." -- David Lynch, director of Blue Velvet and creator of Twin Peaks
"Anna Journey's second collection of poems is wonderful and brings something precise and wild out of a vivid night, an imagery that finds its own necessary music, like sudden isolated birdsongs at dawn. The multiplying shadows of the mind are made exterior here, surprisingly illustrated with anecdotal thought. And Dante no longer concludes that all lovers are martyrs. I'm so happy to have this work in my life." -- Norman Dubie, author of The Volcano
"Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic/alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life." -- Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Twin Cities

Contents

ONE

Why Bioluminescent Shrimp Remind Me of Laura

Vulgar Remedies: Tooth and Salt

Leaving Texas

Vulgar Remedies (2): If You Hold a Dying Creature during Childhood

Diagnosis: Birds in the Blood

Article for the End Times: Gas-Mask Bra

Confessions of a Firestarter

TWO

Warning

Dermatographia

Elegy Where I Initially Refuse to Eat Sand

Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned

Fable with Prison Nurse and an Early Morning Embrace

Wool Blanket Covered in Nipples

The Devil’s Apron

Alarm

Black Porcelain French Telephone

THREE

One Week before the Vasectomy, We Stay in the Panama Hotel Bed & Breakfast in a Room Called Cole’s Dollhouse

Tooth Fairy Pillow

And Behold the Locks of the Three Dimensions Are Sprung

The Spirit of the Hour Visits Big Pappa’s Barbecue Joint

Nightmare before the Foreclosure

Base Notes in Perfume Are Almost Always of Animal Origin

Mercy

Moose Head Mounted on the Wall of Big Pappa’s Barbecue Joint

Hide and Seek with Time Machine

Danse Macabre, Mississippi: My Great-Grandmother Fires a BB Gun

FOUR

When I Reached into the Stomach of a Fistulated Dairy Cow: Sixth Grade Field Trip to Sonny’s Dairy Barn

Honey Dusk Do Sprawl

The History in Coffee

Sonnets to Ambien

There’s Another Forest Growing in the Water

Alarm (2)

Sonnets to the Egyptian Chamomile Farmers

Saint Bruise

As I Rewind

Acknowledgments

ONE

Why Bioluminescent Shrimp Remind Me of Laura

There are lights with a wayward sex
appeal, a weirdness that is
shrimp cocktail in my steel sink

shot through with miracle.
But that saturated, angelic skin turned
out to be a pink

bacterial slither, a sickness.
There are girls who exist,
like Laura and me, who’d glow—

at fifteen—who’d go up
in flames. We straddled
that concrete median in the donut

shop’s parking lot after school
playing the cigarette game:
a lit Camel dropped

between our forearms, a parallel
sting, that burn that made one of us
jerk away first. Who can stand it

the longest? Someone lost
each time, although both of us still mirror
the old brands—those flattened

follicles where no hair grows,
those nine white pox
the size of dimes. That night,

as we twisted in her cotton
sheets’ snakework, Laura said
I didn’t know what to do

with a woman’s body.
We spooned on her childhood
bed after I flinched

from her kiss, turned my spine
to her lips, my face
to the postered wall she’d strung

with dried roses the color of a dark
breakfast tea—those rings
left behind when the heat’s

waned and the shapes
settle into the dried
and distant. Husked and

half-healed. I’d trace those forms
with a fingertip: the ovals
of amber I slurred into the oak

grain of her bedside table, the jade
lip of her teacup from which
I sipped, the row of scars on my arm

I now lie about as chicken pox. Here,
where I stand at the edge
of my sink with a bowl

of peeled shrimp, where I notice
the sea life still glows after
my lamp sizzles and snaps

the kitchen into blackness. As if a girl
still crouches outside
my window with her wire

cutter and her lucky
skull-lighter. As if I crack the glass an inch
I could smell the smoke.

Vulgar Remedies: Tooth and Salt

After extraction, a tooth is smothered
in salt and burned to stop a wild
animal from finding it. Because if

a fox gnawed it you’d grow a grey
fang and if a bear chewed it you’d wear
its yellow snaggletooth. You’ve taken me

to the exhibit called Vulgar Remedies: Belief,
Knowledge and Hypersymbolic
Cognition in L.A.’s Museum

of Jurassic Technology. We’d married three
weeks earlier on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• ONE
• Why Bioluminescent Shrimp Remind Me of Laura
• Vulgar Remedies: Tooth and Salt
• Leaving Texas
• Vulgar Remedies (2): If You Hold a Dying Creature during Childhood
• Diagnosis: Birds in the Blood
• Article for the End Times: Gas-Mask Bra
• Confessions of a Firestarter
• TWO
• Warning
• Dermatographia
• Elegy Where I Initially Refuse to Eat Sand
• Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned
• Fable with Prison Nurse and an Early Morning Embrace
• Wool Blanket Covered in Nipples
• The Devil’s Apron
• Alarm
• Black Porcelain French Telephone
• THREE
• One Week before the Vasectomy, We Stay in the Panama Hotel Bed & Breakfast in a Room Called Cole’s Dollhouse
• Tooth Fairy Pillow
• And Behold the Locks of the Three Dimensions Are Sprung
• The Spirit of the Hour Visits Big Pappa’s Barbecue Joint
• Nightmare before the Foreclosure
• Base Notes in Perfume Are Almost Always of Animal Origin
• Mercy
• Moose Head Mounted on the Wall of Big Pappa’s Barbeque Joint
• Hide and Seek with Time Machine
• Danse Macabre, Mississippi: My Great-Grandmother Fires a BB Gun
• FOUR
• When I Reached into the Stomach of a Fistulated Dairy Cow: Sixth Grade Field Trip to Sonny’s Dairy Barn
• Honey Dusk Do Sprawl
• The History in Coffee
• Sonnets to Ambien
• There’s Another Forest Growing in the Water
• Alarm (2)
• Sonnets to the Egyptian Chamomile Farmers
• Saint Bruise
• As I Rewind
• Acknowledgments