Poem in Which My Speaker Is Bored by My Real Life by Denise Duhamel

"My speaker wants me to be someone else in this poem—Dumbo or Marilyn Monroe."

DENISE DUHAMEL
Poem in Which My Speaker Is Bored by My Real Life

My speaker wants to make some big pronouncements, fly
with extended metaphors. She’s disgusted when I toss
the coffee grounds in the trash without even trying
to make an image. Don’t they look like loam,
the crushed beans once whole—yes, crushed and used,
the way I sometimes feel? My speaker wants to know
where the trash ultimately goes. Reminds me
about Thoreau—I can stand as remote from myself
as from another. I have long loved the way the poet
Ai’s name was pronounced “I,” but my speaker is bored—
I have written about this before. My speaker
wants me to be someone else in this poem—Dumbo
or Marilyn Monroe, or catapult back to my younger self,
a little girl wrapped in victimhood or a Superman’s cape
depending on the day. I tell my speaker the old joke
about the naive bride—First the aisle, then the altar.
Then her hymn—I’ll alter him. Hear the “I” in aisle? I ask.
But my speaker is unimpressed. Aye aye aye aye,
I am the Frito Bandito, I used to sing with my sister.
The first “aye” sounded like “I” and then
the next three sounded like they began with a “y.”
A Frito bandito robbed people of their chips
at gunpoint. He was a mascot of our youth. Back then,
we weren’t afraid of banditos or guns. They were just
cartoons. We weren’t outraged by any Mexican stereotypes
as we would be now. I could have never predicted
the gun violence so prevalent in my adulthood,
a recent mass shooting right on the beach
where I walk every day. A 15-year-old boy
who the medics thought was hit in the heart,
his left side torn open by bullets, lived. He had
a congenital condition that placed his heart
on the right side. Can there really be a feel good story
about a mass shooting? I think not. And yet
how giddy I was to hear this. I imagined
the shocked medic wondering at the magic
of this young man still breathing. Brig, a fiction student,
said I could use his image—the fluorescent light of lies.
He meant the ceilings of hospitals and the false promises
of enthusiastic doctors and nurses. He recently lost
his young wife. I, my mother. This boy will live, I told Brig.
This boy will live. The coffee bean unground, become whole
in reverse. This boy’s heart intact. I had walked
the same beach only hours early. I walk it almost every day,
my speaker wanting me to make big pronouncements—
today about violence, but most days about the dying sea.

First published in ONLY POEMS.