Poetry: Selections from Christine Naprava

What Stays

Either he spelled the cat’s name wrong

(an -ie for an -e, “Kitten” when clearly her name had been Donna)

or settled on the wrong month of death,

finalizing it in black

on the gray paver meant for a walkway.

Everything about the tiny graveyard was wrong

and all the deaths had been wrong too,

whether they were of old age while we were away in Disney,

or euthanasia on 9/11 (of all days),

or the beloved collapsing into a black and white pile of herself

as we all watched and wept.

 

I cannot visit their resting ground

without the neighbor’s dogs barking holes in my head,

and if I fight to clear a stone, the grass fights back,

as if to say, Leave us the hell alone.

Once, he planted a fake Halloween cat on the counter to scare me.

I wailed because it looked like a dead her.

Now there’s one of her in the dirt and one of her in the attic.

 

The tiny graveyard was supposed to be a thing of beauty.

We always feared what would happen to it if we ever moved,

but what a sick, sordid joke that’s become,

what a silly pipe dream it is

to believe that people like us

will ever flee in the night

from a place like this.

Building Your Lover

Every neighborhood comes with a garage door cracked,

burning bright shop lights pouring out from underneath,

beaconing the drive,

and I am that garage,

I am that scalpel that shaves hair soft, hair smelling so nicely,

from less favorable scalps

and I fashion a new scalp, a new head.

I shear the beard from a less favorable face,

transplant onto new head, new face.

I give it lips, soft and small,

but they don’t look small,

only feel small

when my mouth is a cavernous, hungry fount.

I give it a tongue,

no taste, no spit, not yet.

I unscrew a head, toss it aside,

screw body (partially) onto created head,

no light yet, though, no eyes.

How am I to give it light?

Give it eyes, doe in shape, chocolate in iris.

I give it a nose,

perfect, but not too perfect, teeth for that imperfect mouth.

The body−I’m not interested in the vessel.

Vessel comes last.

But how am I to give it light?

Do I undress slowly, T-shirt gathered high over the head and pause?

Do I relay with blind passion dreams for the future?

 

I press my thumbs into sockets like Jesus did.

Over by the clock that buzzes, there’s a crucifix with no savior.

I am not God.

I am not a trinity.

I am not a sculptor.

I’m the Victor Frankenstein of suburbia.

There is only one of me and many of him.

The neighborhood kids will follow my slippered feet to and fro

as they crouch behind bushes past their bedtime.

In whispers, they will ask one another what I’m doing in there

for all those long, lonesome hours.

I am building my lover, you see.

But the light never comes on,

and the shop lights always go out,

and I go to bed alone and in pieces

with a cold arm draped about my shoulders,

a lifeless leg poised across my thighs,

the taste of only me tanging in my mouth.

Pictures Both Moving and Still that Stick to my Ribs

1) Father dipping his head down to peck Grandmother’s stiff, shiny, embalmed cheek

2) The computer-generated photograph of a bright blonde university girl found dismembered on the side of a back road in Jersey in the early 2000s

3) The last Christmas card before the kid with the fanned front teeth gets braces

4) The bread-basket rolls that resemble Grandmother’s stiff, shiny, embalmed cheek

5) Your kindergarten teacher’s aide lifting a loaded gun from the playground you dug holes and buried rocks in

6) The resolve on the face of the boy you like cackling and calling you ugly

7) Your mother’s face before you tell her you’re sexually active

8) Your mother’s face every moment after you tell her you’re sexually active

9) The man you call Grandpa who’s not really your grandpa announcing that if only he were twenty years younger

10) Not the gash on your chin with the tacky flesh like strawberry Pop-Tart filling but the awe in their eyes when they first register your hurt, ask, Can I touch?

At my Cardiologist Appointment, the Electrocardiogram Fails to Detect all the Bitterness in my Heart

I’ve come to loathe

that hundred-degree

office room

like a good-for-nothing

ex-boyfriend,

and when I think of the man

inside of it,

I don’t see his face,

only the face of a meme

that my brain stubbornly insists

is him.

I could Google him

to make the image a little clearer,

but I’d probably

tack the image

to the wall

of that room

and then set fire

to the room.

No one goes to

their first-ever therapy session

the day after Christmas,

but I did

and it ruined my Christmas.

There was another instance

years earlier

when I dared to seek outside help

from another doctor

in a similar beige-grey office,

same godforsaken town.

I accidentally walked in on

an in-progress therapy session,

swore the doctor and the patient

had fire in their eyes

and serpents’ tongues

slapping the insides

of their mouths,

and I dipped.

I found help within myself

after that,

but now I realize that if the help

had actually helped,

I wouldn’t be writing this now,

and I wouldn’t be vomiting

the same words,

same woes

to the same three people

year after year,

and I wouldn’t still be

writing of that

cluttered, hundred-degree

office room

in which

the meme man told me

in broken English

and without words:

I think what you have

is the world’s hate

turned inward.

My solution for you?

Change planets.

Un/Burdening

The year I graduate from high school, every customer seems to contract some form of cancer that’s advanced and equally as fatal. If not the customer, then the customer’s wife, or the customer’s husband, or even the customer’s kid. They drop like flies. Every conversation becomes a version of, “Remember So and So? Well, he’s got cancer.” Viewings punctuate weeks. Some choose cremation, others insist on coffins. Daughters miss their fathers terribly.

Sons wish they’d fought their fathers less. I was an awful son. I could’ve been a better wife, a better husband (I hear that less). Did I tell you my dog died too? You’ve got so much life ahead of you, sweetie. No one says those exact words to me, but I’ve heard them enough in movies to know that youth is society’s synonym for hope. In September, I start college with my dominant hand swollen from a greenhead bite sustained at the beach. When the sign-in sheet is passed around class, I declare meekly that I am unable to sign it. I attend school by day and am briefed on the latest death toll by night. No new cancer, but other death prevails just as viciously. My aunt drank herself to death. My father blew his head off. I knew he was depressed but−I was an awful son. I was awful. I did everything right. I did nothing right. You−keep going if it feels right.

Christine Naprava is a writer from South Jersey. Her poems have appeared in Contrary Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, The Lunch Break Zine, The Daily Drunk, Outcast Press, Rough Diamond Poetry Journal, and Sledgehammer Lit, among others.