Ruth Madievsky

NESTING DOLLS

I’ve been waking with an empty net in my hands.
                                                                  I’ve been re-reading the Neruda poem  
                                                    about the rain taking off her clothes.
                         Tonight the moon is a surgical mask and the stars psych ward refugees.
                                                                                                         Somewhere in this zip code,
                                                               two teenagers are making a backseat holy,  
           their hips harmonizing with the radio, a gun in the glove compartment.
There is always a gun in the glove compartment,
                                        just as there will always be parties where I accept a ride home
                                                                                              from someone whose name
                                        I’ve spent the last two hours dragging through dirt.               Right now,
              you think I’m eating pasta with a friend who has a PhD and a dog  
                                                                              and doesn’t feel like a spare tire most of the time.
Really, I’m home, thinking about nesting dolls
                        and how all my life I’ve been a charley horse in the thigh of some god.
                                                             There’s this dream where my heart is a salted pretzel,
       which is better than the one where my body is a looted ship,
                                                                                                                    which isn’t a dream at all.
                                        I keep thinking we are in the temple of the apathetic ghost
       or picturing us on Plymouth Rock,  
                                                             where I am burying the flag of my finger
                        beneath the band of your jeans.                      Call me an armchair romantic.
Call me when you finish your old Cuban,
                                        when you leave the bar with the beautiful women on tap,
       so I can tell you I’ve decided not to be a broken window anymore.
                                                                                        It’s going to be all rapid-fire dick jokes
                        and YouTube videos of Celtic dance from here on out.
                                                 We’ll be a Labor Day barbeque.
I’ll be the watermelon  
                        and you can be the spoon.  

---

SHADOWBOXING
after Jackson Burgess

Here are the sex cries
my neighbors threw against my walls,
here is the hair you left on my pillow,
here is the sound I made when I found out
my grandfather has cancer,
here are the bats
that sleep in my lungs.

Here is the fire escape,
and here is what happened on the fire escape,
a matchbox, a light bulb,
a box of Sudafed, scissors.

Here is my body making love to its shadow,
music of teeth against teeth,
lips against neck,
my body a basketball hoop,
a flat tennis ball, broken beer bottle,
here is the prescription
I haven’t worked up the nerve to fill.

Here is Los Angeles
begging someone to hold its hair back while it vomits
a gas mask, a lighter, a butterfly
with its back wings torn off.

Here I am naked, apologizing for being naked.
Here is a concave mirror.
Here is me falling into the concave mirror.
Here is the question
of where I will land or if.

---

BRIDGE, SHADOW, HAND

I would like to say something about bridges,
                        bridges and hands, how when you hold hands on a bridge
            it no longer feels like a bridge,
                                                how after, watching a lit candle do that thing you like
with the dark, you decide it doesn’t really matter
                        whether your life is simple in its collapsibility
            or collapsible in its simplicity,
                                    you think the questions you have with yourself
                                                            are just tinted vials in a medicine cabinet,
                        who cares if your body
                                                is a dormant volcano,
            what does it matter which of your friends have picked out names
                                    for their first three children
                                                                        while you spent most of the day
                                             feeling like a receipt someone forgot at McDonald’s,
and can I just share this theory
                        that a person can fall down her own shadow,
                                    that sex is not always about breaking and entering
                        though both involve thresholds and hands
and sometimes cuffs for those hands,
                                                what is it anyway about hearing someone you love
            speak your name
                                    that feels like being rocked back and forth,
is there anything more sacred
                        than that person’s mouth,
                                                how it opens like a renaissance,
                                                                        how it is always a metaphor for sex,
                                    so you are an astronaut
each time you necromance another curve of the body,
                                                                                    so you have this desire
            to touch other people’s things,
                        it’s all relative, the way you enter the museum of love,
                                                               how you are always standing too close to the paintings,
leaving the blue of your breath
                                    behind as a fingerprint,
                                                it’s okay, it’s alright, this bridge isn’t going anywhere,
            the maple leaves are happy to see you,
                                                            the water below doesn’t want you in its arms,
                        you are not going to fade out like a cough,
                                    the person whose skin you are touching
                                                                        wants you to read it like braille,
                                                this blood rollercoastering your arteries
            says, Put his finger in your mouth,
                                                            think about the merging of shadows,
                                 imagine the body as a lamp,
                                                                                     which it is.



--
­­Ruth Madievsky's first poetry collection, Emergency Brake, was named Tavern Books' 2015­-2016 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection and is forthcoming in January 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She was a 2015 Tin House Scholar in Poetry. She is originally from Moldova and lives in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral student at USC’s School of Pharmacy. You can find her at ruthmadievsky.com.  ­­