Sexy, irreverent, and inventive
Lovesick Stormtroopers, dowsing Girl Guides, movie stars, pool hustlers, and the mad queen Ranavalona … With Knife Throwing Through Self–Hypnosis, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine–grained and crude. Yearning, unapologetic women who delight in the monsters they’ve created make these poems “a shield made of braids, / bassinet of broadswords,” and “a ghost-like choir where a love affair / becomes a pulp-book, plotted perfectly to end.”
Sexy, irreverent, and inventive
Lovesick Stormtroopers, dowsing Girl Guides, movie stars, pool hustlers, and the mad queen Ranavalona … With Knife Throwing Through Self–Hypnosis, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine–grained and crude. Yearning, unapologetic women who delight in the monsters they’ve created make these poems “a shield made of braids, / bassinet of broadswords,” and “a ghost-like choir where a love affair / becomes a pulp-book, plotted perfectly to end.”
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Overview
Sexy, irreverent, and inventive
Lovesick Stormtroopers, dowsing Girl Guides, movie stars, pool hustlers, and the mad queen Ranavalona … With Knife Throwing Through Self–Hypnosis, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine–grained and crude. Yearning, unapologetic women who delight in the monsters they’ve created make these poems “a shield made of braids, / bassinet of broadswords,” and “a ghost-like choir where a love affair / becomes a pulp-book, plotted perfectly to end.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770904361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 88 |
| File size: | 460 KB |
About the Author
Robin Richardson is also the author of Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press, 2011). She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence, where she received the Joan T. Baldwin scholarship and the John B. Santoianni Award (awarded by the Academy of American Poets). She has been published in many journals including Tin House, Arc, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and The Cortland Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the ReLit award and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Award. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Read an Excerpt
Knife Throwing Through Self Hypnosis
Poems
By Robin Richardson
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Robin RichardsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-436-1
CHAPTER 1
HOW GODS GO ON THE ROAD
She keeps a crystal ball on the coffee table
at a Super 8 somewhere between Harrodsburg,
Kentucky, and the cornfields she's afraid to enter.
She's thirty again. Spends her birthday burning
sage, rearranges history with the lifting
of a little toe, composes wars while singing
in the shower — "Viper's Drag," "Honey Dipper."
She's the "Lady with the Fan." Tan as deep
as tamarind. Whatever secrets she's received,
what talents, doors as wide as steak knives open
on a nebula she knows she'll one day enter.
Weather will not touch her, nor the sounds
of schoolboys in their march to physics. They
won't fix this hole. Alive too many lifetimes
to believe in cures, she passes decades with the gait
of Tolstoy heroines. However deep she cuts,
it is the blade that bleeds. Her skin like water
holds no form, but folds, and folds, and follows
numbly through the hours of a day.
VLAD THE UNINSPIRED
Tracking bomb threats through Bucharest, you
could have held them in your breath like folk songs,
each ignition red the way a handshake tightens
at the mention of a too-familiar name. The wars
were only whiffs of skin, new patterns on the cobble
patched with shades of summer tan.
SALEM: UNOFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT
The year her seizures became more frequent — dirtied
bonnet too familiar with the wood and grassy patch
outside the barn — she burned her lips on chapel candles
as if a kiss could be a prayer, could prove her innocence.
The year she found a ferret at the gate, gold-pawed, fond
of recitation, whispered Chaucer in her ear to get a blush.
The year she broke her jaw against her father's riding crop,
dropped daisies from a cut that split like batter.
MAYBE EVEN REALER
The cabinetmaker's daughter, while
dowsing with the Girl Guides in Muskoka,
finds a stream three feet below the bedrock.
Sun has bleached her braids, a séance
steeps her voice in mandolins so when she
speaks she seems to sing. The Girl Guides
are a loyal troop; too green to think of heat
or how the bear's skin makes him ornery.
The forest leaves its imprint on a path
where mindful girls may see the seedling
of a full-grown fern. Feeling barefoot
through the mud, they turn their beaks
towards a belt of meteors — slow-spinning
past the blue they've come to know as day.
THE SECOND COMING; I'M AFRAID OF ALMOST EVERYTHING
Toddler dunce-capped in the corner of a five-and-dime, reciting
car wrecks, carving quotes from B films in the rim of a Styrofoam
cup. Can't make him slur, suck thumbs like Gerber Babies. This
thankless offspring swapped afterbirth for new slacks and a collared
shirt. What's worse, his thirst for maple whiskey, wine mulled in
grails too hearty for these new hands. Hired flower girls to serve his
cause, Lolita-lipped, lean as matchsticks. Watch the hot pink way
they wash his toes: our favourite show. Polanski's muse, Rosemary's
second son, or something worse like nursery ghosts come back to
haunt the mom that let them teethe on Chinese lead.
WHEN VACATION MEANS THE FEASTING OF THE SEA
The cruise ship's captain, after every electrical storm,
relieves himself over the starboard banister —
his contribution to the calm. He doesn't check
that no one's looking, leans in
like a porpoise at the dinette's crystal
coffee table. If the ocean is a yawn,
so nonchalant, his ship's the little hum
that keeps it gaping — paced perfectly
to carve in longitude across the whitecaps.
He imagines capsizing, tries to see his passengers
inverted: evening gown to chandelier to spiral stairs'
red velvet overhead. He thinks of Fred Astaire instead.
Ginger in a mint shawl, fawning over the ghost
of a grand piano. Sallow-faced, he sips his julep —
two cubes, blue-hued, heavy on the bourbon.
MERCUTIO
a family history
Mercutio's mother wore a red scarf to her own
beheading, neck a perfect curve before it split.
He was seven, waited while a mountain leaked
its mauve across a row of mastheads. He knew
when it hit, the way a stare is felt, or how
an ocean knows its own approaching storm.
Spent a month among brassieres, rolling
in aroma. Raided her drawers, lace became
his blanket; lush against the face in shapes
of flora. She'd been so lean, elk unburdened
by fur, never stern, giver of cocoa, lozenges
as pink as nipples, sweet and quick dissolving.
MERCUTIO
a personal history
Sure, when you were kids he may have slipped
you in his mouth,
a favourite game. It was his naked knee, a scab
too much like cherry not to pluck. The rug
was made of knots, worn
by loafers, thin branches broken at recess, dragged
across the surface in an hour of boredom. You
were shy then.
Thin-limbed, lips so big you couldn't help but taste
each grain of dust, nun's fruit perfume, Romeo
as well; what his fingers
left on a mango passed before class. Yellow.
Once, Lego lined the gap between you. Kneeling
about the barracks.
Built a moat of blue tiles, teeth used to pry a half-inch
tree from its pedestal. As a man you told your
history to the whores
of boardwalk mornings. Boys so fine
they passed for blades. Crashed parties, slipping
a flea's-width
of caviar between your wisdom teeth.
HOW GODS ARE MADE — PART TWO
A penny enters halfway up the foot and flattens.
This is the first of her armour, guard
against the snow, though semen settles
on her stomach, slips in so that her son
will have webbed fingers, and her veins
burn brightly as they draw down
blood to warm her feet. She's mute,
cherry-haired, a carnivore, she hardens
as the coins accrue, advance towards her
torso. She will not shrink, not stand
atop the mantel; trinket added to dragoons
of frontline statuettes. Instead she readies
for the charge; a shield made of braids,
bassinet of broadswords.
THORA THE PILGRIM
Bone shows through the opening of her snakebite,
calloused foot on cool grass, naked save the rosary
of swallow beaks. Free of brick, brass work swapped
for open air, where breeze makes braille of her forearm.
One sleep more, one plum eye widening its breadth
'til half-blind, batlike, she paces. Lost three weeks:
she sleeps in moss, blanketed by fits of hunger
as her gut becomes a choir, low enough to shake
the june bugs from their branches.
THORA AT THIRTEEN
She wants a ghost, or more, a pooka: horse
whose hooves lead steady to the cliff. Uneasy
'cause she can't get off on flesh alone, such stone,
those statues slack beside the crosswalk, not
fumbling, troubled, only form: heavy-ordered
in its place. In museums, dressed as a peasant,
she sketches fauna, brushes up on Roman myth,
walks Degas-like. If she were a sketch
or best a bluish streak across the canvas, barely
human, she'd be pigment, curled cobalt
in an old Picasso. She's uneven, eyes slant clockwise
and counter-clockwise, fingers keep time
like choirs on the thigh. She's antsy, licks
the paint of a Monet when no one's looking.
No one ever is.
FERAL IN KILLARNEY
Nodding off on the dock. The ocean is a shiver,
too tender for the kraken. Path of smoke, pork
on spit, which inches to an outer layer; plum sky,
she feels small, burns to litter sand with all her parts.
Been camped ten days; friend of stone, slope
to clinging mussels, which she eats. They taste
of prisms. She's underdressed, pimpled
like a turkey's dewlap. Tent is torn, ears stiff
with dried magenta where black flies bit. Hunts
pike, poised to souvenir the fins, piled neat like
china, counts days with scrapes across a pine.
She likes to be alone, packs earth inside her,
sprawls, lets the sun, ants, and beetles burrow.
INHERITANCE
My great grandmother was a chocolate model — broad
boyish silhouette, spent her time in French gowns
gathering applause. My father was a mustached Cadillac
owner, cowboy-booted, carrying a stuffed white rabbit
he called Harvey. He was crumb cake at the racetrack,
raised brows, scars thinning into anecdotes. My aunt
read tea leaves, saw a train derailed, fangs
unloaded on a swaying jowl, cigarettes and fights
by matchbook. My teacher talked of chalk-drawn
backward letters on a blackboard, astronomy's retro
T-shirt: Orion hunched over February skies, Jack
London's dogfights, crayon drawn lightly over maps
of Yellowknife, and cold cremations.
MIKE KOOH'S PALLIATIVE CARE UNIT
The scene where she slips a koi into a patient's colostomy bag just to see if something can take more shit than she can — is particularly disquieting.
Three clicks from flatline he mastered necromancy. Neon
from the all-night deli gawking through gauze curtains
as a pause between two beats became a birth date. Nurse
entered in a fern-patterned frock, thermos spiked
with brandy, brandishing a scalpel. She held his oxygen
in the palm of her body, pacing 'til his strength regained.
She carved a flock of buzzards in his forearm, tickled by
the way he flinched in afterthought, caught his breath in vials
wide enough to fill a lung in case he fixed to die a second time.
THE FUTURE SHOULD NOT BE SHARED
A clairvoyant caregiver dips her fingers
in the palm of an aging ballerina. She charts
the skid marks on her leotard; legs of twine
once twisted in a waltz of soldiers, now
resigned to pacing, pink-slippered
on a mismatched marble floor. She sits
aplomb, back exact as starched lace,
shawl shoulder-slipping, folds revealing
moles in ominous configurations. Clairvoyant
slaps a photograph against the ashtray,
tattered two-page spread, Swan Lake, long-necked
congregation. Past, she says. Present
is the chipped-knee, crow's feet, square
tableau of kitsch and kitchen table. Future
falls between them; figures coming through
the curtain of an open window stand in tandem
with the spider plants and plaques in scrawl
against the far wall. Five men. Five chiming
in a ghostlike choir where a love affair
becomes a pulp-book, plotted perfectly to end.
TERTIARY CHARACTERS: A BEHEADING
All axes hold a half-moon as they lift aligned
with felon necks. Cheek to stone, wave
to grid (cartographer's stippling so the ships
leave wakes of ink). Hooded in burlap, a man
stands. Callous, he thinks, gravity. He lifts his arms,
adjusting grip. Is it sharp enough? He swings. Thirty-two.
Boots polished twice to hide the splay. Clumped
lace, straps of ocean salt. His wife rubs words
from his feet, where please and please and also prayers
to let the head fall gentle to the pit. Simple. Rag to
wipe the blade. Now dragging self through field,
home, he comes to supper with a grateful bow.
USING LINE TO MEASURE WEIRDNESS
A whore's account of ivory
The 1800s
Stampede bleeding through the gullet when he sneezes
Tusks that lean like dancer's feet towards the carving knife
The sculptor is a narcoleptic
Dreams of peeling back his hands
Sees fingers as piano keys
Femur whittled to a soap dish, vine and cherub
Or her hairpin, hot with histories of sand
Sharp enough to cut the fringe that hides her furrow
ADRIATIC DAYBREAK
A gondola palms the water: idle heron,
half sunk toe dipped periodic by an adolescent.
He bribes the gondolier with heirlooms, dictates
with his gait the oar's ascension. Varnished oak
on open air, barely touching down. He hones
a breeze, glows to think of far-off docks.
ONLY FOOLS TELL SECRETS INDOORS
Horizon lanced through rouge on Booth Lake. Jennie
at the deck in her nightdress, straps to cover bruises
big as Red Rose figurines. She thumbs them where
the dress comes satin-cornered to her shoulder. Folding
thoughts like linen in a drawer too mint to make her bitter —
how a house becomes a man, becomes a husband. Every log
a lifetime, fog caught coiling in the kitchen sink, pink stains
of boiled rhubarb, blood. A book on how to quell a ghost.
Three years she's lived alone, sleep-scuffling, scarring,
wrestling with the sheets. He will not let her sleep; three
shades of ivory; how he glows when he's aroused, surrounds
her as a man without a body bangs against the gate.
THE PILOT OF FLIGHT 146
The mist you are seeing
is caused by a difference
in temperature.
The temperature outside
is different from
the temperature inside.
Once we close the door
and prepare for takeoff,
the mist will disappear,
which will make us
very sad, because
we like mist.
BASS ENTERPRISE: HOW GOSSIP GIRL CAUGHT THE DEVIL
Real-estate mogul thrown from high-rise
by a shadow dipped in city lights the way
a kid dips sticks of glue in glitter, makes a wand.
His widow speaks so highly of the spilled wine
as it spreads in Rorschach on her sequins; see
Caligula, his boner buried in assassin's knives,
a casket carried by that last, charitable crack
of thunder. He will not be missed. His kiss of cold
cigars and gold keys clanking at the locks
of her autonomy. He wore no horns but pawed
the ashes of his adversaries. They called him green lynx
for the poise, the lean, black reach of his ambition.
You must know spiders cannibalize. When quarantined
they feast in heaves of leg and tooth until
the last emerges fat and peckish still. He was as fat
and peckish when he died as when he sold
handguns to disgruntled lunch–men at his stepson's
high school. Some say he knew the target.
In a tweed tie, seven thousand dollar Dolce & Gabbana
three-piece he lies unwrapped on a slab of street;
his spirit haggling with an Upper East Side bird-lady
for solace in her gut until he's strong enough again to plot.
NAY, IT IS; I KNOW NOT "SEEMS."
King Hamlet, in a blue-lit suit, mistook my bedroom
for a Denmark terrace. Between nightstand and
a stack of books he stood tap-tapping a cane of soot.
Lamp-lit nostrils flaring so I had to squint, dusted
brow-ridge, garden boots, a glow the likes of slow-approaching
Neptunes. He'd been napping when
it happened, thinking, half aflame, of panties —
satin on the headboard, heedless of the queen. He
followed foot to carpet, fray to wood, and tripped.
BOLD IN THE EVENING
He leans towards the skyline, shies away
from silence: when the jukebox stops he hums.
Chaste barman in his too-tight trousers, tinted
cowlick. He rubs against the stool, steady lift
towards the light above the sink. He's thinking
of a car-wreck, wastes the day in hubcaps
at the crux of overdrinking.
PORN STAR ON MONDAY MORNING
The mole that itches at her hip bone barely shows.
She bends her knees unshaved, sits spread-eagle
like the camera is a thoroughbred. Behind her: pale
plaster, lamp, an unlocked door. But watch, when
she disrobes there is a flea half-frantic at the outskirts
of her girlish gaze.
ABANDONED MANNEQUIN PLANT
There are five hundred states of sky.
Cliffs stripped bare by breeze reveal
themselves in rungs of pebble soldiers
up their sides. I want to join them.
Torso twisted at the window where
each pane is made of spray paint, broken
glass and times past. I am static, stuck
in fiberglass and plaster, asking for the star
that found Geppetto.
HIGHWAYHEAD'S GUIDE TO GIRLS WITH OVERBITES
titled after Terrance Hayes
If she's shaking, if she's point-toed in a corner jigging,
don't advance. Thumb the cleavage, chain-link thing
she's wearing at the Waffle House. Don't fumble your hellos.
It's only 8 p.m. and you can taste her growing anxious.
If the echo is despondent, hunchbacked at a pot,
it's that she sees your face. You're telling, downcast,
can't connect her freckles though you've seen them reconfigure
in the neon all night, typed cursive on her fingers, cotton
drawstringed waist. She's not a liar. If she reaches for your sleeve
across the counter it means hold me. Take her Bic-scrawl
for river dips, hips for rowing. Watch her sun her lisp
in lifting mantras: omelette, onion, orphaned coat, or notepad.
If you see her reach for shift, her apron up still further,
forward leaning, tell her that you mean to keep her.
DISCO AT THE END OF DAYS
Saints go screeching down the underpass.
Black cloaks against the snow; they move like
phosphenes resurrected from the rubbed eye
of a diabolist. Barbed gods gurgling
at the turnstiles. Shiny, fashionable; they walk
as if the roads were runways, shredding
to confetti as they tangle briefly in the wheels
of a transport truck from Cincinnati. Now
the Northern Lights touch down to torch
what's left of us: a misty green–lipped kiss.
The gods go ape-shit at the flame, the way
a dance floor takes to cheering
at the onset of a latest hit.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Knife Throwing Through Self Hypnosis by Robin Richardson. Copyright © 2013 Robin Richardson. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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