Secure Your Own Mask

by Shaindel Beers

Overview

These poems balance between the harrowing and the beautiful, hovering at the precipice where women are both horseback riding heroines and battered mothers striving to protect their homes, their children, their identities. These poems are knives thrown with precision, fairytales rendered real through the grit and dirt of the natural world surrounding their imperfect speakers. Social media helps us grieve our losses (“suicide, suicide, suicide”) and white rabbits lead us down the winding roads of our past mistakes (“Until / a man just became an escape hatch to another man, / and all the worlds were eventually the same”). Transformations abound in this collection, though not by any conventional fairytale means, as Shaindel Beers with her knife-sharp wit and even sharper intuition unveils the nuance within the nuance of any situation. These poems don’t just seek escape—they create their own worlds within the escape hatches and (re)build from there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945680175
Publisher:	White Pine Press
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Series:	White Pine Poetry Prize
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Shaindel Beers is the author of three full-length poetry collections, A Brief History of Time (2009), The Children’s War and Other Poems (2013), both from Salt Publishing, and Secure Your Own Mask (2018), from White Pine Press. She teaches at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, where she lives with her son Liam, and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine.

Read an Excerpt

Secure Your Mask Before Helping Others

I.

Because soon you won’t have any needs of your own.
They will all be for him. You will be walking to the middle
of the lake, your pockets filled with all the prettiest stones.

Amethyst, quartz, peridot. All the beauty it could ever take
to drown you. The topaz and emerald of the water.
The sapphire and ruby of police lights.

Until you are as beaded as a twenty pound wedding gown.
And aren’t you beautiful? You are the prettiest girl
at the Harvest Moon Ball. Why aren’t you grateful?

No one has ever been so adorned with abjection.
There are so many women in line for him, each one
a corpse bride in waiting. Any girl would treasure

the feel of his boot on her throat, to pay off the court fines,
to hide him from the police, to say that they were your painkillers.

II.

You wanted to know what it was like to have pearls
on the inside. To wash down five, six, seven—

all good girls go to Heaven—Percocet
with the amber of whiskey. And he knew you would do it–
your drinking was always the problem. He knew it the first time

he saw you. Imagine if you would have tried heroin.
Boy, could he tell you stories.
Graduate school doesn’t sound that different from rehab;

don’t feel so special. You would be in the same place
no matter where you started out.

III.

Girls like you are so easy
to manipulate. Because the bruise is already there,

he just has to press. Other names have already been scalpeled
into your skin. Look how you bleed these pomegranate drops.
Why aren’t you crying?

What’s wrong with you?
Have you gone dumb? Or numb?

IV.

This is like being married to a fucking baby.
You would probably kill a baby.
You’re the abusive one. You’re the one with anger issues.

No, what we should do is have a baby.
That will make everything better.
You and me in one person.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.

We’ll name her Pearl. We’ll cast her before swine.
She will be our savior. You don’t really believe
any of this shit, do you? It’s just a game,

but there’s no scoring system. Lean down so I can place
the medals around your neck. The medals
will weigh you down until I win—

gold and silver and bronze, and don’t take any wooden
nickels though you’re lucky I give you anything,
you worthless bitch.

Oh, look, here’s the oxygen mask.
Here’s your chance to save me.
Put it over my face and let me breathe.

Friends, 1991
After Ken Fontenot
We were desperate sex in girls’ bodies.
We were girls mothers warned sons about.
We were handcuffed together to a bed at a party.
Sent home together in a cab from a field trip.
We were barns burning for anyone’s love.
We were lonely walks to the cemetery & talking to graves.
Blowjobs behind tombstones. Always hoping
to get caught. Always dreaming of escape.
We were talks on the hood of a car. Dreaming
up early dramatic deaths. Scared shitless
of ending up pregnant or poor or fat
or all three. We were learning to drive
a stick shift on gravel roads while eating
ice cream. Flirting for freebies from sweat-
nervous boys at restaurants. We couldn’t have
lived any different. We couldn’t have saved
one another. We were just trying to survive
the only way we knew how.

Reality falls away—

Reality falls away – a voice says,
I’ve been sleeping with your husband
& hangs up. A doctor’s mouth shapes

the word inoperable. A gunman walks
into a classroom. The world as it was before
no longer exists. & you understand

all the ways of ending the monster
in folklore—Beheading, silver bullet,
stake through the heart—are acts

of mercy. The monster is merely a victim
who didn’t know change was coming,
didn’t want the bloodlust, was just

an actor being human, which is
always a process of losing humanity,
devolving into something else

altogether with each cell’s division,
each full moon’s gravity pulling
blood through the capillaries.

The sudden aversion to garlic,

to holy water. The inability to touch silver, to stand directly in sunlight—

Today we would describe these as triggers.
Something happened, and now I can’t—
Something happened, and now I’m

someone else in some other reality.
If you are reading this, please
scatter skeleton flowers on my grave.

Table of Contents

I

The (Im)Precision of Language 11

Secure Your Mask Before Helping Others 14

The Mechatronic Bird Falls in Love with the Real and Vice Versa 17

When we were knife throwers 18

One Gaza Family Observes a Grim Holiday in Wartime 19

Unfriending the Dead 20

3.22 Miles 22

The Secret Rabbit 23

The Interview 25

Self-Portrait as Rosinback Rider 27

The Drunk Cowboy Believes in Good 28

After Milkpour #5 by Jessica Plattner 29

Perspective 30

II

Friends, 1991 35

There Are No (Simple) Happy Endings 36

When Lights Flash, Bridge Is Up 38

Last Night 40

"And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" 41

The Bird Wife 42

The Scientist Explains Attraction 43

Philomela as Farm Wife 44

A Catalogue of Pain 45

How the Dead Return 47

Reality falls away- 49

My heart is a diner that never closes ... 51

Once 53

I Am Not a Narrative for Your Entertainment 54

The Sin Eater 55

Is it Human? 57

The Con Man's Wife 59

Playing Dolls 61

III

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pelican 65

IV

Prayer to the God of Small Things 83

First Flight 84

Private Property 85

Curious George Loves the Man with the Yellow Hat 86

The Old Woman in the Forest 87

Finding Place 88

When I Was Bluebeard's Wife 89

This Old House 90

Left and Leaving, 2016 99

After Mary Oliver 101

The Author 103

Editorial Reviews

From the opening poem of Secure Your Own Mask, whose speaker confuses ‘ringing/ and wringing,’ I was hooked. This book does both: it rings and wrings. In searing lyrics, Shaindel Beers explores beauty and violence, and the voyeuristic impulse toward and unhealthy human appetite for both. ‘The world as it was before/ no longer exists,’ but the poems do exist, and they are not only unflinching but also open, even warm, despite it all. Secure Your Own Mask is a remarkable collection. These poems are quite literally death-defying.”—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
“With the cries of bird wives, farm wives, beaten wives, and in almost wrecked lives, the wonderful poems of Shaindel Beers shimmer and sing. “How much of love / is love?” these scintillating works of art ask, their inquiries the kinds of questions the survivor of a wrong marriage doesn’t want to ask, and must—because urgency is the meter of this heart, because the thrumming of poetry has the power to heal.”—Alan Michael Parker
“Consider this book’s imperative title as you enter the world of Shaindel Beers. How many times have you heard that phrase within the flight attendant’s spiel but never thought to yourself, There’s a poem there? For Beers, however, experience and the language with which we negotiate it are fraught, suggestive, ironic, and yet clear as the air above the clouds. The world we share with her hands her raw material—a child, pelicans, lovers, a drunken cowboy, an old house, and yes, particular words—and she proceeds to build these exquisite living machines of language we call poems. They unmask what it means to be really alive. Read, and listen, and be dazzled.”
—Robert Wrigley

From the Publisher