Things I Have Learned in my First Year of College

1. Poetry is like sex.
2. Everything is a coping mechanism.  Including poetry.  And probably sex.
3.  If I sleep in your shirt two nights in a row and then you wear it to class, it’s really not even that gross.
4.  War may be the natural progression of humanity, a form of inevitable recycling.  Or maybe not.
5.  We are so connected to our machines that we sometimes forget the humanity that flows from our eyes.
6.  But then again, talking to people is hard.
7.  The word metaphor comes from a Greek word meaning to transfer.  Large trucks that transported goods through Athens had the word METAPHOR printed across the side.
8.  True democracy is a woman sitting in a beach chair outside the polls on voting day in her small New England town in March.  She holds a sign that says Don’t Pave Pond Road.  I don’t want to live in a world without dirt roads and the people who love them.

I am not a pillar of salt.

The sun beats down heavy on
my shoulders, a weight I have
been made to carry after being
torn away from my clean white
linen and raven-haired children
in this sudden exodus.
When I ask my husband why
we have to leave, he does not
look me in the eye when he says:
‘Do not love the world or
the things in the world.’
I already knew the answer
to that question.
We haven’t looked each other
in the eye in years.

I am not a pillar of salt.

Do you know what it’s like
to be a tragic figure?
To be known only as Lot’s wife,
the woman who looked back
at her burning city and so
was turned into a pillar of salt?
Not even given a name.
Why did we listen to these strangers
who spoke in quasi-scriptural
terms? These supposed angels
have brought us nothing but
sorrow, but loss, but brimstone
and fire.

I am not a pillar of salt.

My city of Sodom is carnal and
capricious and everyone else,
they see only sin. They don’t see
the way the dust from the creases
of my skirt catches the light as it
pirouettes at the golden hour of
the day, the way a person’s name
can become holy in their lover’s
mouth despite their own ungodliness,
the way my friends and neighbors
make sure to look me in the eye
at least once a day because
they know my husband won’t.

I will say these words until
my last breath rises like
smoke and falls like ash.

I am not a pillar of salt.

The day after the shooting,
the word most frequently
looked up in the dictionary
was unfathomable.
The second was surreal.
According to Miriam-Webster,
nobody can ever really
understand why a person
would kill twenty children
and their protectors.
Did you know that bonobos
make love, not war?
All this time we’ve been
looking to musicians and
artists for inspiration, and all along
it’s been the tiny chimpanzees.
They pick insects out of each
other’s fur, lovingly as a
mother brushing her daughter’s
hair before she sends her off
to school for the last time.
Studies have found that
hostility is a dominant feature
in most primates, especially
males, but this isn’t the case
for bonobos. They resolve
conflict with sexual touch.
They use that for pretty
much any issue that arises,
actually. I’m not saying that
we should all be like bonobos,
but according to Miriam-Webster’s
list of the most popular words, love
makes the Top 25 every day.
So I guess that’s a start.

Dear Paige,

Is it okay if I call you that? Paige?
I generally like to call teachers by their
first names, but I also have this weird
complex where I need teachers and adults
in general to like me. So, I don’t know.
I think I’ll stick with Paige.

This is where I begin to tell you
about myself, I guess. About how I grew
up in a small suburban town, longing to go
somewhere, anywhere, about how I
used books as a form of escapism and
consequently consider myself a writer.
But that’s not very interesting. I’m boring myself
here, quite frankly. I guess I’d be better
off telling you about how I wish I believed
in more. In God, in wishes, in pinterest.
About how sometimes I think I should be
one of those people who abhors pinterest and
everything it stands for, even though I’m not
quite sure what that is. Or how sometimes I think
I should be one of those people who loves
both God and pinterest, but I’m not one of those
either. Somewhere in between, maybe.

Mostly I think about how we assign meaning
to everything as a coping mechanism, and
how if I had to label myself so as to not be
completely alone, I might say I’m a humanist.
Or a Bokononist. In high school everyone
called me a hippie, because I had hair nearly
down to my waist and I dislike violence and
people who call art ‘useless’ and I cried hot,
humiliating tears when that woman
who survived the Holocaust came to talk
to my eleventh-grade English class.

I have no problem admitting that
I would be a terrible president, absolutely
awful, I should never go into politics,
but I still vote for the candidate
who reminds me most of myself.

I buy used classics for $1.99 apiece,
accumulating stacks upon stacks at
a much faster rate than I can possibly
read them. I romanticize the lives of their
creators. I would like to be like these people.
Someone asked me at a party recently,
If you could be any one of your favorite writers,
who would you be?
We came to the resounding conclusion
that they all killed themselves,
so of course the answer is no one.
The idea of the tortured artist is one that haunts me.
Still, it’s a great party question.

I really am excited about this class, by the way.

Yours,
Alicia

I.

Last night, we were Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.
We faced each other with our elbows bent
at ninety degree angles, fists in the air,
each ready to take the first sucker-punch,
to be thrown by the other into a delirium
just to have the pleasure
of waking up to each other’s face again.
Why does everything sound so beautiful? you asked me.
Well, you see, I said, it’s magic.
I’ve never really believed in this kind of
thing, but I have this water bottle,
filled with wine and completely
opaque, given to us for free, as if
somebody, somewhere, is just asking
us to get drunk, to become so
intoxicated by one another that we forget
the bottle could ever have held anything else.
Or that it once held nothing.

II.

The second time we were in that
dingy, crowded room underneath a stranger’s
house (the first being the night we met),
only half of the partygoers were in costume.
I, for the first time in a long time,
was dressed as myself.
You shook my shoulder and told me
to look at that guy in the poncho selling
meth out of his sombrero, I could write a story about him!
Every word exchanged is intellectually stimulating
and invigorating, just how I always imagined it.
I ask you about your favorite book –
I don’t care what it is, only that you have one.
And you do.
We sometimes have a hard time being serious,
but when you reach your arm around
me and realize my shirt is backless,
stimulating conversation doesn’t seem
all that necessary anymore, does it?

I see up there, standing on the
stage in the library basement,
a girl with two first names and a
red lace dress. I would like to be
wearing her lipstick, to have my hair
pulled back into that same messy
up-do, done just so but not trying
too hard. I would like to be someone
who does these sort of things,
someone who takes the ordinary aspects
of my life and twists and turns and prods
and pulls and shifts and shakes and makes
them into something beautiful.
Someone who does not write the poem
but lives the poem, is the poem.
I used to think every poem was a love poem.
Then I thought I was wrong.
Then I thought I was right again.
Then I wasn’t quite sure, but I was sitting
alone on that swinging bench on the dock
by the waterfront, staring at the water
and the light from the building behind it
that seemed like something off of a
postcard you’d buy in New York City –
but one you’d have to search for in the back
of the little kiosk on the side of the street,
behind all the Statues of Liberty
and Empire State Buildings.
Only I wasn’t actually alone. You were sitting
right next to me and asking if I was
agreeing with what you were saying,
but when I tried to speak,
I couldn’t do it without hot tears dripping
into my mouth. So. I was alone.
Is it wrong that I think of everything in
relation to poetry? Everything in terms of
what words could I use to describe this?
That was the most empty
experience of my life, and even when
I walked away by myself, circling
the lawn and standing by the train tracks
with an illogical fear of being smashed to bits,
even at the pinnacle of nihilism,
I was still thinking about
how I could write about this, how I
could be just like the girl in the red dress
on the stage in the library basement.