It Is Raining In The Desert
The wind tracks madness across the desert is wet and sticks your agony lightning strikes the body hollow house is quivering
I am I am I am
pouring from the sky thunder is dancing on the roof the hoofs are clapping on the roof we scream we scream out at the dancing at our visitor to leave we scream we scream so very quiet as if no one was awake.
In the morning the footprints are windswept memory tracks its way back towards the heat:
Put on a hat
Apply sunscreen
Drink some water
Go and sweep the front porch
Say Thank God it rained and the dust has settled
The roof. The roof on the other hand… We can fix that leak later. For now, cover it with your palm like a mouth
Words track hollow over the tongue is stuck to the silence like the sun that screams so very quiet screams so very far away
The heat. The heat on the other hand…
As if the water never came. As if the fire was right next door. As if you could point to the pain and say
I am I am I am
Teeth
My dentist clicks along them and I try to keep count. My dentist puts his fingers in my mouth. The hair on the chair feels electric.
My dentist doesn’t have any hair on his body he is a bald and shiny baby and cries hard until I give him my breast. He sucks with tearfilled eyes until the milk drips from his chin like drool from my numb mouth.
I tell me dentist don’t cry, this won’t hurt He pulls out his fingers and shows me:
Thirty-two cavities from sugar and I started smoking again.
I fear I am falling into old patterns I fear I am seeking out a medical crisis I fear a healthy relationship I was beginning to say but I’m interrupted:
“Let me re-insert”
The rubber gloved hands in my mouth are poems about the men I keep dating. I’m counting the clicks.
My dentist says I clench my jaw. I did not realize how hard until I feel a finger in my mouth when he pulls his hands away.
If he is horrified I can’t tell at all. It might seem unusual, but this is generally how it goes:
a wound instead of an appendage, a mouth full of blood
I don’t swallow, I spit.
Fallout
When they enter, she swallows her lovers’ whole. She feels them floating in her belly, probing their way towards her mouth. When they enter, she puts two hands in the water until it cools her veins.
Have you seen the water lately? She dips her face in and sticks out her tongue. It is hot as a hand creeps up her neck, tearing its way to the roof of her mouth. She is sweating and tries to drink but a finger pushes down on her tongue. She cannot swallow and feels her saliva
running into the water.
She is becoming red.
She is ripping.
She is becoming red.
She is painted into a corner and eye catching. She is surrounded.
She lays back on the bed for the weight of what is coming.
Her jaw cracks as he moves his arm past her teeth and pushes down on her breasts to pull his torso, his thighs, his ankles out. He steps one foot on her forehead and the heel closes her eyes. He moves to the water and washes his body.
The mouth blooms with blood until it is full of flowers and he rains down.
When she tries to scream she sputters.
“Be quiet. Be quiet. You are making a mess.”
Poetry to Me
This is not poetry to me.
Getting older and only older. To be a body that considers itself disintegrating. To constantly locate points of pain and possible infection.
This is not poetry to me.
To remember watching bugs run down your eyelids and through your arms. To hear things like forever and remember being very young when you heard them. To be young in a body that sags and is not desirable. To be impossible to be desired. To be impossible.
To measure the body by numbers in order to find its periphery. To hand over the measurements when you cannot interpret them.
This is not poetry to me.
To hell with numbers, try sentences instead. To write things out like disassociation and grief and total emptiness. To fill these words with meaning through the linguistic process of signification. To point and point again to letters. Attempting to signify a lack.
This is not poetry to me.
One write out and two can also run a finger across every inch of what you said and three pricks to point out four what heart beats itself inside out. Inside pours from your hands pulling you
down and down and down
Finger pointing inside like inside runs through words like inside will answer like inside like inside like inside like inside like the word itself becomes itself like inside becomes inside until you map it on the page instead of inside and don’t you dare say the word isn’t also an image or that the body doesn’t body through language.
To glaze over in the process of repetition. Where signification moves from the word to how one follows the next. Skim over this poem. Skim to the next.
You cannot recur. You to sag over signs. You’ll never write again.
This is not poetry to me.
Ella Schoefer-Wulf is a writer and artist based in California. Her work is a primarily linguistic inquiry into the relationship between language and the body through drawing, digital media and performance. Schoefer-Wulf was awarded the Leslie Scalapino Award for Poetics from California College of the Arts, where she received her MFA in writing in 2017. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in the US and Germany. Her writing has appeared in Sand Journal, Bridge Poetry, Desuetude Journal and Tiny Spoon Lit Mag.