Two Poems by Edith Lidia Clare

Two Poems: Edith Lidia Clare an older sister speaks

i let the raw meat soak in vinegar

i let the raw meat soak in bottled sauce

i let the raw meat soak in Shaoxing wine

i cooked the marinated meat and frozen corn you made the rice

i wiped your tiny hairs up off the bathroom tile

i threw away the underarm razor you used to shave your head

i walked with you across town to borrow a friend’s clippers to shave your head

i said will you unload the dishwasher

i said please unload the dishwasher

i said hey the dishwasher dishwasher

EDITH LIDIA CLARE

i unloaded and loaded the dishwasher

i painted over my face with cheeriness

i pulled a coat of cheeriness on over my bare shoulders

i hopped around the breakfast table in a circle with my arms outstretched

i stored cases of seltzer on our windy balcony we sang nostalgic songs

i want to turn into the angel from your dearest fairytale and hold you in my wings our mother called so Sonia thinks that what you all have called my “emotional inappropriateness” in your childhood is actually due to your failure to understand my Hispanic culture

i proofread the essay on liberatory pedagogy

i proofread the essay on Booker T. Washington

i proofread the essay on psychiatric hospitalization

i proofread the essay on parental abuse

i proofread the essay on dance history

i proofread the essay that was in fact literally about Hell

i bought two sugared crullers

i bought thick winter socks

i bought surgical masks

i bought the last bottle of rubbing alcohol i cleaned a wound i cleaned some wounds

i taught you how to clean the wounds as we walked across town to get the clippers you told me you meant to jump into the street and i held your hand tight as we waited for the train home you told me you meant to jump onto the tracks and i held your hand tight

i breathed in, it was winter

i breathed in, it was sharp needles

i breathed in, somehow it was boiling hot floodwater, there was no air the high school called the pharmacy called the case worker called the hospital called can i speak to a parent

EDITH LIDIA CLARE

on “ “madness” ” at Storm King Art Center c ubes, spheres, spires, Buddha, small pavilions, giraffes

sketch ii:

or shapes loosely evocative of such—mostly of steel— spangled, & floated down, the fields & slopes. among them i was

one slight stroke dotting the surreal canvas for scale. i was slight ant atop a hill stitching

into a granite sculpture of a pitted peach, whose surface, mirror smooth along the plane that cuts the fruit, grew coarse

across its lip, met me grained blue & cool inside the gone stone’s hole. rough without sharpness,

muted to my skin, which i slid around in it, testing the fit of self within what envelops. the next day i would come into

new words. the rights, i mean, to some familiar slurs— a hectic day! so full of probate court, logistics of inheritance,

poems instructing me in suicide, et cetera . . . yes i cried, horribly. it’s over now, except for the reality, so slightly

modified. i live on in. that won’t go anywhere. she’s staying here, me, on the other side, rolling her skull around this new hollow

“deranged”—what do i do with her? she won’t transcend, or not the way i want her to:

she will not soothe. she says she only needs to know, “if i had gone someplace where the forms on the earth were

congruous then would i be myself today? i would be born into a wholeness, even, i have never had:

in tooth & claw.” imagine though a rationality so fragile it cannot withstand

rock hard of head. utterly competent

some simple triangle of bloodred wire stood on its narrow end! you know you’d have to be

already ill.