Sophia Starmack
P.O. Box 518, Livonia, NY 14487
The house on High Street: a station agent on the road between
who we weren’t and who we were supposed to be.
The dozen years I spent in those two beds more like camping out.
My knapsack floral, purchased from Walmart
before such things brought on bright shame.
This was before self-improvement, but after the evil laundry line
where my stepfather pinned my rose-print panties
for the world to see. It seems the first sister was born
into a lake house filled with sulfur and spiders,
or maybe that was where we escaped from so she could arrive.
For the second sister, it seems there was a cake, frosted white
with blue letters (we’d all expected a boy).
I was disappointed we didn’t name her Roxane.
A girl needs a hard name to get her out of town, out of bed.
The snow crust mornings skipping school,
swaddled in my mother’s nightgown.
I, the blond bastard, though no one permitted the word.
Which half, asked my stepfather, when I suggested my sisters
and I weren’t altogether the same. They grew up dark & small
with cheerleader boobs & poochy bellies.
Me: moon-white butt, no-bra tits & worried teeth.
Me: sneaking into the back stacks while the librarian
clucked with dismay. She wouldn’t stamp the big-girl books.
I read sci-fi, Dickens, the gold-rimmed Britannicas all in a row.
It seemed there was something I needed to learn.
It seemed a secret passage would open a door to the past,
the cellar dirt-rimmed and wrecked with horseshoes,
it seemed a golden mean just out of calculation:
why had we come here, where everyone was cousins,
where the neighbors’ sheep bleated fearful into the barn,
shorn like skinned potatoes, my missing winter coat.
And the one my real father bought and mailed from afar:
pale blue, lined in pink cotton, respectable, warm,
arriving with the first thaw.
Hannah, Up from the Sea
1.
The uvular shadows part and I am free of the women they call Hannah.
Dendrite, argument, the wet sack of muscle and time.
A name, forward and back the same,
Empty blankness, a spot, deserving.
I, too, wonder why every autumn is more and less than a mind.
Another plentiful thing: the lack of saying.
2.
Outside the door my mother prays to a white idea.
In this room with the metal bed they continue questions.
I had been nowhere, nothing, but they who were could not understand.
They say I am, but I do not know her, I never have.
3.
Hannah, you have been gone now for twenty-seven and a half weeks,
One hundred ninety-eight days,
Four thousand seven hundred fifty-two hours,
Two hundred eighty-five thousand one hundred twenty minutes,
And more seconds than one can name.
As long as it takes to fill the mouth, is that how long I have been gone?
4.
Okay, every one of us is an edge, a cliff.
One day I became irretrievably distinct, thrown into focus.
Like a suckling child, nothing held me back
From hurling myself from myself.
5.
In the beginning was what they taught me:
I was, of course, Hannah, she of the church and bone.
Also, I was empty as water.
Afree as the sea, ahush as the wide wake that trails behind the wave.
Then I was into the eye of it.
Then God was the children hungry with milk, lentils in a big pot,
The kind man who kissed me behind the refectory with the absence of cunning.
God was the blanket over my mother’s lap, gold scales spilled over the sand.
And what if I was the stitch unraveled, the careful seam undone?
How could I? How could I be? How could I know no more of Hannah?
6.
A Hannah is no more than a small world of your own devising.
Put whatever you like into yours.
Look: into mine have wandered a red spotted beetle, the disembodied crash of sea.
Hannah Upp disappeared from her home in St. Thomas on September 14, 2017. She had suffered at least two previous bouts of dissociative fugue, an amnesiac condition that seems to obliterate all previous memory of the self. As of this writing, she has still not been found.
The Truth about Magical Thinking
Then the earth comforted me.
I am not your mother, it said,
but spread your blanket here for a while
and admire me, and I’ll teach you
something about luck.
This is what luck means:
in the kitchen, my mother hummed scraps of lieder
as her dreams piled up under fluorescent lights.
Once the earth spoke to her, too,
and then it stopped.
I could tell you she traded those plasmic voices
for marriage, or that alcohol numbed her,
or that her father’s sexual wound carved a hole in her ear
and scrambled the drives to survive and atone.
But it’s simpler, more unbearable than this.
Some of us are spared, and that’s all.
June is very cold this year; it rains late
and the streets fill with ruined umbrellas.
Already, spring is a story I’m telling,
a blanket shot through with holes.