Online edition published 2008
by Dicey Brown Media Publications
Raleigh, North Carolina

First edition chapbook published 2003
by DICEY BOOKS
Staten Island, New York

DAUGHTER, EN ROUTE

Names, characters, places, and incidents of these poems are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Copyright (c) 2003 by Shanti Weiland
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiland, Shanti.
Daughter, en route / Shanti Weiland.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-9723415-4-4
1. Women--Poetry. 2. Parent and child--Poetry. I. Title.
PS3623.E428D38 2003
813'.6--dc21

2003010285

Some of these poems first appeared in Dicey Brown, Product 2003, Steam Ticket IV, and Mo'Jo Risin', Rio: A Journal of Arts.

CONTENTS

EVERYBODY LOVES BODIES

AN OVER-RUN OF DEER...

ON FINDING HER FATHER OUT

KIDS, REMEMBER...

GRIMMS' CINDERELLA SPEAKS...

DAUGHTER, EN ROUTE

WHEN COOKING LEFSA AT HIGH ALTITUDE

GWEN'S DEAD

OBSESSION IN THE LADIES' ROOM

CALLING TO MAKE SURE

YOU ARE NOT EVEN A BANK

EVERYBODY LOVES BODIES

It's as if they heal last.
An embarrassing tumble
down the stairs
in front of friends
is O.K.
so long as the edge of the
pinky toe wasn't harmed,
and laughter is followed by
serious concern.

But on Friday or Saturday nights,
when she does not feel like
rounding the stomach to
melon-size with beer and rum,
nor brushing through nets of
cigarette smoke, her peers will scold
like parents, disgruntled
with her messy room.
They will guilt, nag, and bribe her.
They don't care that her mind
could be nestled into a quiet
cave of blanket.
They want her body, strapped in a ruby red top,
her lids drenched in glitter,
and her lips coyly sucking at
a grape-colored martini.

It's like, when a neighbor
or friend comes to homecoming
with a black eye and a date
with a tight grip and examining glare.
And all the while you had noticed
The way she shook in the morning
and ran in the night.
You were fully aware that he
called her "bitch" and told her she
was nothing without him [at best].

AN OVER-RUN OF DEER, A RESPONSE TO MY STUDENT

"Does Leopold want to kill the wolves because the deer might eat the wolves?"

Yes. Deer eat wolves
in some places,
like Arizona and
New Mexico,
their herbivore teeth slash deep.

Wolves, you will often find,
fear deer more than humans.
Wolves can't deepen their tooth grip
on deer's throats.
Wolves shake in fear
in the presence of a beastly deer
with its electric teeth
and stenching pelt.

Without natural predators,
deer eat wolves, bones and all.
You will never find wolf bones
after a deer's gorge for
deer teeth slash through skeletons,
their greedy bellies digest.

Wolves are deep
and majestic
and special
and we should kill them
before the deer do,
with a shot
through the brain.

ON FINDING HER FATHER OUT

It stops her dead,
this believing in you
as you chew away the silence,
caught tight in small space.

This believing in you
swells her brain big
caught tight, she feels your oblivion
as hefty as a child with child.

Stretching her bones out.
Your absence,
hefty as your gut, Dad,
telling her, "your skirts are slutty."

Your absence.
Back to the keyboard and reading,
telling her nothing, skirting
her questions.

Back to hiding your number,
low-profile, hating your life,
her questions,
asking for favors,

hating her findings.
It stops her dead,
asking for answers
biting her teeth back.

KIDS, REMEMBER THAT A MARRIAGE SHOULD ALWAYS BE A GOOD BUSINESS DEAL

In eleventh grade I had an English teacher
who told us about her life, with little
transitions.
"Once I threatened to saw a man's
tree down," she said, "if he wouldn't leave
well enough alone."
The boys gasped,
the girls laughed,
and I listened
to her reasons.
"He left me with an atrium of pricey birds,"
she said, "when he went to work,
wanted me to clean, hush, and like them."
A few years later,
I knew what she meant.

Dad bought a Blue-Front Amazon Parrot
at the mall for 300 bucks,
against Mom's wishes.
Gulliver squawked like a bitch,
rumbled through the house,
bit bare toes.
Gulliver hated us
and Dad was never home.

When Dad decided to sell Gulliver,
we were left to it.
Two greased men knocked hard on our door,
came in,
took our seats like relatives and
picked at their bodies.
The interested one had clean pale eyes
against a sooted face.
Gulliver shook when he lifted him.
He flicked the bird three times on the breast,
his cold face drew upward.

My sister and I stood stiff in a corner, mouths open.
Mom said, "He doesn't like that"
and shooed the men out the door.

We spoke to Gulliver in soothing tones,
paced around the room.
Mom lit a candle.

Gulliver sat in the corner of his cage,
beak ajar and wings half-cocked.
We could hear his claw brush against
the bars.

GRIMMS CINDERELLA SPEAKS AFTER THE WEDDING

My eyes still split,
like my sister's, at the wedding,
flooding and pin-sized under bird beaks.

To see lentils from ash--thousands of them--
I crafted a mental net and
split silence with rhythm.

Laying deeply within that net
on a cold splintered floor,
I could hear the flood of my family falling.

One by one like lentils
they scattered to the bottom and
split like I did years ago.

And I watched them hack
their own flesh off to take what was mine,
pinning pain to triumph, grief to absence.

During which time I plotted
with the grave and patched
my splitting loyalty while
Daddy sat, beak-cold and watching.

DAUGHTER, EN ROUTE
(A Pantoum)

In the morning from her room
she creeps and hides in Mom's house.
It's her house too, true.
Winding through hallways, organized,

creeping one step past squeaking plank.
Bumped in head by Dad's elbow.
Unheard and organized,
inaudible to sight

at elbow height
in her house.
Not unsightly but silent.
Pills ordered, swept clear

from counters in her own house.
Elbows in tight
she sweeps clear of them.
Seeing Mom, she's silent.

Head in tight.
Mom sleeping rough.
Silent, stuffy, air on full blast
muffling the little sounds.

Sleeping, Mom turns rough.
It's morning and it's O.K.
Muffled just a little, she,
winding through hallways, organized.

WHEN COOKING LEFSA AT HIGH ALTITUDE

In the mountains,
memory is vague.
One must add more water,
less flour, and cook longer
or shorter.
At my kitchen table,
I stand over Grandma's lefsa,
grasping for her voice with
each clutch of flour,
to hold her spirit over a
gas range stove.
The dough sucks the flour clean
as I massage it round, then flat.

The problem is
I have a bad memory,
or rather I remember what
I want to-
or it blends.
Tuesday Mom called to say "sorry
about the childhood,"
but I said, "remember when you made
us costumes?" How she sat at her maroon
sewing machine that had once split through
her nail; the first time I saw her cry.

But I am failing again
with memory.

It was Mom's finger, but she made pot holders.
It was Grandma's costumes that gave me
silver wings, my sister's
witch's cap.

Grandma laughed instead of scolded when
I squeezed an egg projectile on my shirt rather
than in the bowl.

When Grandpa died, his absence meant
ice cream makers, new quilts, a straight shoot
to the end.

He came to her, she said, after death, and
touched her knee--
her 80 year old body still suffered from
a childhood bout of scarlet fever.
He filled her like lefsa and English,

In my kitchen, I have this ridiculous notion
that words are ladders.
But here, with no alternate instructions, my lefsa
turns out fat and brittle,
and I am left standing with Grandma's potato dough,
like the wrinkles of her white skin,
too tight in my palms.

GWEN'S DEAD

The other really sucky thing is that my hamster died sometime after Arkansas. I was pretty sure she was alive in Louisiana, but didn't make it past the Mississippi line. Chris thought it'd be a funny way to relieve tension to say, "Yeah, you cooked her," only I burst into tears.

When we got to the apartment I was supposed to live in and there was no toilet or shower and the place smelled like an abandoned crack-house, Chris said, "What are we going to do?" and I said I couldn't think while there was a dead hamster in my car, so we got a hotel.

The girl next door had an equally shitty apartment so we got a house together and she is fascinating to me because she wears wigs and I've never in my life known anyone to wear a wig unless they had cancer. She wears pink and sleeps with married men. "Just 'till my car's paid off," she says, and I think, gosh, she's nonchalant like I am, in my mind, like I'd like to be.

At that moment, I thought maybe God was saying, "Go home, Dumbo. Go home to your boyfriend in Flagstaff who helped you bury your hamster in a Wheat Thins Box. They don't come any finer than that."

OBSESSION IN THE LADIES' ROOM

As a child, I watched Playboy bunnies
on TV. One blonde, she waitressed,
shiny blue bunny suit, breasts spilling
and caught by silk
wrapped tight to skin.
Men ordered vodka, lobster,
held up a palm to the curve of her
backside when she turned.
I wanted her thighs, rich and netted,
dolphin-shine against soft lighting,

but I ended up here.
Strobes and beating
music,
where men watch my stomach,
run knuckles down their lips
and think too hard.

Out there you were dressed in a suit,
your tie prompt and wallet ready.
But hair is personal,
you fingered it as if it were snow.
I am my hair, blonde and stringy,
dark roots, sweaty at the tips.

In this harsh light,
my flesh isn't rubber, or resilient.
There is no mystery to me here.
I'm a show, a camel in the desert,
hair is my reserve,
the familiar I give to trust,
not to you.

You might think I fell into dancing,
that one day my kid got sick
or some pusher demanded payment
--due upon receipt--
But that's not it,
I planned it,
one deliberate step, then the next.

CALLING TO MAKE SURE

Arizona's on fire. Mom called to see if I was burned. She thinks they did it on purpose, thinks Iam "sleeping" with my boyfriend at that very moment. But I am not dead, I'm in bed with ice on my back; a pinched nerve near the spine. I blame my shoes. Heels one day, platforms the next.

Mom says Sex-in-the-City girls are horny. She's right. They have money, don't work, do it like bunnies, wear pointed shoes, and wobble-walk through Manhattan. Mom says she never liked heels, never liked a pinching, wobbling, street walk. In bed, staring at the ceiling, she remembers something she doesn't repeat.

I used to slip my grade-school feet into her old work shoes. I imagine she sometimes wore them out to dinner or to church. She had two pairs of the same sandal, a multitude of straps just below the toes, a single strap around the heel, and a short square lift underneath. One pair was gray, the other white and rainbow. In the 70's they looked brand new.

My sister and I clunked around the house, fought over the rainbow shoes, tapped our heels against the linoleum. But what we wanted were the wedding shoes. Closed toe, antique buckle tip, white leather, low pump, slightly squared toe.

We stared through the plastic holder in the front closet. I wanted to steal them, steal her prom dress, white and red, small straps, big skirt. Her hair was like a queen's. Mom was a queen. She went to proms, dated doctors, was held, arm-in-arm for pictures that Grandma took.

Grandma liked heels, liked to buy dresses and hats, matching bags and shoes, thick slips and sturdy bras. She liked to shuffle when she walked, like me, in the kitchen on Saturday mornings in her slippers. In fourth grade I stood by the attic, held onto the walls. I thought I might die, or freeze to death, or that someone would say, "Wait upstairs." She was pink and old. She left a fringed lampshade, jewelry that jingled, an antique house, sparkles, and iridescent metals. I think they will remind me.

YOU ARE NOT EVEN A BANK

You are not a pig
or a watermelon,
but a ceramic pot
for coins.
You are in the dark-
ages of "piggy-banks"
with your fruit body.
Real piggy banks come
with corks in their guts.
But you are glazed shut.
I like to call you "fruit pig,"
though you are not a fruit,
or a meat, and are not,
in fact, edible.
One day, when I'm low
on socks, I may stare
at your watermelon body,
your pig snout,
and contemplate
where to thump
the hammer.