Cheshire Cat
Posted by Hannah Van Sciver | Filed under Announcements, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
Love,
You are the dirtiest four-letter word I know.
You are the rick-roll pop-up video.
You are a urinal on display at the MOMA.
(No disrespect to Marcel Duchamp.)
I’m not a cynic. Just a realist overfed with contradictions like necco sweethearts;
Besides, the only difference between cynics and realists these days
is how frequently they check facebook.
I blame America;
we boast both the world’s highest quality of life and the highest incidence of depression:
this shouldn’t come as a surprise, when even our happy meals cause blood clots.
I had been trying for weeks to write any poem that wasn’t a love poem.
But love, like a whack-a-mole, kept popping up.
Dearest Love, you are in a state of identity crisis.
You are a dandelion wisp caught on the lipstick of kids raised against a paradoxical backdrop:
Porn glistening on the well-stocked walls of a convenience store,
movies rated R (not for gore) but for a two second shot of nipples,
and disney-sponsored fairytale endings –
kids learn how sex works before they know what love feels like.
I was no exception to this trend.
And speaking of mythology, when Prometheus brought fire to the mortals,
the Gods punished him by having an eagle eat out his liver once a day for all eternity.
This reminds me of Valentine’s Day. There is a reason everyone hates it.
People fear that which makes them look inadequate, and hate the things they do not understand.
Love, you are not something I understand.
You are a language still foreign to my tongue,
But I’ve always had a propensity for falling head-first into pools of the things I try most to avoid,
And so, I must confess-
Lately – I’m a little bit in love.
I had all but waned to a crescent when I was suddenly lovestruck,
love struck and spun my sliver into a smile,
I’ve been grinning like the Cheshire Cat for five months now,
because for the first time since forever,
I’ve stopped measuring moments by how
if I were to disappear into the night, would it have been enough?
The answer is so often yes, and besides,
I’m too busy deciding whether her eyes are blue, green or grey
to consider such morbid hypotheticals.
I’m leaning towards green, though
I do not know the answer.
As a professional bullshit artist, I’ve learned to define the terms
I do not understand by stating what they are not, so:
Love, you are not a metaphor.
You are not a box of chocolates, nor a rose,
nor a sunrise, nor a battlefield.
You are not a stranger.
You do not make the world go round,
and you are certainly not all I need.
But I do need you.
Love. is like not knowing the answer.
Though not a metaphor, love, you are a little like a simile.
A little like a glass simultaneously half full and empty.
You’re like my mother walking in on us at 1 pm,
You’re like the way we kiss when there’s food in our mouths, because we are disgusting,
You’re like the dead flowers I keep in a glass on my desk, from the day I came back from Christmas vacation and you stood at the corner with a bouquet of green roses.
You’re like for the first time I feel beautiful wearing nothing but skin.
You’re like a bottle of wine with a twist-off cap.
You are not the heels of our hands.
But maybe, just maybe, you are the heels of our feet.
I am digging in my heels.
I suggest everyone do same,
because to all the realists checking facebook:
I don’t know when, exactly, but
I swear one day. It will come.
Lost Boys
Posted by Hannah Van Sciver | Filed under Poetry, Print
Let’s have a party.
With no occasion besides the twilight makes our skin smile,
and we all hate to be alone.
Evening, like cookie dough, is best when shared
and there’s plenty to go around,
so don’t let me eat it all on my own.
Come on over.
Let’s strum the backyard into oblivion,
and drink to the inevitable explosion of the sun.
Let’s be young tonight.
I’ve got a fire burning in my stomach
and six gallons of ice cream in the freezer,
and it’s raining you and me like cats and dogs out there.
So let’s let our clothes fall off like outdated theories.
Skin is skin and naked is sacred in the moonlight,
so stripping is the obvious option.
It’s been too long since I last wrote a love song,
and it’s far too early to start again.
So let’s hang like leaves and surrender to the wind,
let’s let our stems snap and cherish the fall.
Let’s be candlesticks on the beach.
Let’s smile deeper than stomachs,
because smiles shouldn’t require occasions.
And the moon has got to be a cause for celebration these days.
Everyone’s invited.
Bring your bruises, bring your drums,
and bring your souls, no matter their condition.
Spare parts are welcome.
We’ll press them together like puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit,
because nothing’s worth anything unless it requires a little effort.
We’ll howl at the moon like it’s peter pan
imploring us to believe in fairies.
We’ll pretend the stars are fairies,
because the first step to healing is make-believing.
I believe our broken parts are instruments.
If we play them loud enough, you can’t tell the difference.
It’s been too long since I last wrote a love song,
but maybe this is better.
Maybe somewhere in the cacophony of souls,
Maybe somewhere between the cracks and the violin bows,
there’s something exquisite.
Maybe truth lives in the hollow of every empty promise,
and you just have to scrape bottom to find it.
And if the sun explodes in the morning
at least we were howling the night before.
And if the neighbors complain about the ruckus,
we’ll tell them we’re lost boys
looking for gold in the corners of the midnight.
We’ll tell them we’re stained glass mosaics,
hold us up to the light and our broken pieces become beautiful.
So come on over, please.
One’s a mess, and three’s a crowd, but everyone together
is greater than lonely.
And there’s plenty of evening to go around.
Chaos
Posted by Hannah Van Sciver | Filed under '11 Spring: We Real Cool, Poetry, Show Poems
Tonight my thoughts are begging to be spilled.
I always sit on the balcony to write,
I watch the people below,
Just far enough away for me to stay invisible;
A small metal railing the only thing separating me from a six-story drop,
It’s the only place I feel safe.
Part of me wants to blame you,
But the other part knows it’s disrespectful to keep poking through the ashes
So I watch, content to keep the people a page-length distance away.
I still identify as a people person,
Even though I don’t like people much these days.
I trace the skyline with slender fingers just to feel like I own this sprawling chaos.
I’ve always loved chaos.
I want to wake up without remembering what you looked like in the morning,
But you’ve always had a coffee ground body and a way of marking everything I do,
Tonight, the truth sounds like discord
It echoes in my ear drums, and wells up behind my eyes.
I’ve got clumsy hands and shallow tear ducts;
I try to at least keep my fingers occupied, but they only settle down when
I let them remember how they felt on your skin.
I’d lend you my perspective,
But in the end you’d still see what you wanted to see.
I would draw you a diagram, but that wouldn’t make you walk back to me,
You never followed directions.
I woke up this morning with your taste on my tongue.
You had a mouth like a cherry blossom blooming three months too late,
We kissed like the sea and the sky,
our tongues were horizon lines,
you couldn’t tell where wet ended and heaven started,
we just knew for a few blessed moments that we held both between us.
But our love was nothing more than a sunset,
A cliché in the worst sort of way,
It didn’t last so long.
Our love was the second hand on a time bomb,
We bloomed in a field already slotted to become a parking lot.
You told me I was your hero,
So I tied myself to the train track with ropes fashioned from bed sheets,
I admit, I made a lousy martyr.
Tonight I tie-up my blankets like epilogues and stretch them from the balcony,
As if they could reach six-stories,
As if they could tie up our story,
But I never troubled myself with practicalities,
And these days, you don’t seem to trouble yourself with me,
so in a way, this tableaux feels like it’s meant to be.
There are two people below me, holding hands,
And I am fighting the urge to throw something at them.
I am fighting the urge to scream, “it’s not worth it,”
To scream, “you’ll remember this moment over the glasses of wine you’ll drink alone,”
I never wanted to be the jaded one.
I want to believe that attraction
is more than throwing your lonely in the direction of the nearest empty shell,
But I was once a block of marble waiting for my personal sculptor
To chip me into something beautiful.
One night I handed you a chisel and said, “I’m scared.”
You said, “me too.”
But you turned out to be a Picasso,
you carved me into a rambling abstraction and called it
“paradox”
The critics adore it,
but I look nothing like a masterpiece.
I sit on the balcony, and wonder how often you think of me.
I look into the windows to the evenings of strangers
and imagine how lovely it might be if we all just turned our lights off for a while.
The people scatter towards nowhere in particular,
and it reminds me of how we used to run in circles at 4 am, before we collapsed.
Then you’d let your fingers run in circles on my abdomen, and we’d laugh.
Chaos, us, and everything else have a lot in common, I guess.
I have always loved chaos,
from a distance.
Once Upon an After
Posted by Hannah Van Sciver | Filed under Poetry, Print
I never know when to put down my charcoal.
It’s hard to know how the ending begins.
I’ve got restless wrists, mardi gras streamers of ambition flowing from my fingertips,
and an eye peeled for possibility.
I know there’s beauty in uncertainty, but I haven’t found it yet.
I know simplicity can be profound,
But the muffled sound of rain hitting the roof sets my teeth on edge.
White noise hammers too loud. My mind
Is too twisted, my lungs too tightly wound round the spool of my spine to lie still
For even an instant.
I’m not sure how to properly fall asleep, wake up or pray.
I fold my hands like bookmarked pages and wonder,
If the silence could speak to us,
What would it say?
I’ve stopped believing in perfection, but I can’t stop aiming for the stars,
I shovel the night with sandbox palms,
Arms full of salt water,
Wondering how the sun could possibly rise
Before my soul has had a chance to compose itself.
I’m slow to move in anywhere, maybe because I hate leaving.
I’ve got heavy feet, and crooked shoes,
And roots that coil into the earth like screws.
I’ve got suitcases full of memories worn thin from over-use.
I live somewhere between soon and too late,
Afraid if I get lost in the moment, I’ll never resurface.
I run my Venus fingers over my skin,
Scrawling my epilogue before the story can ever begin.
