Jaclyn Dwyer

January 21, 2015

“Ode to Bobs, Breasts, and Beauty” by Jaclyn DwyerPosted by

Jaclyn Dwyer

ODE TO BOBS, BREASTS, AND BEAUTY

The same day Brad Pitt cuts his hair,
I play Bernice, drag my husband
to the strip mall Supercuts and lop off

thirteen inches of wavy locks
everyone tells me is so pretty.
It turns out more bowl than bob,

and I’m afraid I look just like
my mother when my husband says,
You look like Anna Wintour.

I picture a mom sending me to school
in Chanel instead of Velcro shoes
too clotted with fuzz to stay closed, but can’t

imagine ever calling my Rob, a Bob
my Rob, who called me Kitty Pryde
when we first met. I wore bright boots

over tights, and passed through
crowds on St. Charles, effortless
as the notes from the street band

trombone, though my breasts
were more Tomb Raider than
intangible, so round and full

once a stranger in the locker room
asked, What’s your surgeon’s name?
Skipped right past Are they real?

and Can I touch? to Where
did you get them? Like my boobs
are a pair of shoes. My momma!

I wanted to say. No one
would believe me now, sloping
domes like high-rise muffins,

soften to the shape of anything.
I’m just happy to have a husband
who knows what Vogue looks like.

How I watched Anna fidget alone
in Federer’s box during the epic
Open he finally lost to Nadal,

cinching her cardigan close,
shoulders hunched over knees,
trying to hide. I remember pulling

a curtain of hair over my face
in the bath. Every night
I would disappear in the tub.

Now there is nothing to hide
behind, nothing to be beautiful
for me. The grocery bagger

offers unsolicited advice, that
I don’t need the anti-wrinkle
creams that promise minted skin.

When I ask Rob what I can do
to make myself more attractive,
he says, I have no idea what

you are talking about. He says,
Your neck is a long, white
baseline I stand behind to serve.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Jaclyn Dwyer: “I am a practicing Catholic. My faith gives me hope that any of this matters: poetry, prayer, even the people in my life. Without it I probably would have given up writing long ago.”

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January 4, 2013

“The Fire” by Jaclyn DwyerPosted by

Jaclyn Dwyer

THE FIRE

My father took me to the Getty Museum
to see “Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last
Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia,” to behold
bloodstained wallpaper preserved behind glass
and the Tsarina’s severed finger, denuded
of rings, that stitched rubies and ropes
of pearls into her daughters’ dresses,
to shield them from the firing squad.

Sean Canepa’s father took him to Chuck E. Cheese,
peeled him from the ball pit, the boy’s greasy
fingers still clutching a dented plastic sphere.
He laid his sleeping son across the backseat
and set the car on fire. Curled among plastic
gas cans, the boy woke to his own screams.

The camera from the bank across the parking lot
captured the explosion in black and white:
his father standing there, an unmoving witness,
until he couldn’t watch anymore. At the trial,
his father would say, “I tried to save him.
Doesn’t that count for something?”

The boy’s fingers melted, popsicles in summer.
The sweet meringue of his skin foamed,
shedding soft ribbons like Kim Phuc.
Naked running from napalm, she tried
to brush fire from her body, but wiped
the skin from her arms, shaping thick scars,
breaking waves over her back.

And my father, whose hands no longer fold
for prayers, insists, “I wasn’t in the war,”
because he spent the sixties stationed in Boston
where he swaddled soldiers in Saran Wrap
and watched them sweat in a climatic chamber,
trying to recreate conditions of the jungle,
to cure the soldiers coming home with rashes
caused by Agent Orange, while his brother
crouched beneath heavy leaves, his finger
poised, waiting for something to move.

Alexandra, too, felt so guilty having passed
the bleeding gene onto her son, though she’d
been spared, she exhausted the royal surgeons
and turned instead to wizarding Rasputin.

Using his teeth to trace a fan of ghost feathers
on a Thanksgiving turkey, Sean Canepa’s empty
hands look like a rayless sun. But sometimes
I can see what isn’t there: my father’s soft palms
slipping into a leather glove for Red Sox weekends,
Alexandra’s finger, stitching a carapace of pearls,
and Sean Canepa’s father, his fingers splayed,
waving to greet his son.

—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

__________

Jaclyn Dwyer: “David Kirby urges his students to keep ‘bits’ of everything. Snapshots of life, quotes, fun facts that seem only useful at trivia night, but instead, Kirby makes seriously funny poems about this. The oxymoron of serious and funny. I like to see the trivial everyday collide with poetry.” (web)

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