POETRY MONDAY: April 2, 2012
Nina Corwin
Nina Corwin is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps (CW Books, Spring, 2011) and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her poetry appears or in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review/nor, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review and Verse, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has also appeared in the anthologies Visiting Frost (University of Iowa Press, 2005), Beyond Foregetting and Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press). Co-editor of the anthology Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women, she curates literary events for Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery. Corwin has performed her work across the country, regularly collaborating with musicians, dancers and other poets. She has twice served as guest editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. Corwin lives in Chicago, where she has had a private practice of psychotherapy for the past 20 some years.
Of the three poems below, “Tangle” and “Irregulars”are from her 2011 CW Books collection (www.readcwbooks.com/corwin.html). “The Father of Psychoanalysis” is published here for the first time.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Tangle
Today I have lunch
with the king’s bishop pawn. I’m torn
between the shadows of patriarchs,
the urge to knock the whole
board over. But a call comes in
from another district. The white rabbit
stopped taking her Lithium last week.
I have to mop up the mess.
Poems are burning. Ticker tape and ash
slip from the sky, jumpers I can’t rescue.
They keep falling flat. They are the sidewalk
and the pigeon droppings
splattered on the sidewalk. I walk on both,
no sense in my step. Check.
And countercheck. My parachute tangles
with the power lines. Alley cats laughing:
Trumped again, as in aces high
but for the trump that sweeps the deal.
If not diamonds, then clubs. Somebody calls.
The boy at the dike is springing a leak.
Either way, I’m forked
by the white queen’s rook. He’s robbing me blind.
No one’s explained that rook is crow-speak
for swindler and goniff.
I’m just supposed to know. Like the dirty jokes
I’ve pretended to get since seventh grade.
But other precincts have need of my services.
A skinflint consumed with a morbid fear
of tree stumps. A tour guide
struck dumb by sunset –
a slipped tongue, no words for beauty.
She’s late late late. The bus is pulling
away from the curb.
Irregulars
It starts with Inspector 29, her nervous tics
and squinting eyes gone bad on the search
for the wayward thread or almost invisible discoloration.
Or should I say, it starts with the apparel,
on their hopeful parade from production line
to seller’s rack. But there’s always somebody judging,
saying yay or nay, fast track or going nowhere fast,
fine department store or strip mall cheap boutique.
As for me, you’ll know me by the labels
on the clothes I wear.
Gathering up the also-rans, the factory seconds
that stumbled under scrutiny, I who was always the last
to be chosen for the blacktop kickball teams, I celebrate
irregulars! those mail-order pantyhose marked down
for their slightly wavering seams, the snags that only
Inspector 29 can see, the skirt unevenly pieced together
by the anonymous sweat shop sewing machine operator
who must’ve had a really rough night. I welcome
their cut-rate selves into my home, sisters in imperfection,
standard-bearers and tainted saints of human error.
Once my breasts were a perfectly matched set.
But life comes along with its caustic shadows
on mammograms, its ambiguous cysts.
Life with its imperfect science, the winking
of uncertain stars. Like those forced choices
where vanity meets cancer in a face-off for a good
night’s sleep and next day when you wake up,
you find your right breast sporting a jagged new smile,
sagging a bit smaller than the left and thankful for it.
After awhile, you hardly notice the difference.
There are times I see Inspector 29 in my dreams,
smug as the angel of cleanliness buzzing about
the right hand of God. She plucks me easily
out of a line-up of department store wannabes,
with my collection of scars, my uneven teeth and
too big smile, my piles of papers cluttering every
available surface. She drops me into a large vat
along with all the other misfits where we are slapped
with Irregular labels: Inspected by 29. Loaded
into boxcars and destined for bargain basements,
We are assured, if merchandise doesn’t move
within thirty days, further markdowns will be taken.
The Father of Psychoanalysis
Develops an Obsession
Schlomo né Sigmund
can’t shake the feeling. He
misses his mother’s smile.
Wherever he turns, earlobes,
lips and locks
of hair. Not to mention
zippers – their steel jaws peeling
open to the softest
flesh, the sweetest milk,
the deepest wound
it’s always her.
There’s no help for it.