LET KIDS BE KIDS

after Frank O’Hara

I don’t know what you’re up to, America 
But what I do know
It’s not good for the body 
Children need fresh air
An Ave Maria over their flesh 
Their choice of friends
The theater of their identity
That is so complex
No single man from Florida
(The real sinner here)
Can decide— 
If you ask me
What are you up to, America? 
Criticizing how souls
Dress on a Saturday 
Who they are
Who they hold hands 
Or play hooky with
In movie theaters
No one needs the Hail Mary
Of running to far-away streets 
Preyed on by gods know what
Mothers, you are glamorous countries
It costs you everything
Not to keep the peace
Not to keep hate
From taking the hearts
Of humans you love
Wasn’t your first sexual experience
A blessed box of chocolates
Stirred into gratuitous barrels of buttered popcorn? 
And if it wasn’t I am sorry
Oh Mothers
There are many bridges 
Between heaven and earth
Built of strange and wonderful colors
Only the empty
The greedy for gravy on TV
(A dark growth campaigning on the innocent)
(It’s unforgivable the latter) 
Can’t see them
Mothers (and I mean Fathers, Sisters, Brothers, 
Grandfathers, Uncles, Cousins, Aunts, 
Grandmothers, Friends and the entire United State Of 
Nurturing Tolerance)
You don’t want your tykes 
Hanging around their rooms 
Broken in your yards
There is no joy in that particular darkness 
Who is to blame?
If you don’t take this advice 
And they’re no longer here      
Only embossed silver people 
The images in photographs 
You talk to when you’re old
Because you wouldn’t let them be 
Wouldn’t let them love
Who they were when they were young

A WEIRD SCIENCE

with a title and line by Oingo Boingo

Started at twelve and kept growing inside me like Marie Curie’s matter—
radioactive glow of my bones, electric eye pulsing atop my dime-store
microscope, the protozoa dolls an animated voodoo out of nowhere, pill-shaped
specters that shimmied across cut glass slides, ghost worms I’d grown from hay
& water cribs of mother’s leftover mason jelly jars. I laid them down along a 
garage of obscure edges where I’ve fled my whole life to perform experiments
in not dying. Magic from the hand, from pots & pans and not what teacher said
to do makin’ dreams come true. But what else is there except go a little nuclear
when it’s 1972 and you’re sent to school with a box of Re-Elect Nixon pens for
passing out to white Anglo-Saxon friends? Some man’s agenda
Frankenstein-ed into us—domination seeds slipped between our unsuspecting
teeth until the heart hungers for shadow metals that will burn a wielding wrist
but do the trick reflecting truth. I sweated over it like Marie in her Victorian
collars hunched over Petri, her tubes & beakers & burettes conjuring mass from
marrow that could multiply, worms & grasses I fumbled with in the dark of my
home-made lab. And why not? If when not there, I split axioms & hairs at school,
igniting my elementary girls to break uniform chains like the skirts we couldn’t
hike past knee? You know, in case rangy males preyed ferally, the bulbs of their
mouths & eyes popped wide by thigh skin. Which is exactly what happened when
the plots I cooked up behind stalls of the break-time bathroom materialized.
Should you seek a method, our science came down to this: on the count of three,
the clock clicked twelve and we dropped our lunches, rose through funk & steam
of bananas & baloney sandwiches to rush the osculating windows— with our 
hands, unfastened them—fleeing the shocked mugs of boys & men left
speechless in the room. We hurled our bodies to banks of overgrown ivy below,
a safe & sexy mattress. Kush of stems & snails we crunched & buoyed up from,
sailing free, mutating in that instant, poison a power & contagion of the vein
hitting us and the ground running. We were bolted to air and a radiance
of green. We let it blow us wild to the future, reins in teeth, our noble fire 
no one dared chase. Or dared contain.

POEM FOR THE LEFT BEHIND

Once I stood like an actor
in a nightmare except
I was awake
and nothing fell from my mouth
but silence, but wagging
shadow—the singed
tongues of my brothers
rolled out on gurneys,
their grave eyes
searching the house
for a line, for a life
and finding, too soon
only soil.

Poet’s Statement:

I was up late writing in my delectable retreat space gifted by the wonderful @desertratwritingresidency, minding my own business doing research on my historical genre-flexing novel-in-progress Beryl, when I was struck with an overwhelming urge to write a poem! Well, this happens whenever I wander long into prose (even though there’s a poetic hand at work in any writing I do, one could argue), and further fueled by a recent conversation with my artist-screenwriter son (who identifies as a trans man) about the latest horrors and inanities around ongoing persecution of LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. These acts led and incited by various parties wielding the vilest, misguided policies aimed at oppressing, if not destroying, many beautiful, young lives. So, then Frank O’Hara’s famous poem “Ave Maria” floated through my viewing stream, and I decided to take language and tone from him to rearrange into a new piece. I was feeling a lot when I wrote it. The title “Let Kids Be Kids” is blatantly appropriated from Ron DeSantis’s legislation designed to foment discrimination and abuse under the reckless guise of “care.”

“Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream.”
~ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream   

“Poem for the Left Behind” is yet another managing, through art, the terrible loss of both my brothers to suicide, twenty five years apart. It also merges certain experiences of stage fright, anxiety, and performative consciousness and expression I’ve been immersed in since I can remember. Growing up with, married to, giving birth to, and descended from actors, we learn to make a little shiny something from the dregs of the day. That work being, at times, a confusing “out-of-body” sort of sensation/salvation, and yet miraculously anchoring. 

The recollected story for “A Weird Science” has lived in me for a very long time. Recently, I sat down and spat that puppy out. I’ve worked it numerous ways—as a more traditional lineated poem and justified prose block. As a pre-teen (and onward, truth tell) I had some seriously raging chaos rocketing around and out of me. I was a ringleader of mayhem and protest on more than one occasion. Finally, someone had the bright ideas to shove me in the library where I was sequestered to write stories that were usually mystery and detective—themed. I get it. People get nervous when defenestration enters the picture.

 

Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom,winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.