Danielle Pafunda
Danielle Pafunda is made of awesome. So classy and lovely is she that The Nepotist adjusts his habit of publishing up to three poems per poet just for her. These poems-- all four of them-- are each titled "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison." It's easy to think of them as a series, though I'd discourage that. Instead try this: think of each poem as the same poem, only written with different words. It's not so strange, is it? I'm convinced that I've been writing the same poem for years. We all do. It's whatever hectors and nags us. What we can't let go of or what won't let go of us. The germ of an idea, the impetus of an image, that squinting twinge of truth in a stereogram's squiggles. Yes, that's what these poems are like, those Magic Eye pictures. Only through a choreography of alternating focus and dilation can they be truly seen. I won't quote from the poems here as I usually do. Just read them. These dead girls will haunt you. As they haunt me.
Thanks, Danielle.
***
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
We’re ever so tired of sleeping.
When we wake up
we find we’re still in this immense bed,
and our eyes focus on this middle distant wall,
which is blue enough, granted,
and these curtains, everywhere, windowless, stained with
all sorts of excrement, reminding us
that it is the world down here,
too.
Too late
we’re asleep again.
At the end of each soggy hour
we recognize our failure.
We failed again, today,
at length, we failed.
Which is why the vision
came upon us. She scalded us,
she stank up our room,
we yelled, fuck you to death,
but there she stood, with all her
wiry hairs shooting out
with her waxen skin
frozen, slumped. We won’t
try to burn her again. What a failure!
We roll over, thinking
maybe we can’t see her from here.
***
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
The surface world, too bright now,
wasn’t made for us,
anyhow. We were made
its ridiculed, its honeybunnies.
We were tense up against a rack
displaying our fine cuts of—
a thousand gluey rhinestones
spilling out onto a very predictable
warehouse floor.
The surface world, with all its oil
stains, pockmarks, flecked metals,
its beetle visitors, its skeletal pollens,
its multiply coded salts, its loams
of night, like meat veins in a white urn,
you cannot.
***
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
We can recall in great detail
the startled thread of skin pulled,
revealing the pathogen chasm.
What we once thought we were
on the outside
squeamish of,
ewwwwing,
we turn out to be entirely
composed of.
Turning, first on the spindle,
then spun
into the greasy fabric,
mutton smell,
deteriorating harbor,
flesh filled spectacle
itching away in the corner.
We recall the moment when
the knee exploded, when the curse
of bone-black bled,
a name scrawled in ash
on the adulterous hide.
Mother, what mutton.
What kneeling has done.
***
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
Supine, we roll our eyes back
like the doll’s, and the night
is a starry dome. The night,
the tarry inner crust of the earth,
and the stars each one a salty
maggot.
A murder of ghosts appears
on the hemlock; it’s extra deathy
around here, for sure, but don’t be stupid,
human cylinder. There is no near
to death. There is only yes
or not
yet.
***
About the Poet:
Danielle Pafunda is author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press 2010),My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming Manhater (Dusie Press Books). She's an assistant professor of gender & women's studies and English at the University of Wyoming.
On the identity of The Nepotist:
The Nepotist is very shiny, made entirely of bones, filled with beetles! The Nepotist has a dozen passports! The Nepotist gets every haircut in the book! What cheerful creatures gathered in the forest where the Nepotist hums!
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