I Am The King

poetry slam at the belmar thursday 9 pm

Jan Becker Binghamton's poet Laureate

Pissing On The Blarney Stone

Pissing on the Blarney Stone

Jan Becker

Leona sends me emails from Scotland.

Where she is the modern model of femininity

among the boys drinking whiskey in the bars.

Her emails say she is starting to embrace

the new culture

of life from a backpack

and youth hostels with dorm rooms

crowded with armpits and nose hairs,

falling asleep to a symphony of foreign snores.

She is a gypsy again

and she doesn’t mention Dave, the vegan rush fan

who is waiting just outside of Boston

growing thin in her absence.

She writes instead of the Scottish men

and Nepalese men who shower her with affection,

ask her to marry them in public Dublin

under the street lights.

Men dripping with diamond rings and promises.

Leona writes me from Limerick

that she couldn’t kiss the Blarney Stone,

because the Irish locals piss on it.

The only thing I asked her to do in Ireland was kiss that stone for me.

It is like when we went to Plymouth Rock, and the reproduction Mayflower,

And after wanting to see the rock for so long,

there it was, sitting in the Harbor painted with a red swastika.

and the tourists all took their pictures home to foreign countries

and faraway towns.

But my fingers would not press the shutter button,

and my photos were undeveloped.

I only took pictures of the Pilgrim graveyards

where the colonists buried their dead the first winter

in a place where the Indians could not count the Pilgrim dead.

Leona will come back from this trip,

having read the new theories that

Atlantis was actually Ireland that I mailed to her.

Her hips will swivel with experience

from the stares of British boys

with bad teeth

in air so thick with whiskey farts

that the oldest maid

suddenly appears to be a princess.

and the Blarney stone will shrink

from not having touched her lips

while she was alive and vibrant

and all the boys loved her.

And I know,

that if I ever make the trip to Plymouth or to Cork,

I will lick both rocks

with my tongue,

I swear,

if I ever travel to Plymouth, or to Cork,

I will soul kiss both stones,

and give them a tourist to remember.

Kimmy Is Crying

Kimmy Is Crying

Jan Becker

I.

Kimmy is crying

Next to me in the

Passenger seat because

My eyes are tired and the

Wheels have strayed

Past the center line.

II.

I know I have opened something

Kept buried in her chest

Of treasures.

This memory, a dark violent pixie

Come to haunt us once again on the road

From a Dylan and Dead show

Where we lost one another in the crowd.

I find her bent over with a headache

By the van

III.

We give her some Goody’s Powders

And a nap under the Navajo blanket

in the backseat.

I looked so hard for you. She says.

I don’t tell her that I didn’t look for her.

Eight hours and a bottle of wine later

I’d been busy, so crowded on the hillside

Overlooking the Ferris wheel,

That I had lost my eyesight.

Eyes don’t matter when young dancing

Sweaty bodies trying to pass in the crowd

Mistake their bodies for mine.

In that case, I lose my outer eyes

And open inner ones

While the dead all around me skeleton dance

To the shining technicolor movie

In their skulls.

I had figured I would find her dancing and sweating

Passing by me in the crowd

And I would hug her

Until I could feel her pulse racing with mine.

My sister.

IV.

Instead I am now completely stone sober.

I swear it.

I could walk a straight line for a policeman.

Instead we are all sober

And she is crying because she

Thinks I am going to kill her.

V.

I’ve a feeling of the memory she has found.

We like to think we have erased them

But we wear them like new wrinkles

We are just discovering.

VI.

This one is a tumbleweed that rolls across a California

Desert highway.

I am eleven years old in

The backseat of the new silver Mazda

Danny, my brother,

Won’t stop touching me

And Kimmy is crying again

On Dad’s lap.

Mom is racing towards Iowa

Like she might reach it today

Even though we have only just left Los Angeles

And my first memory of smog.

VII.

If I could go back to the moment just after it happened

I would not remain silent again.

I would leap like a leopardess protecting her child

And gouge his eyes out with my talons.

I would kill him although he is dead now,

Because sometimes even the buried can

Never be dead enough.

VIII.

He has taken her gasping with sobs

And hung her out the window like a rag-doll

All her newborn eyes can see is heat-shimmering asphalt

Streaking beneath her at

One hundred miles per hour.

I was quiet then,

There is no sound that could contain the terror.

Of the California Desert wind

Ripping through her red hair.

IX..

It might be more than that.

At least that day he was sober.

An infrequent occurrence back then

There might be other roads she rode over

With him.

Where Jack Daniels was driving and

Dad was in the passenger seat of a car

Fueled by Tennessee Old No. 7.

Things My Mother Didn’t Tell Me

Things My Mother Didn’t Tell Me

Jan Becker

Mom never really said much

about condoms.

She just handed me a case when I was about

sixteen and said,

“Here, make sure that you use them.”

They were ribbed and

lubricated. Danny,

my brother,

and I made giant water balloons

that we

dropped

like hand grenades

on our little sister’s friends.

We found that we could stretch the condoms as wide as our heads

and wore them as hats.

We thought we were

making a fashion statement

until we discovered,

that it was next to impossible

to get the lubricant

out of

our hair.

Ernesto Likes to Call Me Mami

Ernesto Likes to Call Me Mami

Jan Becker

Ernesto likes to call me Mami.

“Mami,” he says,

“you got to face facts. You are a big beautiful

Earthmothergoddesswoman. Man,

you gotta love that, Mami

cause it’s the truth.”

I got curves,

that’s for sure.

A big round belly like the Venus

of Willendorf,

legs that have stood on the top of Gibraltar,

feet that walked through the

Atlas Mountains of Africa

and shoulders that shrugged.

My arms

have held down dying bodies,

crackwhores begging for medication,

pregnant women in seizures

borderline IQ children who probably weren’t

retarded, but

came from South Philadelphia.

My fingers dig holes in the garden for

wormwood and thyme,

pennyroyal, rosemary, basil and sage.

Fingers sift dirt like flour

chop garlic

grasp tissues, dry tears.

When I was a small girl,

I knew I would grow big tetas

because I need a chest this big to carry the pain.

Me, Earthmothergoddesswoman

a big mami with curves:

Yeah,

I gotta love it.