Brant Lyon

Queer Macabrely Poetry

 

 

Betty and Barney, 1963

 

I do not and cannot doubt the veracity of the Hill's account,

and believe in the factual reality of their experience.

—Rev. John D. Swanson, Christ Church, Portsmouth, NH, 1963

 

That eerie glow outshone the pale crescent moon,

late summer stars, she recalled, and (what they

couldn't know) light that streamed 220

trillion miles to Earth from Zeta Reticuli.

She looked over at Barney. No, not a plane.

It flit above the White Mountain treetops,

then hovered 200 yards ahead on

that lonely stretch of U.S. Highway 3.

She'd seen that look come over him before.

In the diner where they'd last stopped en route—

the sidelong stares at the Negro with his

misceginated wife, as though aliens

in their native Granite State, where men

Live Free or Die— He pulled over and stepped

outside the car with his .22, pressing

binoculars deep into his eyes' sweaty sockets.

Then: at 100 feet in a clearing to their left,

                ohhh!—

She yelled imploring Barney to get back in,

and they sped off past the Franconia Notch with

Delsey in the back seat barking uncontrollably.

Strange beeping sounds, deafening—yes!—shook the car

at Indian Head, and tingling sensations,

a drowsiness which threatened to overtake

them both— That's all she could remember for sure

before those nights she would wake up screaming.

Within the circumference of two hours un-

accounted for, the orbit of their

extraordinarily ordinary lives had jumped

its valence, yawing into hyper-space, where

they would spend the next two years retreiving it.

 

                Breathe deeper now,

 

Dr. Smith leaned forward reassuringly,

as though to reel her back at

the same time he detonated the launch:

 

                Breathe, and tell me, Betty, what you see.

 

Perhaps it was the social worker in her,

whose genial instinct was always to befriend

and help, that she, unlike her cranky husband,

would be so willing to cooperate.

It's true they were disrobed and specimens

were taken from them both without consent.

They asked her to point to her planet on

the holographic star map, a jumble of

unnamed coordinates and intersecting lines

—she couldn't say. Somehow, they bypassed

their gray mouths with slitted lips that didn't move

and asked, What is a year? What is time?

Again, she was at a loss to explain, and nothing

she knew how to say that spoke to a world

that they might understand.

 

 

 

Ex-G.I. Becomes Blonde Beauty

 

I am now your daughter, she wrote home
from Copenhagen, avowedly un-sonned
in size 9 AA pumps, and hair stylishly coifed,
unmistakably feminine; deplaned at Idlewild
to a blizzard of flashbulbs, "the convertible blonde"
smiled graciously, signed autographs, amid cheers
and jeers, freak or heroine. In size 9 AA pumps,
smoky-voiced, but unmistakably feminine,
in the Cold War world that greeted her
she could have been too stunned to smile
graciously signing autographs, freak or heroine,
out-blasting H-bomb testing on Eniwetok Atoll
front page headlines had shunned;
but in the cold war she met it was she,
instead, that stunned and bewildered -
with her incendiary alchemy: castration and estrogen.

 

Joe Blow unacquainted with a reassigned ex-G.I.
George, rechristened Christine.
Bewildered by vaginoplasty that corrected
the mistake she believed nature had made
(at last, manhood undone!)
John Q. Public became acquainted with ex-G.I.
Christine and sent mountains of fan mail
(and poison-penned letters) addressed to Miss Jorgenson
that decried the mistake science shouldn't
have made. Now woman, redone, she crooned, "I Enjoy
Being a Girl" in testosterone-charged nightclubs;
cover girl for Look magazine, fans sent more and more
mail addressed to Miss Jorgenson
c/o her parent's home in the Bronx.
Unvexed, transsexed, serene,
she cooed, "I Enjoy Being a Girl", lectured,
was televised, graced the pages of more glossy magazines.

 

Heading home to her parents in the Bronx, unencumbered,
eugendered, serene, she deplaned at Idlewild
to a blizzard of flashbulbs, "the convertible blonde.”
Yes, I am now your daughter. She flew

home from Copenhagen un-sonned.

 

 

 

Mae West Consults the Mediums of Lily Dale

 

Diamond Lil’s sparkle never dimmed until

well past her prime, still refracting immortal

light as she dispensed ghostwritten advice

re: ESP and spiritualism, or the rejuvenating

virtues of bottled water, enemas and colonics,

positive thinking, indirect lighting, fantasy

and sex, that gave to the lie that goodness

had nothing to do with it.

Ravenswood, even the beach house, kept

shuttered from the sun’s pernicious rays,

devoid of houseplants she claimed consumed

oxygen, but two un-housebroken macaques

given free range for monkeyshines, the muralled

walls depicting otherworldly golden phalluses,

disembodied testicles floating in air as though

trumpets in a seance, the opulence of her boudoir,

And all her other worldly goods would be to her

but a splendid pharaoh's tomb--vainglorious

dowry for no afterlife--were she unable to make contact,

re-bond, with her mother and father on the Other Side.

Mae made that long, anxious journey from Hollywood

to Lily Dale and sat in silent awe in darkened

psychomanteums and parlors, tables tipping uncannily

on their sides, or in charmed frenzy, danced,

An eerie rapping on the wall, raising the platinum

hairs on the back of her specter-white neck.

But of all the mediums that beckoned forward

the dearly departed from Summerland to that

‘thin place’, it was Jack Kelly, from whom sex appeal

oozed like ectoplasm, she had come up to see

(and not the other way around), and open her

heart to invite spirit inside as he cast a beam

Of supernal light on which she passed over to meet

the undead—Jack’s gaze piercing through the veil

of disbelief or doubt, of disappointment,

unfathomed hurt, before the message delivered

from a somewhere she had long known but never

seen came through as he looked her straight

in the eye and asked with the innocence

of a child, "May I come to you?

 

 

 

Reanimation

 

They’re at it again, this time with hardened resolve,
storming the woods with their torches and hounds.
I pray for my disinheritance in a hollowed-out log,
smelling my own breath so hideously bequeathed me.
So newly undead I don’t know who I am.
They turn the knife on themselves, asking me to surrender
what I’ve never taken from them.
They will find me and devour me.
My criminal dumbness attests to their own monstrosity
I surrender:
a heart, barely begun beating again,
another’s brain, just re-lamping its genie.
Strapped to the table and shocked back to life,
they cannibalize each other.
You… you…YOU! This second-hand tongue stammers.
They will devour me. I surrender.

 

 

 

Brant Lyon was a poet-musician-composer & friend of the Macabre who conflated spoken word with music hosting his reading series, "Hydrogen Jukebox," at NYC's Soho Playhouse. As a composer and studio musician, particularly for poets, his own CD, "Beauty Keeps Laying Its Sharp Knife Against Me" (Logochrysalis 2008), has done that, too. He was an associate editor for Uphook Press and Big City Lit. His poetry, short fiction, and other work has appeared in DM, Rattle, Ganymede, Red Wheelbarrow Poets (vols. 1 & 2), and A Cautionary Tale.