Petra Kuppers

Poetry

 

 

River Quest                                       

 

Let’s cross the river, she said. I gladly followed

my heart in a feather bower, aflame and toxic

I joined the crew, had breakfast, stroked the crow.

We sailed waves that shouted out the rain

never supposed, never abandoned land of glass

the crown I gave to her alone.

 

So I wander behind the bunch, hungry and alone

dragons had walked here before I followed

a river pattern of silver fish, water meadow, glass

pelted skins, ravines now dripping toxic.

Walking stick hums along, swishes in the rain

I catch up, with all of them, and with the crow

 

oh he sits so cool, that crow.

Sneaky flight. Blink. Look at me, alone

paying my last dime to ferryman’s eyes, lap the rain

full of effluent, city waste, followed

along the river’s paths, down the toxic

heart, press collapse of thinning glass

 

she did look back, the bower fell so hard, shards of glass

swooped deep, fired feathers of the blackest crow

who stared at her, then me. Lidless toxic

water runs into delta, my breasts alone

break the surface, gasp for air, followed

when she laughed, slipped beneath, all open rain.

 

We changed to miniature, smallest rivers, in the rain.

Her eyes topaz, dark, her skin of cobalt glass.

There is no passing, no return, I followed

down the throat of the crow

down shore, heart crush alone

words turn lead and shout loud, toxic

 

belladonna, lily rash raised on her skin, foxglovial toxic

my aching breasts stop this beat the rain

companions long gone, dragons all alone

like needles, cadmium, fertilizer bottles of green glass

horded underground, screams startle crow

if I had known my love’s pain, would I have followed?

 

We hadn’t held each other for a time. Breaths of glass

too tender touch. Bowers broken. Hacked open by the crow.

But we walked the river, we walk now. Yes, she followed.

 

 

 

Bottled

 

The water bottle’s cyclopean eye

beams out over the windowsill,

level with the horizon line: beaky

mouth hidden by the round clasp,

a thin wire keeping any spills at bay.

No wine sloshes in the translucent

blue cave walls of its gut, this is

 tap water below the condensate,

pure and simply heavy, run through

municipal water filters, measured,

monitored, along its leaden path.

Bottled pride and a faint dismissal

of its paper-thin cousins, a crinkly

architecture of rings and bulges

it surveys among their shape-shifting

pressures, perusing street scenes

from its perch on the desk, by

the window, high above the plant,

ground into the asphalt, those

vessels deformed in a human hand,

with waists emerging, bit by bit,

with the press of callused palms,

the eager suck of moist red mouth,

maybe a foot’s swift kick up the arse,

till the collapse inward, the give

of structure, thin sides kneaded,

pancaked, spent. Stands tall, feels

only the touch of tiny drops dewing

down the interior planes of its shaft,

slow runs of microscopic droplets,

foggy veil spreading in the heat,

creeping around its blued well-

curved rounds, patience drilled into

non-leaching plastics, BPA-free,

polished, and stamped at retail:

do not leave anything behind.

So solid, un-degradable, for years

erect, refilled, in use. It thinks.

The layers of plastic in the streets,

the thin sheets in touch with one

another beneath the thinly

sprinkled soil of the dump.

Molecules shifts. Reevaluation

procedure initiates. Its dense

wall color has faintly shifted,

sun-bleached alchemy.

Dishwasher-safe, maybe.

But not without options.

The rubber seal, globular

blob tongue, nipple-soft,

closed tightly into the beak.

Yawn, slightly, open a slither.

Scratches radiate seal-ward.

Microscopic tumbleweed

teeters toward the lip.

Over winter, spores settle in,

drift into squishy corners

adjacent to the finger-worn

hardness. A midnight bloom,

mold shifts into new patterns,

the moon looks through

the study window and sees,

the bottle, the bottle, gently,

vibrate, gently, open, spreads.

 

 

 

The Well

 

I sat there, day day day, one hand warm on my

patterned thigh, the skirt just up enough to show

the flesh-colored thing that kept my shape together.

Amtrak rolled by, and all stared out, bored, goldfish eyes

shaken behind bullet-proof glass.

I looked back, broke into song.

Now, the bench lists, listens to an old melody

round the corner,  the seat solid cornfield yellow.

The railway shed has slumped to the right,

barely visible in golden light, a hint of weathervane

no longer lines up just so with the signal post, comma

slanted into humid air, pause. Tremble, just after the train

has hurdled past, quick to get elsewhere, to the skyscrapers

in the East away from the grain elevators that threaten

one last embrace, fold origami steel around wagons

that do not wish to circle, just want to run and run.

I stand by the bench, by the shed, by the rails that reach

out toward the horizon between the forest no longer.

Rails jump like crickets, gas escape

trajectory from the fracking well, over the hill.

Railroad sleepers pummel the ground. The screws

by my feet circle in their old wood grooves,

I can see them unwind, tension falls off like skirts,

I see them. They burst, one one one, out of their plates. 

Loud ping rusty arches in the sky,

champagne pop fizzles, one jumps

high and I see it coming.  I

stand here, for just one more sec,

a hole in my face that my eye could see

through if it were not far away

now aims home to gravity’s well.

 

 

 

Petra Kuppers is a queercrip disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, teaching in performance studies. She also teaches on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Her most recent poetry collection, PearlStitch, appeared with Spuyten Duyvil Press (2016). She has previously published a collaborative book of poetry (Cripple Poetics: A Love Story, Homofactus Press, 2008, with Neil Marcus and Lisa Steichmann), as well as poems and short stories in British and US journals like Future Fire, PANK, Adrienne, Visionary Tongue, Wordgathering, Poets for Living Waters, Disability Studies Quarterly, Beauty is a Verb: New Poetics of Disability, textsound, Streetnotes, Epistemologies, Accessing the Future, Quietus, Beyond the Boundaries, Cambrensis, About Place, and QDA: A Queer Disabled Anthology. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and she is currently engaged in the Asylum Project, with her partner Stephanie Heit. www.petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com