School Morning Pep Talk
You hide your head under the pillow
as if my voice were a downpour
of bullets, and I, an assassin
that would gladly slit the throat of sleep
for the pleasure of watching it bleed.
You try to wail me out of range,
beg me for five more minutes
but I won´t budge, not with the faces
of girls like you heavy on my chest,
their futures gone cold, mute as stone.
You´ve mastered a hundred different
scowls to frighten the school morning
across the border of your room,
all of them monstruous, misshapen,
like a face whose features
have been carved up, burned to keep
fear spreading across a country
you´ll only ever see on television
while pushing your breakfast cereal
around the bowl, unconcerned with a belly
that has never collapsed under the weight
of an empty space. The wide-open territory
of your blinds, through which sunlight
billows and billows, reveals the path
we walk every day, free of militants
brandishing machine guns, of schoolhouse
bombs. Full of girls dressed in bright colors,
arms and legs bare as an autumn breeze,
all of them hoping today´s classes
will missile by. I want to sit at your
bedside, sing about the girls who burst
out of their shackles, who learn, despite
the strangle of knowledge around their necks,
but the only way I know how to wake you,
my love, is through shadows that smother
faces, through bullets that strike brains.
.
Big Time Crime in the Countryside
The words in the sand bear more weight
than the children who wrote them. Kneeling,
they scrawl letters around their bodies,
a chained enclosure as relentless as iron.
The fields abound with freedoms no longer
visible beyond these walls we´ve raised
with the stones of missed heartbeats.
Last week, my daughter and her friends
raced down the path to the far end of the grove
where they pocketed handfuls of unripe olives,
pelted each other with jokes and dares
while we sat on a bench in the playground,
swapping small town gossip, unconcerned
when their voices fell, momentarily, into chasms
of silence, or shadows snatched their silhouettes.
My son and his friends bounced up and down,
the seesaw teetering so near the fence
their giggles spilled like bells on the other
side. We didn´t hang over them like a fuss
of armor or seek to quell their voices.
Only birds, bugs, and butterflies lured them
out of our grasp, and the maze of bushes
lining the sidewalk was still the coolest
spot to hide from parents when it was time
to leave. Another silver Audi slinks by,
the face in the window disheveled,
ominous. We rush toward our children,
stumbling over our fear, wondering
when the chain of attempts will break,
this prison come crumbling down.
.
They Come When I Least Expect It,
a mosaic of faces arranged on a wall
of rain as I rage out of the busy café,
late for work. Faces that once savored
berry, caramel, cacao floating in a puddle
I fail to sidestep. Faces blurring
my glasses. For half a second, I want
to pour them into a poem, as if poetry were
crystal enough to hold the flow of thought
and not crack. To say, I saw them drowning
in reminiscence of their own deaths.
And maybe at its most relentless, memory
is a kind of endless drowning. Maybe
I´m not standing at a traffic light, tapping
my heel, but on the precipice of a revelation,
my watch the tick of a million lives swept
into the whirl of time. Worse is the spatter
of muddy faces on my white pants, more sneer
than laughter, the winter static not static at all
but a crackle of fingers pointing accusingly
at my phone, messages ping, ping, pinging
as if an orchestra of friends who once lived
were playing their bones on a xylophone
shoved in the fear-filled cellar of my mind.
I sail the lane to my office, faces blowing
past trees they once climbed, past shops
whose shelves they once perused, past
ducks that waddled out of ponds to snatch
bread from their once outstretched hands.
.
When the World Was Rated X for Nudity
If you´re hoping for black lace,
a falling bra strap, rock-hard
nipples, stop reading. If you´re sliding
the tongue of your mind down
my stomach, navigating a rain-
swept slope, a voyager on a quest
for treasure, this poem isn´t for you.
If you´d calm down, though, and bare
with me, my tongue will make
an appearance as conveyor
of incomprehensible sounds, once I slip
on my mask. Yes, on. Here you are
all knotted fingers and frenzied pulse,
imagining downpour, a spill of silk around
my ankles, words paralyzed in moan
when I´m talking about the amount
of air your lungs can hold without
bursting, not like a body through
the taut skin of orgasm but a smile,
which shouldn´t have been seen at all,
ruptured into a thousand hot flecks
of shame. I´m talking about the stares
as I hurried back home, condemnation
so stark I could see the reflection
of my X-rated face, horror rippling
my expression, and now that I´ve got
you tied to my nightmares, let´s climax
to the future: my poem undressing
in a valley of poems, earth´s elements
lathered over every centimeter of my body.
© Julie Weiss
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s Editor´s Choice Award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series, and was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her recent work appears in Rust + Moth, Trampset, ONE ART and Rat´s Ass Review. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.
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