Sinners Welcome
Poems
Mary Karr
FOR MY SISTER, LECIA SCAGLIONE
whose larger hand steered mine
around that first, tortured cursive.
Earliest reader, queen of the straight shot
and the crossword, you’re the one
I’ve always scribbled toward.
…And I waited with anxious soul for Romeo to descend from the clouds, a satin Romeo singing of love, while backstage a dejected electrician waits with his finger on the button to turn off the moon.
—ISAAC BABEL, Red Cavalry
God says, to the free mind, Find me.
—BROOKS HAXTON “Anonymous”
Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Pathetic Fallacy
Revelations in the Key of K
Oratorio for the Unbecoming
Disgraceland
Métaphysique du Mal
Descending Theology: The Nativity
Delinquent Missive
This Lesson You’ve Got
The Choice
A Major
Waiting for God: Self-Portrait as Skeleton
At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave a Message
Elegy for a Rain Salesman
Who the Meek Are Not
Hypertrophied Football Star as Serial Killer
Orders from the Invisible
Requiem: Professor Walt Mink (1927–1996)
Pluck
Descending Theology: Christ Human
Miss Flame, Apartment Bound, as Undiscovered Porn Star
Reference for Ex-Man’s Next
Winter Term’s End
Entering the Kingdom
Descending Theology: The Garden
Hurt Hospital’s Best Suicide Jokes
Sinners Welcome
The First Step
A Tapestry Figure Escapes for Occupancy in the Real World, Which Includes the Death of Her Mother
Mister Cogito Posthumous
For a Dying Tomcat Who’s Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature
Coat Hanger Bent into Halo
Last Love
The Ice Fisherman
Descending Theology: The Crucifixion
Red-Circled Want Ad for My Son on His Commencement
Son’s Room
Easter at Al Qaeda Bodega
Garment District Sweatshop
Overdue Pardon for Mother with Knife
Descending Theology: The Resurrection
A Blessing from My Sixteen Years’ Son
Orphanage
Still Memory
Meditatio
AFTERWORD: Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY MARY KARR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PATHETIC FALLACY
When it became impossible to speak to you
due to your having died and been incinerated,
I sometimes held the uncradled phone
with its neat digits and arcane symbols (crosshatch,
black star) as if embedded in it
were some code I could punch in
to reach you. You bequeathed me
this morbid bent, Mother.
Who gives her sixth-grade daughter
Sartre’s Nausea to read? All my life,
I watched you face the void,
leaning into it as a child with a black balloon
will bury her countenance
either to hide from
or to merge with that darkness.
Small wonder that still
in the invisible scrim of air
that delineates our separate worlds,
your features sometimes press toward me
all silvery from the afterlife, woven in wind,
to whisper a caution. Or your hand on my back
shoves me into my life.
REVELATIONS IN THE KEY OF K
I came awake in kindergarten,
under the letter K chalked neat
on a field-green placard leaned
on the blackboard’s top edge. They’d caged me
in a metal desk—the dull word writ
to show K’s sound. But K meant kick and kill
when a boy I’d kissed drew me
as a whiskered troll in art. On my sheet,
the puffy clouds I made to keep rain in
let torrents dagger loose. “Screw those
who color in the lines,” my mom had preached,
words I shared that landed me on a short chair
facing the corner’s empty Sheetrock page. Craning up,
I found my K high above.
You’ll have to grow to here, its silence said.
And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid—
names of my beloveds, sacred vows I’d break.
With my pencil stub applied to wall,
I moved around the loops and vectors,
Z to A, learning how to mean, how
in the mean world to be.
But while I worked, the room around me
began to smudge—like a charcoal sketch my mom
was rubbing with her thumb. Then
the instant went, the month, and every season
smeared, till with a wrenching arm tug
I was here, grown, but still bent
to set down words before the black eraser
swipes our moment into cloud, dispersing all
to zip. And when I blunder in the valley
of the shadow of blank about to break
in half, my being leans against my spinal K,
which props me up, broomstick straight,
a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am.
ORATORIO FOR THE UNBECOMING
Born, I eventually grew hind legs
to rear back on, and learned I was other
than the miasma that mothered me,
so begged to reenter the body. Told no,
I staggered forth to whap my head on table corners—
my tongue a small stub jabbering wants.
In the morning funnies, Little Orphan Annie
had an eye like a white pindot,
and when I watched her blankly
watching me, the complex universe
crawled inside my head.
Mirrors spooked me too. The kid inside
eluded me, though her fingertips
fit perfectly to mine. The mystery of who she was
floated on a silver surface uncertain as mercury.
The heart is a mirror also, and in my chest I felt
this tight bud of petals held a face:
God, with his stare of a zillion suns.
He told me the risen Lord was a sack of meat
and a brother to me, that the Holy Ghost
was the girl pronoun in sacred texts
who longed to steer
my body’s ship. He swears now
this form is carved by him.
Have mercy, the soul
singer says, and I say
blessed be the air
I breathe these words with, for
it makes a body wonder.
DISGRACELAND
Before my first communion at 40, I clung
to doubt as Satan spider-like stalked
the orb of dark surrounding Eden
for a wormhole into paradise.
God had first formed me in the womb
small as a bite of burger.
Once my lungs were done
He sailed a soul like a lit arrow
to inflame me. Maybe that piercing
made
me howl at birth,
or the masked creatures
whose scalpel cut a lightning bolt to free me—
I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed
and hauled through rooms. Time-lapse photos show
my fingers grew past crayon outlines,
my feet came to fill spike heels.
Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths,
get stewed, and sulk around. Christ always stood
to one side with a glass of water.
I swatted the sap away.
When my thirst got great enough
to ask, a stream welled up inside;
some jade wave buoyed me forward;
and I found myself upright
in the instant, with a garden
inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that
and eat it.
MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU MAL
Sometimes in the quadrangled globe you feel
impossibly small, a mere pushpin with face
embossed on top, jabbed in place.
Say it’s night in the kitchen, and those sprawled pages
hold notes for your oldest friend’s funeral—your fifth
eulogy in five years. Bach’s
measuring out cool intervals of pain.
You stand too long in the freezerspill
of smoky Arctic twilight—rows of plastic boxes
old soups and gravies
furred with frost, everything glazed in place.
And in the fridge, how long has that stripped carcass
shriveled there, legs widespread?
In the pantry, the lychee nuts eyeball you,
aloof in their ancient miasma of syrup.
By dawn, pantries yawn on all sides. Bach’s shut off.
Every dog-eared tome has been thumbed.
The single page says only, I had a friend who died. Cancer
ate her liver out. In your Timex
the noise shifts, the minuscule hammers
start tapping out now, now abruptly fast.
(for Patti Mora)
DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE NATIVITY
She bore no more than other women bore,
but in her belly’s globe that desert night the earth’s
full burden swayed.
Maybe she held it in her clasped hands as expecting women often do
or monks in prayer. Maybe at the womb’s first clutch
she briefly felt that star shine
as a blade point, but uttered no curses.
Then in the stable she writhed and heard
beasts stomp in their stalls,
their tails sweeping side to side
and between contractions, her skin flinched
with the thousand animal itches that plague
a standing beast’s sleep.
But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid,
the child knew nothing
of its own fire. (No one ever does, though our names
are said to be writ down before
we come to be.) He came out a sticky grub, flailing
the load of his own limbs
and was bound in cloth, his cheek brushed
with fingertip touch
so his lolling head lurched, and the sloppy mouth
found that first fullness—her milk
spilled along his throat, while his pure being
flooded her. (Each
feeds the other.) Then he was left
in the grain bin. Some animal muzzle
against his swaddling perhaps breathed him warm
till sleep came pouring that first draught
of death, the one he’d wake from
(as we all do) screaming.
DELINQUENT MISSIVE
Before David Ricardo stabbed his daddy
sixteen times with a fork—Once
for every year of my fuckwad life—he’d long
showed signs of being bent.
In school, he got no valentine nor birthday
cake embellished with his name.
On Halloween, a towel tied around his neck
was all he had to be a hero with.