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    Everything is Everything
    Everything is Everything
    Everything is Everything
    Ebook111 pages51 minutes

    Everything is Everything

    By Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

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    About this ebook

    In her fifth collection of poetry, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz polishes her obsessions until they gleam. Whether she is exhuming the bizarre ("Cryptozoology" and "A Short History of Unusual Fish"), exorcising her demons, ("Hog Butcher of Workshop Table" and "On Why I Shouldn't Read Books") or celebrating the uncelebrated oddballs of the world ("Little Heard True Stories of Benjamin Franklin" and "Crack Squirrels"), Aptowicz's poetry sings and singes. Everything is Everything illuminates the dark corners of the curiosity cabinet, shining the light on everything that is utterly strange, wonderfully absurd and 100% true.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateOct 1, 2018
    ISBN9781935904588
    Everything is Everything

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      Book preview

      Everything is Everything - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

      Author

      READER

      Some poems read like a bookshelf.

      The poets carefully putting each word

      in its place, snug and sure and right.

      And other poems feel like Polaroids,

      poets waving them about in the air

      to make the scene come into focus.

      Still others feel like a come on,

      something you can’t believe still works,

      and yet here you are, in bed with it.

      My poems are like the hot panic you feel

      when you are sure you’ve lost something

      and dump your bag on the table.

      My poems are the things which

      tumble out of the bag: the menus,

      the post-its, the articles your mother

      cuts out and gives you at Christmas,

      the books, the receipts, the leaky pens,

      the old gum, the unflattering photo,

      the lint, the dust, the dirt, until…

      there it is. You find it: the shiny key

      needed to open that stubborn door.

      JUNKYARD GHOST REVIVAL

      It was October, and New England was stupid with beauty. Anis obsessively took out-of-focus photos of it streaming by our van window, all blurry red-gold-orange. The four of us — me, Anis, Buddy & Derrick — were old enough not to lose our shit when Anis left the cash box in a hotel room in Amherst, but still young enough to be shameless suckers for roadside stands and ambitiously pretty waitresses. I always thought on tours like this, I'd blow out my voice by the third day, but I was wrong. I was right, however, about bringing Presidential flash cards, lots of warm socks, and extra toothpaste. I was the only one in the van not nursing a broken heart, and consequently, I made the worst DJ. The world's largest and smallest hamburgers can be found at the same diner in a Pennsylvanian town which also claims to have a haunted corn maze and the state's best shoofly pie. The pie's called shoofly because it's made of molasses, and you've got to shoo the flies away from something so sweet. And we could have had the best shoofly pie! In the state! But no! We had to keep driving! The one day we had off was spent in Maine: first, at an antiques shop which sold banjos and pewter birds we later learned were salt shakers; and then, at a lobster shack so close to the ocean, the wind dried the butter to our chins before the napkins had a chance. The other nights, we stomped on the hardwood, pulled our eager books out of optimistic boxes, then stuffed them right back in at the end of the night, unsold but unswayed.

      We'd flop on a series of different empty beds. But sometimes, in between, we'd marvel at the sky from the parking lot: the moon doing its usual magic, stars poking through clouds, the air fresh & sweet & hopeful; tomorrow, not slowing down for a second.

      BALLISTIC

      I know about the mice in your cupboards,

      what you see when you look out your window,

      the first things you do when you wake up.

      This is odd, because we have never met.

      With other poets, I know different things:

      the thunderous hairbrushes of their childhood;

      the humble lump in their husband’s pants;

      their children, those screaming bundles of hope.

      But of so few poets do I really know so much

      of the ordinary stuff: the songs you can’t play

      on your piano; the worn robe you amble in;

      the food you eat when you are at your happiest.

      This must be why my hand fluttered from

      my brow to my heart to my neck with so much

      sad electricity this morning, your latest book

      slouching weak and mournful on my lap,

      a road map of your broken heart, without you

      once saying broken, without you once saying

      heart. All your usual wandering, all the cups

      and spoons and dogs and beds, all the things

      which once wriggled under your winking eye,

      now sit heavy in your verse, steeped. You,

      quiet and alone in your kitchen, cigaretteless.

      Me, left tapping on your rain-streaked window,

      wanting you to know that everything is going

      to get better, and really hoping that it does.

      L'CHAIM

      I found out that David Foster Wallace committed suicide while I was dancing the Horah at my friend Jordan's wedding. A writer / groomsman leaned into the circle, drunkenly staring into his handheld, wetly slung the news in my ear:

      David Foster Wallace has hung himself!

      And the Horah turned, pulling me in the opposite direction.

      Later, when the bride's family wanted their ancestry represented in dance, my middle name was all that was needed to pull me into the center. All I could remember about the Irish jig was while your bottom half whipped the floor, furious as a seizure, the top half stayed frozen, immobile, paralyzed.

      HOG BUTCHER OF THE WORKSHOP TABLE

      The other students say you’re beautiful,

      and I

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