Tanya Larkin
LES TENDRES PLAINTES
I start a fire in the toaster oven
and now the toaster oven is in the backyard on the last lump of snow.
I did not burn the house down. I am such a failure.
Yesterday I slammed the storm door shut and the handle fell off
but the door still closes.
When one door shuts, another opens.
But when the door doesn’t shut, how much better
to resign oneself to a draft—can’t I dream
of a life where there are no half-measures?
I go to the symphony to hear a short piece
interpreted by a great soul.
To open myself up, I take a burning bath beforehand
it works immediately the music strikes up
a conversation with its corresponding parts
inside me. I tear up.
But before I can weep down my neck and onto my program
then onto the floor, I fall asleep.
But not so deeply that an usher
has to shake my shoulder
in the empty hall to wake me up.
Either I want to stay up for all the beauty
or be so far gone that a stranger must touch me
to remind me to go home.
When I wake up the next morning
my eyeglasses are not on the bedside table.
I have to find my old glasses to find my relatively new glasses and wind up
having to find the old-old glasses to find the old glasses
which I am wearing.
Instead of taking an
Uber to school and starting class on time
severely myopic
I was almost fifteen minutes late
and could see my students
each of their smooth peeved faces
for if I had been one more minute late
class would have been canceled.
I could have walked into an empty classroom
and savored the feeling of having
been given up on.
It seems if I could only commit to the disaster
I have only faintly courted till now
anything would be possible.
Thunder snow instead of this dribble of rain
silence instead of these words.
Who am I trying to please?
My father? Once I threw a fork at his face.
It flew above the meatloaf
its tines singing across the table and dividing the air
to make it more breathable.
I missed. Because I loved him
and because he taught me how to throw
so well that I could.
You girls never finish anything, he once said
and then died
because he was perfect.
I did not know that then. I must have been
distracted.
TANYA LARKIN is the author of My Scarlet Ways (Saturnalia) and Hothouse Orphan (Convulsive Editions). She is a creative writing lecturer at Tufts University and the interim managing editor of Transition magazine. Her most recent lyric essay, “The Path,” can be found in The Critical Flame. “My Nature,” a poem in Pangyrus, was nominated for a Pushcart.
