Words I Use Too Much by Lily Herman

Here it be - the final installment of the L. Herman trilogy. It turns out that Darth Vader is not indeed her father, but just a seedy uncle with hair plugs who runs a used car lot in Hyattsville. --------------------------------------------------------------

Words I use too much


Depending on the context
conspiring or conspiracy, usually
in a positive light, like two people
pitching a tent in their own bedroom
just to have somewhere to put
their heads closer together, inhabit
where live would do just as well,
altar, not like change
but in a blood-of-the-lamb
edited-for-PBS kind of way,

He says she says
like after a decade of poems
I still can’t let a brother know
that someone is speaking
without having them say
She instead of I
in all the places di Prima said poets
are explorers, but not necessarily
brave

Pussy twice over
because wimp is weak
and cunt reeks too much of poets
with both hands in their pockets
trying to ignore the climate
of the fifties, listening to Lady
Day, and calling men cats

I try to avoid bringing cats
into it, even when one
is the benevolent critic
warming my lap
as I write, and we both
know life is a simple series
of variations on trying
to get fed

Methodist, because their Christ
is not duty-bound to spend all
his time up like a public service
announcement on the cross
but will walk a little way
down the street with you
if you’re headed the same
direction, never trust a poet

who has to
disclaim confess reveal
because it means there’s
something they’re withholding
during all the sober hours
of their day, and they want
the reader to serve as their
incidental heir, which is a bane
that keeps on giving,

Benefactor because
to keep working I must be convinced
that somebody up there digs me

Heart as a physical object, not
the tacky wood-paneled room
in which one’s spirit animal dwells,
hips when I really mean
I feel fat, or I mean fucking,
or young women are a curse
all their glorious own, love
when I mean tailspin, or sea-
sickness, or an excuse
to stay up late

Drunkenness
for excessive kindness, or excessive
unkindness, the train tracks
that I grew up next to and haven’t
been able to grow up from
and their many romance tongues
cargo freight boxcar
train-hopping or commuting,
depending on who I observe
in flight, the tunnels they conquer
and men who died burying their spikes
none of whom I knew personally
but if it was personal

I wouldn’t be writing about it,
intimate
in any room where two people manage
to hear each other while speaking quietly,
God, as a placeholder for any
really gorgeous sky or void or drug
like the useless zero you leave in after
the decimal point to keep the equation
balanced, math analogies
I don’t even understand, analogies
for heaven, for madness, for men,
a hundred burning bushes sounding off
like desert clockwork when the poem calls
for a fireworks display,

Solitude sounds better
than loneliness, Petrarch is the only man
who’s said, soul, without making
me gag, and I have no muse
so I don’t dare say it myself,

even though I am arguably
always writing to you, you
the most frequent flier of all
these words, who spend all your time
like an overnight security guard
watching me write and occasionally
when I’m gasping for air, you (dear)
grab the pen and with two hands
steadied by each other,
we finish the fucker off
with a period like a single shot
to the head

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Lily Herman lives in Baltimore. A collection of her poems called Better than some, not as good as some others, was released by Furniture Press Books in 2011. She runs a reading series called “ILLITERATI” out of the Pent House Gallery in the Copy Cat building, and co-writes a blog of food stories called "What I Ate Where" with her cohort Adrian Shirk. She lives with seven dreamy humans and one cat, who, darling though he is, manages to stay almost entirely out of her poems.

"A thousand or a hundred thousand birds" by Lily Herman

Sometimes, unlike a recent ten minute trip to the CVS for some pricing stickers where I walked in on a botched robbery, witnessed some loud crazy-assed shouting match between someone in a big double-wide truck and a lady who got so pissed off she ran to get something (hopefully a crowbar and not a gun) out of the trunk of her car to attack the truck or the driver of the truck and then got a sales pitch from a glassy eyed panhandler who seemed to be filled with helium - it pays to go outside your home.

Such was the case a few weeks ago when I caught an Artichoke Haircut reading and heard some great new writers. One of them was Lily Herman and this poem by her makes me all riled up jealous. I love it and I hope you agree.

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A thousand or a hundred thousand birds

for Bob Dylan and Bob Snyderman, but mostly Aradia

What we talked of first
was a marriage. The same year
your mattress disappeared
each time you couldn't sleep,
and you romanced a bag
of wet leaves in the name
of your many plays, we heard
about Isis

how she snuck to the woods
to be a bride, and your cousin
snuck to the woods to be
a widow, and upstate
your niece was born before
I even knew you
had a brother

In an oblong park circling
Manhattan, we peered out
through the baubled walls
and saw the army
of tunnels we'd been sent to check
for bombs, or orphans, or more
tunnels, I kissed
you like a monk who's forgotten
his prayers and goes on wordless
chanting in the dreary interim
till death, all the scarlet
flowers shut like windows
against pilgrims who look
for a room to set down
their sleeplessness

Before anyone could argue
we'd been on a date, we got
married to avoid their questions
On our wedding day my brother
told you I walk like I keep
all old countries low
in my hips, and not to expect
a little aisle to change that
When you went away for a turquoise
rope, we exchanged
feathers in the mail to remind
each other how few promises
we'd actually made, that it might
stay possible to keep the one

I wore your father's suit
that I'd asked so many questions about
and your niece was reborn to celebrate
and one of my men had his granddaughter
so that she could take our name, and
you wore me to the reception so you wouldn't
feel overdressed
around us
the heat amassed into fat jewels
with teeth, or fragments
of the skies we were born under
that only come back to hug or cut
but when you've been born as long
as we have, inexhaustibly, you can't
invite one and not another

Later we learned to take our Decembers
when they came, and talked of nothing
but the blankness where our middle names
and the Soviet Union used to be
Or sometimes we'd pause to drink
a little, and wonder aloud
why our parents had dragged
us off the ancient star-belt
for this short hospital stay, swore
we'd never make more people
if we didn't have a much better reason

And I looked at you and you
saw me for the second
we eclipsed and it became May
and we greeted our better reason

with no calendar counting down
with no little wives sweeping
under our feet we thought it ridiculous
said Any room is a delivery room
if it's better than the room
you were in last and in the last
none of us had sons so I guess
we're making progress


Neither of us kissed anybody
for years least of all
each other, and any time
someone asked we said
This is being redeemed, or said
we were brother and sister
or cried in each other's arms
like the time we were starving

And if your niece saw us then
she instantly became my mother and growled
at us for coming near each other
like we might not feed each other
like she didn't trust our intentions
and a hundred birds took off
for their chosen planets around us

--Lily Herman

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Lily Herman lives in Baltimore. A collection of her poems called Better than some, not as good as some others, was released by Furniture Press Books in 2011. She runs a reading series called “ILLITERATI” out of the Pent House Gallery in the Copy Cat building, and co-writes a blog of food stories called "What I Ate Where" with her cohort Adrian Shirk. She lives with seven dreamy humans and one cat, who, darling though he is, manages to stay almost entirely out of her poems.