JAN BEATTY
winner of the 2023 Pink Poetry Prize
IF YOU SLICE THE MOON
If you slice the moon in half
shotgun pellets will spill into sky
and rename beauty.
That’s what I’ve seen.
People running away from their inside fires.
You can’t blame them—
But they are losing life-color,
becoming patterns of their former selves,
into the blueness that’s not really blue.
I’d rather be terrified.
In the moving life
that’s running without me.
I can hear it.
I’m breathing in it.
Right now.
Now I call this my new beautiful
because the terror is too large,
too unseemly.
Can I flip the moon over and name it
a piece of cloistered beauty?
If I do, will it leave me?
MIRACULOUS
As a child I spent a lot of time in the closet. I sat, bent like a finger in arthritis.
Here I could become anything: a cloud, a C note, Michael Jackson’s rhinestone hand.
By the time my mother would finally unlock the door to say, “Had enough?”
I was able to imagine her as someone miraculous, someone saving me
from my mother.
LEAVING SANTA FE
I’ve known disappearance, but never
4 AM corner dark with months of clothes
on my back. Past Nino’s near St. Michael’s
and Smith’s grocery where I went daily
to trash talk with the bag packers
about hair and magazine covers, maybe
all those years of waitressing.
I’ve fucked men for years to disappear,
drugs for years to go missing,
hungry to be institutionalized
to have my choices removed—
looking for a pathway to sky
without dying, a way to not be here.
5:10 AM driving on Cerillos, the GPS
says Sá-ril-oss in the black dark.
No traffic but homeless people
on the sidewalk. One man pushing
a shopping cart piled high with stuff,
hard to make out in the shadows.
He’s wearing a long raincoat, gloves,
even though it’s 73 degrees.
Another guy on the corner just standing,
staring. I pull up beside him at the light,
his clothes hanging, pants dragging,
no movement. Some kind of Mexican
rap comes on the radio, one click and
my door locks. The DJ says it’s
Roaring Lion doing Spanish Calypso.
The knife pulled on me in the backroom
fucking him to avoid calling it rape,
living in my car—but not for long.
I’ve known disappearance,
moving 14 times in a year,
but what was the man on the corner
staring at?
I came to—in rooms I didn’t recognize
with people I didn’t know.
Never 4 AM corner dark
with months of clothes on my back.
I drove away from Cerillos
in my rental car, wishing him mercy,
my privilege running over me like water.
JUNKIE
...the first day i shot dope/
was on a sunday./I had just come/
home from church/got mad at my mother
cuz she got mad at me. u dig?
—Sonia Sanchez
There’s light along the stripline tonight: this is your new family, same as the old—cold, not
there, spot the dealer at 50 ft, shady deal behind the van/side lot, know the city solitaire—5am
light after all-night drugs/don’t look straight in the eye/movement to the corner/same as the
old/don’t acknowledge/who to look at & when/ get the dope don’t be stupid friendly/ shut up &
listen/know the main player/walk away/not too far/the way some one holds their head/behind the
van/same as the old/study the movement/don’t look like you give a shit/night after night/don’t
acknowledge/they know you saw them already/behind the van/shut up & listen/walk away/not
too far/gangster lean doesn’t mean gangster/same as the old. cold, not there/get the dope/walk away
I RAN INTO WATER
Last week I ran into Water on the street,
said, What’s up?
I’m fighting the dragon, he said, trying to blend
male and female.
It’s a big job, he said.
Later, at the hairdresser, I said, Kill it, cut it all off,
stepping to the measure of my own cavalry.
Because inside my body, there is no home/and I
want to say to anyone:
It’s like there’s no body
I can live in,
so I walk around in the one I have.
I’m wearing striker boots
to kick the straight men away,
spit-shined, with heel irons.
SCARLINE
On any given day, they would lock me up.
I miss those hills of the body,
the line bruises from slamming the edge
of the dresser—
Those lines of demarcation are the scarlines
of hurricanes:
new continents rising to the surface:
this happened here
this girl lived
——
I was a split baby/
half a body here, half
nowhere
—asylum baby
split off
with the dull
tools
of the cutters.
——
I stayed
until birds flew out of me
until words became animals
——
Mothers
selling us to
strangers with a wallet—
and the walking bodies say:
when I saw you, I knew
you were mine.
I’m not yours.
You can’t own a split thing.
——
I found the cheap gold cross you sent,
buried under papers and books.
The letter where your priest told you:
Adoption is God’s work.
I don’t know if you’re still alive.
Bloodmother, finding you was like finding religion,
but without the cruelty and deception—
but then, what’s left?
——
Only:
Continents landforms upsurges
In this split kingdom
this body walk of life,
I’m the scarline.
JAN BEATTY’s seventh book, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. The Body Wars was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020, and a new chapbook, Skydog, was just released by Lefty Blondie Press. In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. For years, she directed Creative Writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program at Carlow University.
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