Caolan Madden: Counterfactual
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
FRIGID BITCH
Uhhh I prefer sex-negative feminist?
The guy who scoffed it’s easy to be bisexual if you have zero sex drive
The idea I had of a kiss when I had never been kissed, the idea of like a fountain/and like a field of flowers/and like/settling your heels and shoulderblades into the floor/the idea of surface tension
My dad’s friend Phil, when I was fourteen, in the car, I can’t remember the joke. I watched my lipsticked disapproving mouth in the rearview mirror
I asked J, do you think I’d be a slut if I had the chance. J said, I think slutty from the waist up
They must be picking up on something
Kaleidoscope of hormones, the strangest flowers, double blooms, inversions, every time you shake the cylinder, recombinant, call them frostflowers, those blue crystals, snowflakes. Call it clinical. What burst into bloom when I stopped/when I started. My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around. How hot are yours? Your orange lilies, orange blossoms, you blushing brides, my bad science: Schrödinger’s sex drive, we can’t know until we take each other’s temperature, but. Killing frost. Check the evidence of architecture: have you ever put your fist through the wall? Wallflower, wallpaper, stay in bed, diagnose yourself, try to raise your core temperature
At the conference I found myself making small talk about Taylor Swift, how the best thing about her is that all the boys complain that she only wants to kiss. She buys all those houses for kissing in, overlooking the sea.
Cold shower, dead drop. Your heart beating, the only heat signature for fathoms.
COUNTERFACTUAL
those days when gentlemen used their own thoughts as evidence,
experimented on their brains by thinking, then wrote a treatise
and kids still have to read those and write papers about them:
this table here and smack it the color blue is a quality but not
I can hold the color blue in my mind separate from
or like my friend’s husband who used to stop breathing until he had visions
Is that different? It’s in the tradition
I use my body to feel the history of sexuality
& you use your mind & we talk about it
the physical revulsion, the revulsion that’s protecting something
I love to theorize about my body as a microcosm
in the absence of medical knowledge or supervision
its millions of stars bearing debris from real stars
If I had really been straight I would have felt
but on the other hand if I had settled down in Providence
feels very much like if I had slept with this guy junior year
if I had married. but also if I had a bike & waited tables
if I had been blonde. The stars in my body
reveal that high-school boys are decorative,
or grace, or power. If you had seen me first
wanting to be looked at, against cobblestones
Desire is different, weirder, declares my body,
a coming-closer, or a shudder
thirty-six hours later, then years later, in the park
where no one actually would have wanted
to lose her virginity at twilight in a linen dress
QUIETING MUSE
I shall never get out of this
said Plath in plaster, a yellow rose
in a stiff white vase. But I think
you don’t miss her ’til she’s gone:
at eighteen, sweating in my dorm,
I scribbled doppelganger elegies,
remembering our doubled bones,
our doubled fat bright in the cauldron
of a summer-long half-nelson.
Sister soup, I wrote, the only sisterless
girl on my floor. I must have meant it.
I must have missed her. When her shape
filled up with flecks of talk, like tin
confetti, high and thin and cold,
her opposite. There was an absence.
Who was she? What was she for?
Reading my diaries? Listening
behind me on the sidewalk. De Beauvoir
said that Diderot said you all die
at fifteen and I really felt it then
at seventeen
The one who died. I only know
her from that doppelganger poem and from
the caught breath at the double, at the hinge,
the horn, the heroine in someone else’s.
Even the tumor with its eyeballs. Even
Emily-in-the-glass. Wallpaper. Why say divided.
Why not doubled, why not luxury.
She has her nails done in some strip mall in the South.
She waits ’til I'm alone again. Some weekend.
Some other life. She’ll stir a little, say hello.
I'm not afraid.
from Dazzling Dresses: A Princess Activity Book
Uriel at Yale 1
In Physics for Poets, Ursula
twirling her ankle-socked foot
leaned over the aisle and murmured
about the Velvet Underground
and sucked her pencil expectantly.
O how the auditorium filled up
at that very moment, and the glittering ink
spilled out of Uriel’s pen nib!
Under the ground the velvet
corridors were plush with newts
and stalactites like staghorn sumac
(another class she took with Ursula
was “Local Flora.”) Under the water
Uriel’s sisters embroidered their names
on the delicate edges of manta rays;
in her dorm room she lifted them
from Fed Ex boxes, stroked their velvet coats
absently, bent over a villanelle.
The refrain was, “If you had seen my face
above a wave”; her word processor
had shorted out when she spilled a cup
of beer on it one Friday early in the term,
so now she wrote in longhand. Outside
the second spring-term snow was falling.
MOTHERGLUT
It’s all coming back to me
like I whistled and those rats came running
white foaming pattering
their backs undulating
screaming stat screaming code white
I gained all those pounds on purpose
I poured them on me like milk
I put them in a jar and weighed them on a scale and stood beneath the scale and
POURED
Until I was the white queen of fat
Umbrella of leaf-lard
Rat-queen redolent of lard
Pelt of a thousand rats yawning
Wicked stepmother luxuriously padded
with the milk of
with the blood of
virgins
O medical establishment we are sorry to have been so sedentary
We are sorry about our bad memories
I am sorry that I poured the leaf lard on my memory
I am sorry that I do nothing nothing nothing but make
this enormous baby
to fill up my hungry cradle
Sorry the baby’s made of a thousand fat rats
teeming over the ward and swallowing the tinies
Sorry about its thousand mouths full of seed pearls
Sorry that I forgot and made a blowjob baby out of swallowing
If you could just lie down and do it the normal way
just remember to just lie down but also do some light cardio
swimming for example, maybe some journaling
If there were more poems more dissertation more candies
there would be less baby there would be less marvelous mantle
creamtop mantle, glorious mantle, gluttonous mantle
I veiled the two of us the thousand-and-one-of-us
in my supreme gorgeous idleness
These poems originally appeared in our ebook The Queer Body.
Caolan Madden holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins and a PhD in English literature from Rutgers. Her poems have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Bone Bouquet, Black Warrior Review, Posit, Anthropoid, Split Lip, and Supplement. Her chapbook VAST NECROHOL was published last spring by Hyacinth Girl Press; as a member of the feminist poetry collective (G)IRL, she’s also a co-author of the collaborative chapbook GIRL TALK TRIPTYCH (dancing girl press, 2016).
