Lara Kaapuni |
Selected poems
Best Medicine
I have a laugh that is…
embarrassingly loud.
In movie theaters, at concerts…
the scenes of traffic accidents…
My back-row guffaw gets me looks like,
“Lara, why do you have to turn everything into a joke?”
Everything already is a joke.
I just know enough to laugh at it,
Without first scanning the room to see
who I might piss off.
No matter what the topic is,
There’s always gonna be someone.
It’s one hard lesson to learn,
No one ever just comes out and states it.
And people seem to get bored
when you try to straight out explain it.
But in this life
no one cares about anyone’s tears but their own,
And besides,
I have already cried,
For my grandmother
who abandoned her oldest child
to go on the run from
Japanese internment camps,
I have already cried,
For my half brother who died
from a bullet to the head
before reaching the age of one,
For his father,
who pulled the trigger,
before turning the gun on himself,
I have already cried,
For my father,
whose diseased brain screamed at him
until they locked him up
and pumped him full
of the kind of chemicals
that keep you from
walking around naked in the street,
I have already cried,
For my sister,
whose brain grew a tumor,
leaving her with
the mental state of an eight-year-old
for the rest of her life,
For my mother,
Who held the hands of monsters,
Fed and sheltered lost causes,
Gave to those who
could give her nothing back,
While she dug backyard graves
for her own dreams,A pet project cemetery,
With Popsicle stick headstones marking
loves she would never revisit.
This is the history of what created me.
you can have it in less than three minutes,
‘cause I’ve been told that
the soul of wit is brevity,
so I have condensed twenty years
of past conversation
that gradually had to reveal it,
and I lived the first fifteen years of my life
with tears in my eyes,
daily,
before I even knew exactly why,
I was wracked with
Sobs so shaking they
sucked the air out of my lungs,
And led to hiccups, like a hint:
Yes, everything is a joke,
And if you don’t tell that to yourself,
Then your body will shut down,
just to let you know.
Just try explaining the ache of your soul
Through hiccups.
That shit is hilarious.
So I will laugh,
Like German children
playing tag in the ruins of East Berlin,
I will laugh,
Like Scottish soldiers
lifting up their kilts
to moon invading English armies,
I will laugh,
Like my Hawaiian ancestors,
when they ate up captain Cook,
I will laugh,
Like my Okinawan ancestors,
who were conquered so many times
that they adapted rice threshers
into weapons and
invented fucking nunchucks.
I will laugh
Like the very first gasp from the mouth
Of every newborn baby,
I will laugh,
‘cause I’m dying inside,
and nothing less than
the world’s best medicine
can save me.
Like every reluctant curmudgeon with grudges
That can never be paid back,I will laugh…
‘Cause this life is fucked-up,
and I am done crying about it.
Sestina For The Booth
The last year of the decade was great for film.
We seemed to have destruction/deconstruction on the brain
And searched tirelessly for an appropriate aperture.
The sympathetic terrorists playing in the dark,
The underage temptress at the tips of fingers,
The overlay of digital glow and burn.
I had a collection of marks from the burn
That friction creates from skin and film
And pressure and inexperienced fingers.
Not quite used to using those parts of the brain
That prevent injury. Working in the dark,
Cooking skin on the hot aperture.
Rubbing alcohol fizzed on the aperture,
Bronze plate seemed designed to burn
Us fresh post adolescents in the dark,
The xenon heat evaporating the work film
Of sweat on our skin, any brain
a device for memorizing movement of fingers.
We were not to have rings on our fingers,
The manual warned. The aperture
Between metal and skin could hook on brain,
Sprocket, roller, anything and heat the ring to burn
A path through flesh while the film
Went on its merry way through the dark.
We all had a horror of this lonely dark,
A bloodbath of stupidly severed fingers
Merrily splashing blood all over the film,
Decorating the light within the aperture,
There would be complaints. Blood would burn.
The thread would stickily entangle the brain.
We became austere in our carefully oiled brain,
Monastic in the mechanical hum of the dark,
Oblivious to the crosshatched pattern of burn
Threaded into our post-adolescent fingers.
Watching for the new opportune aperture,
We disowned the comfortable nest of film.
My hardening wet brain trained my fingers
To love the dark but seek light through aperture
To treasure the burn of bright color through film.
Down the Rabbit Hole: To the Satellite
We watch a still photograph
Mass of illuminated dust,
And children are around,
Manipulating small-scale worlds
In their small-scale world.
“How many of us are here?”
A girl asks, hopping.
It’s a count us big, loping things
Don’t even figure into
As those who really matter
Puff out excess caloric burn
In orbit around a parent,
A pair of parents.
I can’t even remember if it’s
Castor or Pollux
Or whatever
That’s actually two stars in Gemini.
All I know is it blinked through the scope
Like LED,
Party favors at a digital bacchanal:
A place we go to remind ourselves
Of the worlds we burn out the sky…
With our grocery store parking lights
And our decorative baroque lampposts.
Silly atheist,
Complaining of strained eyes and sore neck,
Let that stop you from scanning the sky,
Naming the stars for stories you see in them,
Always chuckling at your petty
Pattern-recognition mechanism.
Silly meat-thing,
Rupturing your fragile life
With cigarettes and cheese,
Fretting the inconvenience of
Fetal feet pressed against ribs,
The pops and tears attendant
In springing the new mammals,
Vehicles for new minds,
No guarantee, either.
But a small price to pay
On the grand scale:
A student ticket,
Hell, a child’s admission.
Much smaller than the self-consumption of a star.
Much smaller than Earth’s burping
Planetessimal bombardments
Even smaller
Than the price of archipelagos,
Building their beauty on the backs of volcanoes,
Then eroding into the ocean,
Too good to live,
Like some literary heroine.
Silly pattern-recognition mechanism.
Bad atheist,
Complaining, lacking wonder,
Like an unforgiving Christian.
Sleeping through the great
This-is-all-we-get
With novels and alcohol.
You need the breath,
And the tiny hot hands,
And the distant dust and fire,
And the spike of every smallest burr
Driven into your heart.
Symbolic or not,
It is what drives you.
Tell Me A Joke
A poet and a scientist walk into a bar.
The bar is called “Thesis Statement.”
The bartender is a helicopter.
Patrons get drunker than
Intellectual housewives,
‘cause the bartender,
Let’s call him “Splash Gordon,”
Hovers like an intellectual parent.
The scientist is social
And uses “utilize”
When he means “employ”
The poet is asexual
And hugs like the letter A.
The bartender pours shots
Taken live on the scene.
The bar is exclusive.
It’s an exclusive.
It’s excluding.
You wouldn’t have heard of it.
The scientist knows apologetics
Like the back of a petri dish.
The poet has feelings
And makes a big deal of it.
The bartender pours shots
Of an intersection
Of a freeway.
The poet and the scientist
Watch on the tiny television,
Black and white,
Foil-wrapped antennae
Arranged slightly off-kilter
For better reception.
The scientist doesn’t feel anything,
Imagines surgery in diagrams.
The poet smokes cigarettes apologetically.
The bartender,
Let’s call him “Intervention McGee”
Pulls levers and flies the bar around the city,
Shines searchlights that flood
Backyards with visibility,
Pours between blinds,
Crosses off residents like hashmarks
Sorts residents like hashtags
Residents press pound for more options.
The poet and the scientist are shitfaced
Drunk and singing the epistemology blues.
The bar lands in the woods
And explodes in a collective groan.
Oncology Fight Song
What will I miss about cancer?
Warm blankets
Every single doctor’s office
Had an oven full of blankets
At the ready
And gangs of nurses
Ready to descend
Upon the slightest hint of cold
Wrapping us up
Like presents or babies
In repeatedly-bleached
Folded scratchy toasted blankets
To approximate the
Lofty, unachievable goal
Of comfort.
What will I miss about cancer?
Permission to waste food
With impunity
to the point where
I have been congratulated
For eating half a cup of yogurt
My every slightest whim indulged
My husband rushing out
To get me anything
I think I might possibly
Be able to eat.
What I won’t miss?
Ensure. That shit is disgusting.
What I won’t miss?
Staring down the scale
Every .5 pound loss
Screaming, “You’re failing!”
This is the one thing
We can all agree
Western women can do:
Get fat,
And I have nothing to do
But count calories in the
Opposite direction
And the doctors say,
“I know you aren’t doing this on purpose.”
Well, thank the high holy hell out of you for that,
At least,
How I’ve been waiting…
You know, I swore
When it was over,
I would never just take
The good-natured jabs
About my lucky, skinny ass
From all the ladies
Who love to hate their weight.
I do though.
I still take it.
I don’t say shit.
(Though I’d rather be fat than dead)
I think,
I’d rather be fat
Than feel my bones
Press through my flesh
On the radiation table,
And see my bones
Peek through my skin
Like knives through
A canvas tent
In a horror film,
And know my bones
Like you know a mother,
Sustaining, recognizable
And know my bones
Like you know a child
So carefully watched
As the breath rises
As the breath falls
As you wash delicate skin
With unscented soap
And some parts with aloe
And some parts with alcohol
What I won’t miss:
Being called a “strong woman”
What I will miss:
All that time to read
You know what they say about foxholes?
It’s true, ‘cause I remember begging.
You know what they say about foxholes?
It’s not true, ‘cause I don’t remember god.
But there was a part
Where I couldn’t give a shit
About science or words
Art or ambition
Religion or death,
And love was only sleep.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands
And chicken soup.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands
And chicken soup and my cat’s voice.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands
And chicken soup and my cat’s voice
And my mother-in-law arguing with nurses.
And then I woke up.
I have a laugh that is…
embarrassingly loud.
In movie theaters, at concerts…
the scenes of traffic accidents…
My back-row guffaw gets me looks like,
“Lara, why do you have to turn everything into a joke?”
Everything already is a joke.
I just know enough to laugh at it,
Without first scanning the room to see
who I might piss off.
No matter what the topic is,
There’s always gonna be someone.
It’s one hard lesson to learn,
No one ever just comes out and states it.
And people seem to get bored
when you try to straight out explain it.
But in this life
no one cares about anyone’s tears but their own,
And besides,
I have already cried,
For my grandmother
who abandoned her oldest child
to go on the run from
Japanese internment camps,
I have already cried,
For my half brother who died
from a bullet to the head
before reaching the age of one,
For his father,
who pulled the trigger,
before turning the gun on himself,
I have already cried,
For my father,
whose diseased brain screamed at him
until they locked him up
and pumped him full
of the kind of chemicals
that keep you from
walking around naked in the street,
I have already cried,
For my sister,
whose brain grew a tumor,
leaving her with
the mental state of an eight-year-old
for the rest of her life,
For my mother,
Who held the hands of monsters,
Fed and sheltered lost causes,
Gave to those who
could give her nothing back,
While she dug backyard graves
for her own dreams,A pet project cemetery,
With Popsicle stick headstones marking
loves she would never revisit.
This is the history of what created me.
you can have it in less than three minutes,
‘cause I’ve been told that
the soul of wit is brevity,
so I have condensed twenty years
of past conversation
that gradually had to reveal it,
and I lived the first fifteen years of my life
with tears in my eyes,
daily,
before I even knew exactly why,
I was wracked with
Sobs so shaking they
sucked the air out of my lungs,
And led to hiccups, like a hint:
Yes, everything is a joke,
And if you don’t tell that to yourself,
Then your body will shut down,
just to let you know.
Just try explaining the ache of your soul
Through hiccups.
That shit is hilarious.
So I will laugh,
Like German children
playing tag in the ruins of East Berlin,
I will laugh,
Like Scottish soldiers
lifting up their kilts
to moon invading English armies,
I will laugh,
Like my Hawaiian ancestors,
when they ate up captain Cook,
I will laugh,
Like my Okinawan ancestors,
who were conquered so many times
that they adapted rice threshers
into weapons and
invented fucking nunchucks.
I will laugh
Like the very first gasp from the mouth
Of every newborn baby,
I will laugh,
‘cause I’m dying inside,
and nothing less than
the world’s best medicine
can save me.
Like every reluctant curmudgeon with grudges
That can never be paid back,I will laugh…
‘Cause this life is fucked-up,
and I am done crying about it.
Sestina For The Booth
The last year of the decade was great for film.
We seemed to have destruction/deconstruction on the brain
And searched tirelessly for an appropriate aperture.
The sympathetic terrorists playing in the dark,
The underage temptress at the tips of fingers,
The overlay of digital glow and burn.
I had a collection of marks from the burn
That friction creates from skin and film
And pressure and inexperienced fingers.
Not quite used to using those parts of the brain
That prevent injury. Working in the dark,
Cooking skin on the hot aperture.
Rubbing alcohol fizzed on the aperture,
Bronze plate seemed designed to burn
Us fresh post adolescents in the dark,
The xenon heat evaporating the work film
Of sweat on our skin, any brain
a device for memorizing movement of fingers.
We were not to have rings on our fingers,
The manual warned. The aperture
Between metal and skin could hook on brain,
Sprocket, roller, anything and heat the ring to burn
A path through flesh while the film
Went on its merry way through the dark.
We all had a horror of this lonely dark,
A bloodbath of stupidly severed fingers
Merrily splashing blood all over the film,
Decorating the light within the aperture,
There would be complaints. Blood would burn.
The thread would stickily entangle the brain.
We became austere in our carefully oiled brain,
Monastic in the mechanical hum of the dark,
Oblivious to the crosshatched pattern of burn
Threaded into our post-adolescent fingers.
Watching for the new opportune aperture,
We disowned the comfortable nest of film.
My hardening wet brain trained my fingers
To love the dark but seek light through aperture
To treasure the burn of bright color through film.
Down the Rabbit Hole: To the Satellite
We watch a still photograph
Mass of illuminated dust,
And children are around,
Manipulating small-scale worlds
In their small-scale world.
“How many of us are here?”
A girl asks, hopping.
It’s a count us big, loping things
Don’t even figure into
As those who really matter
Puff out excess caloric burn
In orbit around a parent,
A pair of parents.
I can’t even remember if it’s
Castor or Pollux
Or whatever
That’s actually two stars in Gemini.
All I know is it blinked through the scope
Like LED,
Party favors at a digital bacchanal:
A place we go to remind ourselves
Of the worlds we burn out the sky…
With our grocery store parking lights
And our decorative baroque lampposts.
Silly atheist,
Complaining of strained eyes and sore neck,
Let that stop you from scanning the sky,
Naming the stars for stories you see in them,
Always chuckling at your petty
Pattern-recognition mechanism.
Silly meat-thing,
Rupturing your fragile life
With cigarettes and cheese,
Fretting the inconvenience of
Fetal feet pressed against ribs,
The pops and tears attendant
In springing the new mammals,
Vehicles for new minds,
No guarantee, either.
But a small price to pay
On the grand scale:
A student ticket,
Hell, a child’s admission.
Much smaller than the self-consumption of a star.
Much smaller than Earth’s burping
Planetessimal bombardments
Even smaller
Than the price of archipelagos,
Building their beauty on the backs of volcanoes,
Then eroding into the ocean,
Too good to live,
Like some literary heroine.
Silly pattern-recognition mechanism.
Bad atheist,
Complaining, lacking wonder,
Like an unforgiving Christian.
Sleeping through the great
This-is-all-we-get
With novels and alcohol.
You need the breath,
And the tiny hot hands,
And the distant dust and fire,
And the spike of every smallest burr
Driven into your heart.
Symbolic or not,
It is what drives you.
Tell Me A Joke
A poet and a scientist walk into a bar.
The bar is called “Thesis Statement.”
The bartender is a helicopter.
Patrons get drunker than
Intellectual housewives,
‘cause the bartender,
Let’s call him “Splash Gordon,”
Hovers like an intellectual parent.
The scientist is social
And uses “utilize”
When he means “employ”
The poet is asexual
And hugs like the letter A.
The bartender pours shots
Taken live on the scene.
The bar is exclusive.
It’s an exclusive.
It’s excluding.
You wouldn’t have heard of it.
The scientist knows apologetics
Like the back of a petri dish.
The poet has feelings
And makes a big deal of it.
The bartender pours shots
Of an intersection
Of a freeway.
The poet and the scientist
Watch on the tiny television,
Black and white,
Foil-wrapped antennae
Arranged slightly off-kilter
For better reception.
The scientist doesn’t feel anything,
Imagines surgery in diagrams.
The poet smokes cigarettes apologetically.
The bartender,
Let’s call him “Intervention McGee”
Pulls levers and flies the bar around the city,
Shines searchlights that flood
Backyards with visibility,
Pours between blinds,
Crosses off residents like hashmarks
Sorts residents like hashtags
Residents press pound for more options.
The poet and the scientist are shitfaced
Drunk and singing the epistemology blues.
The bar lands in the woods
And explodes in a collective groan.
Oncology Fight Song
What will I miss about cancer?
Warm blankets
Every single doctor’s office
Had an oven full of blankets
At the ready
And gangs of nurses
Ready to descend
Upon the slightest hint of cold
Wrapping us up
Like presents or babies
In repeatedly-bleached
Folded scratchy toasted blankets
To approximate the
Lofty, unachievable goal
Of comfort.
What will I miss about cancer?
Permission to waste food
With impunity
to the point where
I have been congratulated
For eating half a cup of yogurt
My every slightest whim indulged
My husband rushing out
To get me anything
I think I might possibly
Be able to eat.
What I won’t miss?
Ensure. That shit is disgusting.
What I won’t miss?
Staring down the scale
Every .5 pound loss
Screaming, “You’re failing!”
This is the one thing
We can all agree
Western women can do:
Get fat,
And I have nothing to do
But count calories in the
Opposite direction
And the doctors say,
“I know you aren’t doing this on purpose.”
Well, thank the high holy hell out of you for that,
At least,
How I’ve been waiting…
You know, I swore
When it was over,
I would never just take
The good-natured jabs
About my lucky, skinny ass
From all the ladies
Who love to hate their weight.
I do though.
I still take it.
I don’t say shit.
(Though I’d rather be fat than dead)
I think,
I’d rather be fat
Than feel my bones
Press through my flesh
On the radiation table,
And see my bones
Peek through my skin
Like knives through
A canvas tent
In a horror film,
And know my bones
Like you know a mother,
Sustaining, recognizable
And know my bones
Like you know a child
So carefully watched
As the breath rises
As the breath falls
As you wash delicate skin
With unscented soap
And some parts with aloe
And some parts with alcohol
What I won’t miss:
Being called a “strong woman”
What I will miss:
All that time to read
You know what they say about foxholes?
It’s true, ‘cause I remember begging.
You know what they say about foxholes?
It’s not true, ‘cause I don’t remember god.
But there was a part
Where I couldn’t give a shit
About science or words
Art or ambition
Religion or death,
And love was only sleep.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands
And chicken soup.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands
And chicken soup and my cat’s voice.
And love was only sleep and my husband’s hands
And chicken soup and my cat’s voice
And my mother-in-law arguing with nurses.
And then I woke up.