The Mobius Strip Club of Grief Read online

  THE MÖBIUS

  STRIP CLUB

  OF GRIEF

  BIANCA STONE

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  for

  Grandma

  Contents

  [Odin plucked out his eye in exchange for a drink]

  I

  Introduction

  Medieval

  Last Words

  Lap Dance

  A Brief Topography of the MSCOG

  The Murder

  Client

  Mama-san

  Hunter

  All the Single Mothers

  Honeybee

  Emily Dickinson

  Math

  I Am Unfaithful to You with My Genius

  II

  Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother

  How Not

  Interior Design

  Flight

  The Reading

  Self-Destruction Sequence

  Stenographer

  Elegy with a Swear Word

  Cliff Elegy

  The Fates

  Dear Sister

  The Gang Elegy

  Blue Jays

  Ones Who Got Away with It

  Letter to a Letter to the Editors

  The Green Word

  Migration

  Retreating Knights and Riderless Horses, or Poem with Another Poem Halfway Through It

  The Fall

  The Woman Downstairs

  The Walking Dead

  The Lit Club Slaughter

  In the Champagne Room with Grandma

  Elegy with Clothes

  I’ll Be Happy

  Historic Flaws

  The Dark Ages, Revisited

  Bibliography

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  Odin plucked out his eye in exchange for a drink from Mimir’s well of wisdom. He wanted to know everything there is to know of the past and future. And so it was. But the weight of wisdom made his face sour. Seeing everything blown to shit. The gods with it. After that, he never ate again and lived on a strict diet of alcoholic beverages at the Möbius Strip Club of Grief.

  I

  Introduction

  At the Möbius Strip Club of Grief, come on in, the ladies are XXX! If you want the skinny ones we got skeletons cracking round those poles. And over at the bar—there’s Grandma, with her breasts hanging at her stomach—gorgeous with a shook manhattan, and murderous with a maxi pad. At the Möbius Strip Club of Grief all the drinks are free. Grocery store rosé in gallon bottles on every table. And the dead don’t want your tips. They just want you to listen to their poems. Don’t do anything dangerous. And call every once in a while. In fact, they tip you at the MSCOG. With checks. With a sigh they’ll throw one down at your feet—We make it rain with checks.

  Then the dead are sitting at the back of the club, dying further. Sniffing. Shuffling into the bathrooms, holding their skin in their hands, farting methane and sobbing across the stage with their last meal—it’s the raciest show in town. And ladies, there’s men too, hanging themselves on the bathroom doors and from the rafters, totally naked, with their cocks in their hands, tears coming down their faces. Ladies, you’ll love how their feet smell. How their bones protrude. How they leave no note.

  Medieval

  At the funeral they carried boom boxes on their shoulders,

  blaring Chopin, swaggering over the snow in sync,

  in all black, the cloth of penitents and matriarchs.

  A hole is free to dig,

  if you know how to ask men with the right tools.

  Funerals need not break the bank.

  Through the yard

  like a procession of Danes and Duchesses from Hamlet,

  all hired mourners from birth,

  punters of rough gods,

  women of the salons—

  our funerals are like poker games

  in the back room

  at the Möbius Strip Club of Grief.

  The stakes are high.

  You have to have pneumonia to get in.

  You have to cough and gurgle.

  You have to have a cat on your lap.

  And refuse to eat.

  Last Words

  After the funeral was out

  the hors d’oeuvres came out.

  Olives, pâté, sardines with soft bones and violent,

  flushed organs—too much wine, slouched on a flowery chair—

  aperitifs on the porch with the early moon—

  I looked at the sky overhead where it said

  in the white jet-stream cursive:

  dying is awful.

  And I lit my head on fire.

  Danced a dance for the gods.

  Mom pealed out, off down the mountain

  like Mad Max

  to sit alone in her house,

  to play solitaire in the dark

  because they’d turned off the lights again;

  the pipes were frozen, the wood almost gone—

  so solitaire on the floor beside the woodstove,

  thinking

  about abandonment

  about love

  about luck

  about money—

  like a winter songbird

  it sang in her head all day:

  Who will pay?

  Who will pay?

  Who will pay?

  Lap Dance

  I think everyone’s glad I’m dead, said the stripper

  with the caved-in face. Her fingers were bone and no

  sinew. She flapped her arms at the two wrens

  caught up in the rafters, staring down

  on the empty dance hall. Chirps rained like sparks

  from the electric saws in their hearts.

  No one here is glad anyone is dead. But

  there is a certain comfort in knowing

  the dead can entertain us, if we wish. We line up

  outside looking drowned, telling whoever comes

  our way that we are falling very fast. And that

  we are fine. The dead as wrinkled as jet streams

  cutting across the room with glasses lost on their

  heads, vitamins dissolving like milk

  under tongues, hair still growing, crackling

  out of their skulls in time-lapse loops—

  and we file in, in ones and twos, clinging

  to our tragedies, finding our favorite face,

  and it looks back at us with indifference, contempt,

  chill disappointment. You never came much

  when I was alive, says one with red hair, lying

  on her side, a Botticelli on the stage;

  and now you want a piece? $20 for five minutes;

  I’ll hold your hand in my own. I’ll tell you

  you were good to me.

  A Brief Topography of the MSCOG

  I

  Over the door there’s the iconic ice-pick in a human heart. You have to show a scar to the bouncer to get in: the old suture holes, a common kneecap, the shy smile of a cesarean, spattering of long-gone acne—any scar will do. And you have to tell a story about your mother. Something she suffered through. But once you’re in, you’re in forever.

  Then there’s only the horizon, lush carpeting through cigarillo smoke, coats on hooks, worried aunts, croquet—grand as a yard sale, a ghost, her eyes like thumbs pointed down, her laugh like an almost perfect test score—

  leave your inhibitions at the door. There is no room for modesty.

  Your magnum opus will start

  in the dim alcoves of grief.

  II

  Main da
nce room: frivolity, managed by a House Mom, who sits in a high swiveling chair, making sure no one breaks the rules of solitaire.

  Lay me out on the floor and win me. I have nothing to give but my songs no one knows, on my album no one bought.

  The DJ is the world, spinning and spinning.

  On the loudspeakers it’s Rubinstein at the piano, remixed with sick beats.

  —and there’s Grandma, half-blind, naked but for an open XL flannel and Birkenstocks. She peers out from behind the bar, squinting into the faces, trying to figure out who is ordering and what, her hand up behind her ear like a sail. Don’t let the cats out! she screams, whenever someone comes in.

  III

  You want privacy with your dead?

  Follow the nameless great-great-grandmothers through the screen doors.

  Cross your hands over your chest like a coat of arms.

  I will ravish you with songbirds.

  You’ll see angels bathing in dust.

  Let there be something for you in one room or another.

  And there are so many glow-in-the-dark galaxies to look upon.

  Like you’re all alone in your childhood bedroom,

  but totally restored

  in the adult entertainment industry’s moral center.

  IV

  For the masochist, nothing quite hurts like the truth.

  Farther in the cavernous club

  where the bend in the strip fakes an edge,

  I engrave my lunatic memorial:

  I WAS HERE!

  The dungeons of the mind, the most defeated cells,

  wherein cruelty cums.

  V

  Let go and there is nothing

  tethering you to the stake

  that is always driven

  into the soft center

  of your vampiric world.

  VI

  The great cosmic cow gyrates her stomachs on stage. The tall grasses sway at her knees. The people moan. The sun sinks. The band wraps up with “Gloomy Sunday”—

  Oh, Billie. Billie, do not leave us again—it never ends, it just lies down and weeps, because it can’t get ahold of anyone. HELLO?? Is anyone there?! Why aren’t you answering your phone??—lost in a magazine from 1998 about the sky & telescopes. Let the moths land where they will. Feel their powdery legs against your own. Gloomy Sunday. Gloo-my Sun-day. Would the angels be mad if I thought of joining you? Bright midnight moon, gloomy Sunday through the glass ceiling—better yet, Mars: that raving nipple, that red goddess who demands from the eaves to be worshipped.

  The Murder

  I ground hemlock across your brow.

  Shot you in the head.

  Hid the gun in the river.

  Looked inside the hole

  of your temple—

  looked inside

  the oak tree’s ragged scalp—

  your bosom bubbles

  and rots in the field.

  I cast you out of your house

  but your ghost lies down

  in front of the stove

  to weep,

  to say you’d like a cup of instant coffee,

  a piece of toast (that’s all!),

  and I bring it to you,

  I poison you, Queen Gertrude,

  in the center of a tournament,

  pearl dropped

  in a cup of rosé; lying down to die

  again and again

  in a tantrum and tempest—

  I get the power saw.

  Put the plastic tarp down.

  Pass along your suicidal genes.

  Your voluntary life in bed.

  Window monarch—you

  whom we fretted over

  like superstitious servants

  competing among your heavy furs and mantle—

  How many grandmothers have I killed?

  Some mornings I get up

  and walk barefoot down the road

  with my tin cup

  to shake the tinsel loose from my bones,

  to beg the strong winds

  to touch me everywhere.

  One sad epiphany after another

  to survive this—

  Oh, I survive this, I say to no one.

  Dear, old flesh and blood,

  these days I

  would not recognize

  your face

  hidden in the ground

  but for the sound of thunder,

  the tremor of spring rain.

  Client

  I’m here, watching the dead spinning.

  The dead are twerking and jiggling in my face.

  The dead are goddesses, walking around the room

  of wasted imbecilic dudes from Wall Street: the Living.

  The living are so obliterated, they can barely see.

  The dead are shaking our very foundations with their boobs.

  And they’re real—every part of them.

  The dead are wild apples in your mouth.

  They’re all out there in the dark, working it.

  Pissing in your belly button. Punching you in the jaw.

  Forever.

  Mama-san

  The strippers tip the House Mom at the end of their shift.

  With their life, their time, their sanity.

  She sits at the center, conducting order.

  She takes each aside to tell her she’s brilliant.

  (Too brilliant for anyone to appreciate.)

  But the House Mom is trapped.

  Owned by sorrow.

  Up the back stairs it led them all each night: grief.

  It tucked them in. It read itself aloud

  in gilt fragments and tapestries fallen apart—

  and she made them say it back to her

  until they knew it by heart.

  Hunter

  Erotic dancing takes the place of Greek tragedy

  just as the gladiatorial fights did in Rome—but it is a private dance

  no one can touch or see. A feeling every day I enter and close

  a curtain behind. Sitting alone with it,

  looking at it through a tiny hole,

  something lithe and naked, shaking in the spotlight

  beyond which I can never reach—

  suffering cannot do what it did for Christ.

  We do not get to go home afterward, cannot be

  imagined into the arms of the absent father. See how

  I do not rise up or shift the stone, do not

  inspire a nation—I sit at the bar

  consuming fried food. I put $5 into a machine

  and shoot bucks with a long green rifle,

  not speaking, not calling out anyone’s name,

  just me and the deer

  grazing in a digital clearing of the wood.

  I can’t tell anymore for whom I grieve.

  Something bigger

  and more catastrophic has died

  but died out of necessity—something that thought itself

  into indispensability

  something burst from every atom

  outward, like autumn fireworks over the lake

  and now

  I’m just recording its scream and glitter-down,

  just making a serial

  from its fantastical, dazzling demise—

  I can’t tell anymore whether I am grieving you particularly

  or I simply find life and death erroneous—this

  big expired grief

  like limbs people deny ownership of, find

  in their beds and throw on the floor, only to be told

  again and again, when the

  whole body is thrown with it—that it is

  attached,

  it is theirs, that they were

  born with it.

  All the Single Mothers

  A Möbius strip has a surface

  with only one side,

  only one boundary—it cannot be

  its own mirror image.

  Just as a family is

  def
ormed by symmetry—

  our favorite kind of beautiful here.

  When the men came

  they came in Doppler shifts,

  frequency fading

  the moment they passed by.

  The rest of their voices’ pitch

  was relative to the air—

  and when we were born

  we listened to them fade away

  as if they were never there.

  Honeybee

  When the male enters a female honeybee

  and manages climax

  his genitals explode

  and break off his body.

  It is the most dedicated orgasm in the universe.

  His penis stoppers her

  like Ali Baba’s boulder at the entryway to a cave of treasure:

  she’s sealed with a spell.

  Having sired their tragic progeny

  and prevented another from entering her

  the male bleeds out

  and dies in the grass. This really happens.

  So it is at the Möbius Strip Club of Grief.

  Off-hours, the dead wait at the center of the room, sitting backward in chairs,

  lounging in nipple-tassels,

  reading goodbye letters that’d been tucked into their caskets.

  The disco ball in the center of the room

  is like a flamboyant, pockmarked moon

  spinning silver acne over the dancing dead.