"The poems in The City Skirts are concerned with the ways in which the urban landscape informs the identity and personal narratives of the speaker. Deeply involved in the acts of observation and association, the speaker in these poems is constantly looking to the urban landscape for guidance, for answer, for reason for the personal and unreasonable."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

Duhig, Christina

NC DOCKS at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

English

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

     DUHIG, CHRISTINA., M.F.A. The City Skirts. (2007)  Directed by Stuart Dischell. 27 pp.    The poems in The City Skirts are concerned with the ways in which the urban landscape informs the identity and personal narratives of the speaker. Deeply involved in the acts of observation and association, the speaker in these poems is constantly looking to the urban landscape for guidance, for answer, for reason for the personal and unreasonable.            THE CITY SKIRTS      by  Christina Duhig     A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts     Greensboro 2007                       Approved by                    _________________________________            Committee Chair                 © 2007 by Christina Duhig       APPROVAL PAGE   This thesis has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.    Committee Chair _____________________________________                       Committee Members ____________________________________                       ____________________________________                          ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee          ii      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the following journals in which some of these poems have appeared, or are forthcoming:   Washington Square Review: “You Ask How I”; “What Places, Things”; “Luck”  The Greensboro Review: “Post Trauma”    My best thanks to my parents and my sister, Mara. To my teachers, especially Stuart Dischell for his patient reading and rereading of these poems, and Thomas Sayers Ellis for knowing from the beginning. To my close friends and close readers in workshop. To Allison Cox, Jesse Floyd, Jessica Cox, Erin Bittman, Jessica Ratigan, and Josh Baugher— I am so grateful that once we lived in the same city at the same time.     iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page   What Places, Things………………………………………………………………………1 I……………………………………………………………………………………………2 Notes from the Missing……………………………………………………………3 Near Elegy………………………………………………………………………...4 You Ask How I……………………………………………………………………5 Maps To My Home...……………………………………………………………...6 After……………………………………………………………………………….7 Power Failure……………………………………………………………………...8 II…………………………………………………………………………………………...9 Rape……………………………………………………………………………...10 Walk-In Testing………………………………………………………………….11 Each Spring………………………………………………………………………12 Snow in North Miami……………………………………………………………13 Just This………………………………………………………………………….14 Self-Portrait, Polaroid……………………………………………………………15 Post Trauma……………………………………………………………………...16 III…………………………………………………………………………………………17 Tattoo…………………………………………………………………………….18 To Solve for X…………………………………………………………………...19 iv      The First of Hunting Season……………………………………………………..20 The Alarm………………………………………………………………………..21 Visitor……………………………………………………………………………22 For the New Moon……………………………………………………………….23 Casual Dating…………………………………………………………………….24 Expectations……………………………………………………………………...25 The Querent Dreams the Seven of Swords………………………………………26 Luck……………………………………………………………………………...27                             vWhat Places, Things  A drink of something. Not tea, sky. You ask for the sky  In a shade of purple. A pickup truck and I, you say I   Must write the particulars. A certain word, at least one  Time, all sand and aster. And I ask what. We make us   With these things. Between here and Ohio. Not the sky,  Your pickup. Purple then, a thin thread. Laced to the town   We fled with CB radios. It’s me. Two blocks from the East  River, a man curses in Polish and sleeps. Splintered chairs   And box spring, a broke down Toyota where a house  Should stand. Once I crept close enough to touch the water-  Stained upholstery, but wrote you instead. Once you called  Just to read me a poem. The poem begins with margaritas,   A man in New York and a woman. In Virginia, it ends  With stars. Something about earrings, grapes. The color   Over the river. Just before the sun slips, it’s you. I always  Answer. Revise the love story, where. A lake skirts   The places we paint, thirsty and orange. This is how we know  The other. We hedge our bets with the sky. We call it geography.    1I.  2Notes from the Missing  The woman next door has pushed a fence of plastic  tulips into the dirt again. We’re nearer to bees now  than winter. If anyone asks, tell them cold graces  my radiator like a canary. Tell them everything.  Should you need me, build a dollhouse and bury a cello. And every February, please, light a candle  in the far corner of the church on 51st. Tell them the red scarf Allison sent still smells like Zanzibar tea.                                      3Near Elegy   What we did for a cup of coffee. That first November   in Cleveland, snowbanks the size of us, and you   wore your hair in pigtails. Not two weeks ago you said   you want to kill yourself again. We were baking spinach pie.   I remember the mornings radio static mixed   with the squalled ache of the alarm, the blankets pulled tight   over your head, slow wheeze of bus after bus off the curb outside.   Nothing could wake you then. And when you did not answer   yesterday, I waded into hours, all the green bottles ditched   in a stream. That is no way to die. Last July you said you believe   life falls under two categories— things that are vanilla almond   and things that are maple pecan. You tell me now the days after   your death will be like any other. The day you dyed my hair   in the bathroom. It was a Friday. We ate peppermint ice cream   while we waited for the color to take.               4You Ask How I  Am always one bird. Am the first fray. Am ribbons traded  in airfields. Am sequence fixed to concrete. Am hinted but   twice. Am rare. Am archive. Am everyday before mayflies    thatched the nest. Am documents roughly pined. Am radios    hooked as bait. Am squeeze toy decoy. Am one electric eye-  liner, binder, crinoline. Am winged. Am waistlines cast in   subtext. Am freshly hunted fox tooth. Am scented letters to the new hero. Am bathtub songs. Am tremolos clocked   inside mailboxes. Am stamped. Am maps folded into one thousand ways home. Am a fire, red door. Am tin ceilings   in a port city. Am safe. Am no false crow. Am cheating  architecture. Am those rooftop flower pots. Am almost   sorry. Am how? Am tied to your engine. Am are? Am not.  Am you? Am no lullaby. Am after fine medicine.                        5Maps To My Home                                   1.  The gravel lot is as near as you are to the remains of a textile mill.  A forest grows up from the mill’s center.  Render a familiar hollow foreign.   2.  We argue about the shape of the collarbone  just to feel the collarbone.  It’s June. The bird neglects the tree.  I miss the abandoned factories. Pretend to leave me.   3.  If I am the tree, you are the bird’s wing.  There is a tear in the sleeve of my dress.  Bare the direction from there.                       6After  that autumn every girl practiced pinning moth wings  into corkboard                 each wing she dreamed  was the skin of an eyelid     pinned open     a pair   of scissors pointed at her head        that autumn  every girl cut the locks off her hair   turned mirrors  into shadow boxes and light       she’d walk   with hot bulbs in her hands if it meant a garden would keep her    safe this time      that autumn  after she was raped         every girl practiced being   a museum   a vine shorn from the season   one breath  and bricks to sound bells             every girl pinned              together       a cobbled shelter          a church wall                             7Power Failure   And nothing to light the sirens. The body half-buried in the gravel. Yes, she struggled. And still the pitch  landscape is inside. What animal will kick up the last  of the weather? Won’t you find me a candle to hunt  the eye, the memory, the mouth of the thing.                                    8II.  9 Rape  Some nights it’s easier to bury myself in juniper than to remember the road where first he asked you if he could get a cigarette                                      10 Walk-In Testing   When the man pricks her finger she thinks  of the fountain in the flower shop, fresh-cut marigolds  sewn to the scales of a fish. She understands the flowers  as three shades lighter than a tiny drop of blood  on a plastic stick. Mouth permanently agape, the fish  heaves water into an organ-shaped pool of loose change.  Someone wished on an old subway token. The man  drops a rubber glove into a can and leaves her  skimming the ceiling for fishhooks.                                 11 Each Spring  Off the potted tree in her  tiny wrought iron lined  courtyard, a woman  vacuums a fist of brown stiff leaves. Her skirt pockets  stuffed with white tissue.                                     12 Snow in North Miami  See where the sky unravels the inside of a quilt.  Unfold the blanket and lay your head down.  Further down the beach a woman spins her arms  in the air and screams. Seagulls funnel around her.  Maybe she’s a propeller on a plane, descending.  The pink and yellow houses, the run-down stucco,  how many strip clubs did you count today?  What names did you invent to explain the colors  in the ocean? You know who you are looking for  and you are looking in all the wrong places.  When they found her she was already a room  you could see through. When the last fist closed in,  when his hands had finished shaking, the world  turned over and it fell down all around you.                             13 Just This  One small spoonful  of ice cream, then  another. The carton  on the counter, a clock,  the cordless telephone.  She’d like a coupon  for the good shampoo.  Maybe the Sunday  paper. Maybe tomorrow  her daughter will call  with better news. She  turns the spoon over  on her tongue. The fridge  clicks into a hum.                               14 Self Portrait, Polaroid  the train tracks   a sign belled into red    a paper cup  turned up in the crux of a curb   a wall    part concrete part collapse   look up and over   the over-saturated sky      extend the arm and pinch    a button    black   the grass  where grass and steel     what letters name     a misplaced    corner seam of a sleeve    a fleck of skin     some hair   pulled loose     a single frame laid out in the light   dulled  white and into focus    you’ve gone where you thought  you’d rather be        you’re all graffiti          no girl                                 15 Post Trauma  The girls hold each other up.  Cameras blacken and turn the fire  engines quiet.                         An ambulance stalls. When I see the yellow tape cross the stairs into the station, I become part of the tallest building,  steady the sun on the sidewalk. Moths rummage  the stomach. The eye strains  sand from water. Sounds                                         come from boys  braced against a blue mailbox.  I almost do not believe. They are whispering  about me. They are saying something  about the devil. And not a word  about the boy who dared to climb a train.                              16III. 17Tattoo  More than the fenced-in parking lot  freckled with a thousand cigarettes  flicked out over the rocks not far  from the cars tagged on the tracks  in this part of town that is the same  part of town in every town where I  in my red dress and tall shoes pencil  myself into the image where you flick  another cigarette into the lot which has  nothing to do with the nights last summer  we slept in the same bed and fought on  sidewalks all over this town near this shop where now a man needles pink and red  flowers to the inside of your arm while I  sit and watch my nails tear bits of skin off  my plain body I thought it would hurt more                             18To Solve for X  Subtract the holiday oranges. Divide    laundry.   Detergent. Delicate. Spare.  Blame slack-eye  on the late train  and absolute zero  caffeine. Factor  a clean suit, a shirt, a tie  by suggestion. Distance  body from body. Distinguish tongue from lolli. Punch, Sucker.                             19The First of Hunting Season    The deer strung to the bed of the truck appear hollow already. But I cannot trace the wound or blood trail, nor can I gauge  the yard of the hunter’s bullet. The way a buck quakes   as if at fault, does he? Tell me, how deep into the brush  does he stagger before he falls?                                                      We are far now from the fields   where last I killed a swarm of flies. Stiff wings to ground,  legs shriveled across the body, I found them on the living room floor,  the windowsill, window opened to a screen. Each fly a reprieve   from the dishes you dropped in the kitchen, a little tremor,  a trip over nothing in the hallway.                                                         The books and brochures   say “clumsiness” and “indifference” are the first signs.  You never mentioned, then, the disease.  I read you will forget me.   I am on a road in West Virginia. After all this time  let me touch nothing that’s living.                     20The Alarm  The city leaks. Swarms, rats.  And men under a bloated sky  tower. The heroine crouches  behind trash heaps. Gloves and ash. A baby slighted of oxygen still bleats inside her.  Dark rooms. Where some light  blue thing is always. On fire.   No sign of her. No sign of her  lover at the window. She drops  into flood waters sipped by bodies.  A claw drags a man and a woman  off a ruptured island. Rats scatter.  Across a pocked street the heroine  kneels next to a spider. A web.  She begs the legs to spin her into  silks to smother the alarm. Sever from her hand another finger for  the feast of a dead king. She will  not rest. Rest until she finds him.                        21Visitor  Where the street rushed with four days of rain—  she remembers. Near the gas station, a river, surge   at the mouth of the sewer. The city swells from setting to subject. And harder to place— the space from his shoulder  to her shoulder, as he walked, with her then, under the white streetlights, the turn of his face toward her face, darker than grass  the exact shade of green in his eye. The door to his apartment, the days damp layer of clothes. The two of them almost  where once she was home. And the next morning,  her suitcase in his hand, the last spit of rain on his glasses.                              22For the New Moon   All October carefully spackle the fissures  where screws large as telephone poles  grow through the walls of your new life.  Scale counter and fridge to scrub the last  greasy boil off the kitchen paper. Try to eat  but find tofu unbearable, lettuce limp. Then  drive for two days in search of tomatoes,  purple onion, cucumbers, the produce stand  with the good limes. You’ll find him there  pricing fresh greens. What else can he do?  With Saturn opposed to your sun, the whole  world’s gone mobile. Be wary the Gemini  when he’s rising. Hold your face over the kettle  when you cry. Everything rusts in this transit  and you’ve only just scoured the sink.                             23Casual Dating  Across the bar the jukebox digital eye skips to C85. Guitar riffs a good tonic  swig and I start the story over. There’s us  dancing in Dad’s apartment. No, see this   is about my sister and I. Five dress sizes  too little to know where table lamps crash,   we wore the audiotape thin. Our parents  already split should I stay or should I    Here your hand runs the grain of the bar  towards mine if I stay it will be   Pass the open matchbook. You’ve never been  to London and you’re going. Now fidget   with the straw in my drink, I think I could love  your hand on my knee. Neon signs quiver   and faint below The Clash. Darling you mouth  the words like you’re going to kiss me.   I’ve left this town by Greyhound so many times  I could draw you the stink of each exit should I?                  24Expectations   Music drills the wall.  The wall is without portrait, textures,  without frame. Not even a bed’s carved edge  touches the wall and still the wall rattles,  a low note. Metal hum. The bass, an iron lung.                                              Hands, now. A man’s hands etch the spine,  my spine. His questions about the days that follow  sound like stories, calendars, a long drive home. I answer   there were girls who worked in the market. Behind glass  counters, glass cases. Chilled tongue, liver, lamb. Their eyes   blue slate and I never once heard them sing or speak.  There was a radio by the register and all summer   cockroaches climbed the pipes to the apartment upstairs,  found a way in through a hole in the wall.                          25The Querent Dreams the Seven of Swords  Under this city’s patchwork canopies is a woman  he won’t want to miss. She isn’t you, though her face   assembles a mirror. Without her he’ll believe himself yellow—  yellow as the ground, as his best shirt. As everything ripe   for the running. And when the backyard chorus breaks in  to quarrel, he’ll insist he ruined the grass, your lungs   and the stitching. Eyes closed he’ll know how little  he can carry, the red shoes on his feet and five swords   dragged from the dirt in his hands. Try to touch him  or don’t. Devine a yes or a no and a door locks at the hinge.   In the morning admit the lime tastes vanilla. He’s left you  the dishes, the last two swords, and the dog, fast, asleep.                           26Luck  I lived above a meat market then  and every morning I walked  seven minutes to the closest train,  slowing at the lot where cranes  stretched into the sky, which was  often grey, but sometimes blue and  when the sky was blue it was easier  to make peace with the new concrete  slabs of a high-rise over the bakery,  where if I was lucky and the sun was  right, I could see through the metal  slats in the door, more than fifty loaves  on a conveyor and anyway I was always  late to get where I was going because  I thought those cranes were beautiful.  This was before I knew you. And now  wherever I am, some other girl is  living my life.    27

The City Skirts

http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/umi-uncg-1346.pdf

The City Skirts

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