Letter To my Teenaged Self: You Are a House, You Are a Hammer, You’re the Momentum of the Nail.
In many ways you’ll always pull on boots
to rise from bed and walk from room to room
and hear the jagged gypsum moan beneath
your rubber heel and love the boy
in eyeliner and duct-taped shoes
(how casually he shrugs while kicking holes
in walls and car windows) or love at least
the way a single winter break with him
(your parents think you’re off with church
group friends) lets you discover what an art
destruction is so rip the flocked bucolics
from their glue rejoice because your limestone-
powdered biceps are the pulleys
of the sledgehammer that is the lever
of the fall and scrutinize the cat
who rides the pendulum of gravity
from band-saw down to baseboard
for she crashes like a nail advancing
through a tunnel of its own design
so when you raise the scaffold of your limbs
(four limbs two torsos O) be long and long
for salt that rises through the skin and hail
each thing that splintered (paper drywall oak)
yes hail the tool belt for the way it grips
and then descends your open pelvic cage
and hail the ceiling of your skull
the thumping of your mitral floor
remember that tomorrow dawn
will enter like a woman fallen
on this floor in broken gypsum budding
she will cleave nighttime and day the way
a sledgehammer cleaves wood and wood the way
a week will cleave a girl and her next self
or breeze will cleave to flesh that is the wall
of this the house the nail the body.
Saara Myrene Raappana is the author of Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press, 2015). Her poems appear in Cream City Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, [PANK], The Gettysburg Review, and Verse Daily, among others. She’s from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, served with the Peace Corps in China, and edits Cellpoems. For more, go to saaramyrene.com