Tag: Susan Cossette

I Was Diane DiPrima in Another Life by Susan Cossette

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I Was Diane DiPrima in Another Life

I was one of the boys.
I dropped acid with Timothy Leary.
Ginsberg hit me up for weed,
Kerouac for wine and typing paper.

I sewed stars in my hair,
spoke golden truths from other planets.
Buddhist monks chanted my poems like sacred wisdom.

I wanted every electric experience,
the eternal wisdom of peyote and Shiva,
my words to churn and blaze.
Goddess of destruction, purveyor of mercy.

I am really a middle-aged refugee from New York,
living semi-anonymously in the Midwest.
I have a mortgage, a day job, and landscapers.
Two cats, two dogs, and boxes of old memories
packed high in the garage, after the divorce.

Diane, all I have for you tonight
is Muskrat Love on the Legion Hall jukebox,
Christmas music in October,
and monolithic credit card debt.

My brain a thick concrete brick,
dank mud-filled swamp.
Paralysis by analysis.

The letters and syllables buried with old tires,
rusty license plates, plastic six pack rings,
and visions of what I could have been
had I been born thirty years earlier.

It’s not too late, Diane, right?

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Struldbrugs at the Wine Bar by Susan Cossette

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Struldbrugs at the Wine Bar

They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the
men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional
ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years.
                  -Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

What does forever mean?

Younger women have asked the same,
and heard the same dull echo from the void.
Lead shadows hissing threats.

Nameless servers pour pity wine
for those of us who still taste.
The glasses rattle and the chatter clacks
from the tin ceilings, for we who still hear.

Frozen in time, covetous and vain,
incapable of friendship,
selfies of ourselves.
Botox grins, taut hollow masks.

Those of us still allowed to work toil
under ignorant children with no memory of the past.
The rest are granted a scant allowance.

Ever practical, we brush thinning hair forward,
cover the black mark of the eternal immortal.
Our birthright, unending days.

The shadows of dead lovers dance in mirrors,
and the nameless ones who never were
reflect back, taunting.

We’ve reached that age.
Our rights are gone.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Procrastination by Susan Cossette

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Procrastination

Next summer I will plant flowers
in a perfect circle around the towering pine–

Carve tiny cradles for each pink impatiens,
pat flat the cool damp mulch.

Next summer I will tame wild ivy
on the hundred-year wall,
coerce it into tidy compliance.

The soaring rhododendrons stand guard,
old wise, twisted roots.
The stories they can tell.

Next summer I will hang a suet feeder
outside the kitchen window and await red cardinals.

It is August, and next summer is a long way off.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

The Procession of the Living by Susan Cossette

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The Procession of the Living

You return to that old place.
The musty salt smell of low tide floods back flush.
You did not notice it when you lived there,
Twenty-five years.

Green lawns lush,
shrubs carved into false spires,
obscene roses, impossibly fluorescent hydrangeas–
perfect, expensive, artificial world.

Ten cars crowd the curb
near the neighbor’s grey clapboard house.

I never really knew the man,
saw him in passing, smiled and waved.
Three small children, petite blonde wife.

Then the Saturday run, then the heart attack.

The joggers still jog.
Mothers pull sunburned children to the beach in red wagons,
a slow cadence to the sea.

The purple clouds and fog hang over the horizon at sunset,
florid balloons wafting in stifled air.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

There is No Wine in this Poem by Susan Cossette

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There is No Wine in this Poem

Just a rumpled periwinkle quilt,
two cats, ice water, and opioids.

There is no wine in this room.
I fold into red pain,
the scar on my throat raw,
stuck together with adhesive tape.

I have seen the mountain,
tribes of electronic monitors and surgical equipment,
given enough fentanyl to put down an elephant,
and equal amounts of Narcan to awaken the dead.

            Breathe Susan, let me hear you breathe.
            That’s a good girl, breathe and you will get some ice.

The nurse scooped tiny chips
into my mouth like a mother bird.
I swam to the sterile porcelain surface,
racing home to fluorescent light.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Misbehaving Body by Susan Cossette

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Misbehaving Body

A malignant alien
lives at the base
of my throat.

He has a name.
If I say it
he wins.

In three weeks
he will be in a jar,
his memory a scar.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

The Night Before Prozac by Susan Cossette

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The Night Before Prozac

The amber bottle of green and white capsules
waits in the plastic pharmacy bin,
for three days now.

The strap of muscles clenched around my ribs,
The nausea and stomach churn tell me it is time.
My pulse pounds
go, go, go.

At 3 am, I will think of the perfect things I should have said at work but didn’t.
I will regret the things I said but said anyway.
I will imagine every way I could possibly die.

CNN reports a 50% increase in the number of liver transplants needed
due to pandemic binge drinking.
I cringe at the dozen empty wine bottles
in the kitchen trash.
So many colors, each with its own mood.
The good pinot grigios remind me I overspend.
The cheap ones scream of bored desperation.

In 1999, I crawled into bed for a month.
Nothing existed but the lace curtains, the damp sheets,
a toddler and his grandmother in the next room.
All it took was a pill to wind me up again–
a blank-gazed cipher in pink gingham,
contorted limbs, stiff painted smile.

At 3 am, I will worry I won’t write another poem again.
But I need to sleep and smile and do my job,
the one I waited my whole life for.
I have bills to pay.

The amber plastic bottle waits.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Two Poems by Susan Cossette

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Helix Nebula

At the center, a knowing red eye—
Hot dot glowing, regarding the universe with cold disdain.
A thousand sapphire crystals ring the pupil then scatter,
Glittering into nothingness.

You do not blink.
You observe the blackness in silence.
You are studied from afar, photographed and measured.

We want to know you,
Beyond the disconnect of light years, the vacuum of dark distance.

Short-lived star, the core of you imploded ages ago,
Detritus of dust and gas cast into hollowness—
Hydrogen, helium, plasma.

Are you a dying star, or a star nursery?

Gravity will lure the cold crystals back into your scarlet mother’s eye,
Coalesce into new life and possibilities–
The ceaseless cycle of disintegration and rebirth.

*

The Blue Nude Wishes the World Was a Snow Globe

I am not lost.
Leave me in peace, to count paint chips on the worn wooden floor.

I am not singular.
Just indistinguishable from your vague, empty background.

Content to shut my eyes,
Curl inward, as you coldly tally each vertebra of my bare spine.
My bruised thighs delineated by crude black brush strokes.

I expect or desire nothing.

I dream of being rooted in a plastic dome
Among fir trees and singing red finches,
Thatched cottages, distant gothic cathedrals, smiling gnomes.

A shake brings silver snow, dark crows.
For a second I am that forgotten child.

The music box bells tell me, sleep in heavenly peace,
As particles rest on the plasticine ground.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a two-time recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Vita Brevis, Adelaide, Clockwise Cat, Anti-Heroin Chic, Loch Raven Review, As it Ought to Be, The Amethyst Review, Cross and Crow Keys, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.