Moving amidst my Ramona chapter books,
I make out your movement, M, the moody turns
Of your mounts and valleys, the moniker of

Family names, you marked me like a maternal
Emblem of the generation’s matriarch,
You mingled amid reminiscences of former matrons  

Maria Helena from the Midwest,
Who crossed the mountains in a wagon,
Madeleine, a migrant from Marseilles,

Who baked warm loaves in San Francisco,
And her own daughter, my Mimi,
Who muttered merde while she drank martinis.

In my own time, you materialized in
Marjorie, my nana, and Maria, my mom,
The women in which I knew you growing up,

Then Molly, who made dreams out of
Magic and Movies and Marie Antoinette,
You embellished my most favorite things.

In my monogram, you aimed my impulses
in your masts’ diametric directions
Towards competence, towards imagination.

In your middle ‘s mysterious compartment I make snug
With magazines and novels and mugs of hot milk.
You nuzzled me in moments of melancholy, then motivated me

To meander among your fundamental family,
The sumptuous L of melt and mélange,
The meticulous N of man or monk or money.

Even W, which matches your mien in mirror
It warped wicked witch while you
Milled maidens and damsels, so I imagined

The mutilation of those two majuscules formed
My image of womanhood. M, Molly Smithson materialized
From a meek mademoiselle into the mistress of mischief.

Tell the ******* truth, Gwen Stefani, bleach blonde vamp.
Questions stack up in the recesses of my mind,
A renovation’s trash pile of drywall dust.
You changed me, but there are things to clean up.

Did you just take a break to remake your image
For swarms of chubby white suburban pre-teens
Swarming in packs at the middle school dance?
Are those the only bees you could catch in your hive?

How did you meld and mold the Harajuku girls
To fit in the camera’s crosshairs or to walk
the thin line of a New York fashion week runway?
I must admit I still have my bottle of L.A.M.B.

Was the woman who screeched she was Just a Girl
Just floundering for fame? Does this happen to
Every mid-level artist? Will my inkwell turn
To the blood of an easy fan base too?

I wanted you to be my mother, but you picked
my platinum model sister as your favorite.
But will I still become you, even though I know
You’re false? Your press coverage can’t reveal the future.

Black tar lies spew from US magazine covers
Eyes dark, I gobble them up in violent shudders.

Dear Gwen Stefani Circa 2006,
The first music I chose to like that wasn’t
just my mom’s tuning of the radio was

Your solo CD, the first and best of two, which
I made sure to get on my twelfth birthday, after
I made sure to get my first kiss.

We were not rookie sixth graders anymore,
In soggy bathing suits teeming with pubescence,
So I publicized my plans to plant one on

Yeorgios Mavromatis, the new seventh grade boyfriend,
The first boy to buy me jewelry I would not like,
The first boy I used to make myself infamous.

Our hallway bottlenecked with twelve year olds,
Alone we sat on the bed, legs dangling above
The stained beige carpet. The kiss was damp and boring.

But the crowd that pressed at the door was an ******,
Surged voices told me my dad was walking up the stairs,
I arched around to throw the boyfriend in the closet,

My father caught me, and I wore the walk through them
Like your scarlet lipstick. The album of
My first kiss was not passion, but gossip.

I’ve seen you in red lipstick, bindis, and blue hair,
A pink wedding dress, and a Platinum Blonde Life.
I knew you were making art meant to publicize.

The songs and the clothes and the Harajuku Girls,
The boys and the clothes and the Children’s Theatre,
The day I made a scene was the day I knew.

Catholic guilt and couture gilt and creative goals
Took two West Coast girls, only twenty three years apart
And turned them into people you paid attention to.

You start trouble, Ovaries. You usually cause:
“I just got my period,” or
“I haven’t gotten my period,” or
“ I have the worst cramps.”
But you’re complicated. We don’t really think about that.
I’m here to say, Ovaries, your trouble is of importance.

You’re part of our own big bang theory.
Some people think it’s a religious miracle,
Most just figure it’s pure science,
But in a way we most don’t understand
You mixed your matter with its male and made a
Completely unique planet.
Earth’s atmosphere could be all Carbon Dioxide,
And my sister could be blonde with a sweet disposition.

Matter can’t be wasted, just changed, and I don’t think
Your eggs are either.  I estimate sixty eight of my oocites, my essence
(those are unfertilized eggs, like the ones sold in a store)
are floating in sewer systems through the US and Limoges France too.
Ovaries, there’s no need to worry: that’s sixty eight out of a million
In each of you! I couldn’t waste you if I tried.

Before the internet or on-demand TV or iPhone apps
You figured out how to sift through the most complex data in the world:
Millions of options of human DNA. How do you pick?
You’re the Netflix of humanity.
You’ve chosen people of all roles for us to watch, to love, to care about.

I waited for your faucet to switch on until I was thirteen, ovaries.
Now I wait, usually with dread, but sometimes with a little hope,
For the drop that’ll turn some water and flour into leavening dough.

Fake concrete crosses and the worn black skeletons of barns hover above secondary looped highways. We weave and bob over the Mountain.

Old dirt roads share the same name as the mailboxes that still line them. The Walker Homestead: now a pile of trucks stacked on top of a doublewide toppled next to a house once built in classic southern architecture.

Stripped naked pines are whipped by cold mists.

I awoke during the credits. I lay with tongues. I fall to sleep in verses.

For $30, you can heal in an hour at Hot Springs.

“The Dali Lama has soaked in our tubs!” The woman told me on the phone. “Seven years ago, that is.”

“He’s not still in there, is he?”

The Lama’s not betting on Hot Springs North Carolina for total consciousness. Or maybe he is.

Maybe any *******, even Madison County, can bring you enlightenment when you’re basically a God on earth.

Google: Does the Dali Lama have a car like the Pope-Mobile when he travels? Is he carried on one of those Cleopatra looking things? Sedan chairs.

Ross plays a CD he listened to when he drove the flat empty asphalt of Montana and Colorado.

He was searching for stunning landscapes to shred. A kind of enlightenment I don’t think the Dali Lama could do.

Google: Has the Dali Lama ever snowboarded? Read the whole Dali Lama Wikipedia page.

It’s only the Killers though. We both sing the chorus, staring straight ahead.

I got soul but I’m not a soldier.

Ross says he never liked that song. It’s something I never knew.

Hot Springs has been one of Western North Carolina’s premiere locations for rest and relaxation since 1778.

Except in 1916, when it was an internment camp for German civilian prisoners who were on a cruise ship captured on the coast.

They were all very friendly and really bonded with the townspeople. Some of the Germans even returned with their families and are buried in Hot Springs.

Some prisoners are buried in the town graveyard.

The building to our left was the most lavish resort in the Mountains. It had sixteen marble lined pools filled with healing mineral waters that were surrounded by groomed lawns. The summering crowd played croquet.

It burned down in 1920.

We don’t get offered a lawn game when we arrive. Just visitor towels for $1 and an ashtray.

Cold mists whip among the mineral pools.

I awoke during the credits. I lay with tongues. I fall to sleep in verses.

Ross and I consider having *** in the hot springs. We try once or twice, but parts don’t fit they way they do usually.

I see tiny flecks in the water.

Are they essence of the healing mineral springs or elements of the soakers’ fat bodies before me?

Ross lights a cigar. It smells like burning hair. I light a cigarette in retaliation.

The chubby spa attendant knocks on the door.

“Your time is up,” he drawls.  

What does that mean?

Are we going to be executed and laid next to the German civilian prisoners?

≈Did the Dali Lama receive such treatment?

The water drains, screeching as it is pulled away.

They don’t tell you where it ends up.

The mineral pools swirl with tiny flecks .

I awoke during the credits. I lay with tongues. I fall to sleep in verses.

Paint left, humidity purgatory,
Sticky but practically peeled off, while

Water and lime, the kind you hear about
On infomercials promising to rid
You of Built Up ****, is trapped between the
Panes they said they replaced but I don’t know.

Clothes piled with invisible coatings of
Dust from the floor last swept ten years ago,

And sweat from leaving the AC off
(Because saving a few bucks is worth it),

And sweat in stained dresses when you touched me,
And sweat in damp briefs when I touched myself.

Paper stacks, three years, busy work
And scholastic articles I should
Have read, say I will, but won’t pick up,

And verses I wrote that go nowhere but
Here and to a real poet, happily
Trapped at an average liberal arts college.

So instead of dressing or cleaning I
Call you, naked, a fattened odalisque,
Silent for hours, my thin mouth, a suture.

A fit black girl cut across the dog park,
She saw my bare shoulders, sloped pudgy pale,
We gazed in the other’s faces, but now

I can’t think what she wore, and she knows
I’m just sad, still: a ghost in the windows.