#chessy normile

I wrote a joke on the bathroom mirror in toothpaste.
It was about how there were four combs on the sink,
which I think is a remarkably high number of combs.

Who were you brushing?? I wrote
and drew a fictional animal with long hair.

My roommates came home and it was like christmas for me,
very proud of myself, lying in wait under the covers, listening.

I heard the mean one, Simon, tell his girlfriend,
There’s a snide note in there
about too much hair in the sink,
which was an incorrect reading of my joke.

This caused in me a panic so acute I fainted.

Luckily I was in bed already,
so this was not so different from falling asleep,
except for one potentially noteworthy difference,

which was I dreamt all night
that the men who’ve attacked me in this life (and will ever later)
were swimming through dark, thick water
towards my sleeping body.

I couldn’t move because my body was asleep and
I couldn’t hide because my body was glowing,
like a white ember/ridge of maggot/sliver of soap.

I could not turn
the damned light off!

The water glowed ’round me where I touched it.

Because of the glowing
I saw it was red,
thought,maybe this is not water…
thought,THIS IS BLOOD I AM SWIMMING IN,
and remembered

the time I drove to Washington, DC
with a girl named Carly who liked to lucid dream
and how in the car Carly told me she had met a shaman once
and that that shaman told her,

In a nightmare, Carly, if you are being chased,
turn around and walk right back towards the thing that is chasing you.
Only one of three things can happen: it will disappear,
it will change into something else, or you will wake up.

When I woke up
I was staring in the mirror,
looking at myself
through the toothpaste message.

Who were you brushing?? the mirror asked.

I reached out and began to smudge brushing??
until all it said was Who were you

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

I enjoy talking to the man beyond the wall.
His pants are like one bad triangle.
At home, he can see the statue of liberty
just by sitting on his stoop. I live by the water, too,
in my own way, meaning by its code.

When I was fifteen I was new
at my high school and a girl named Dawn
gave an impromptu presentation on water.

No one asked her to and she made the poster
in under ten minutes. We do not pay enough attention
to this element, she said to the room. I thought she was crazy,
but I listened. Now, I heard, she does a pretty good deal of ecstasy
and hula-hoops in small but elaborate outfits on the west coast.

I asked my co-worker if he felt he had gotten to know the statue of liberty,
watching her from his home like that. I said, have you noticed that she’s walking?
and regretted it immediately. Why am I always challenging people?
In the article I’d been reading at my desk the author asked, out of nowhere,
is this the hill you want to die on? and I didn’t know. I don’t know what hill this.

Last March I got beat up at night and it wasn’t anything like I’d always pictured it in my head.
I just crumpled to the ground and blurred as his boot swung in and out of my face.

All my life I had trusted in this buried power
that would reveal itself when the time came.

I used to keep my backpack on
at the parties my brother would take me to
in various basements around Pelham, New York.
My mother called it skating around the edges.

I think I grew up this year. Does saying that negate it?

Do you have to let go of everything to grow up?
How about just most of it?

                      A group of boys gathered around me in the woods.

                                                                 Let me light that for you.
                          It seemed normal at first, and then the questions.
                                                           Is that too big? Does it hurt?
                                                                   I didn’t understand why
                                 they were talking about my cigarette like that
                                   until I looked up at the boy who’d fucked me
                    while I cried the night before and saw him laughing.

 His friends had formed a circle around me. They were quoting me.
 It hurts, I had said to him. And the next day, they all said it back.

         My greatest fantasy has been the same thing for seven years.

If I could have any one thing
it would be the chance to go back
just this once to kill them.

This is not the hill I want to die on, but I am willing to.

When I realized the statue of liberty was walking
my whole life literally came into focus.
Do you know what that feels like?

When your face opens up on the sidewalk and you realize
you might die, but still you are not powerless? For instance,
maybe in the spot you die a poisonous mushroom could grow
and the man who killed you could eat that mushroom.

Never mind.
What matters is that I am
will be ready next time.

I am not skating around the edges anymore, et cetera.

I thought this poem might be funny. I forgot what My Life So Far has been.
But it has been funny. And if it wasn’t midnight I would tell you in what ways.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Yes,
you know about this natural phenomenon
and what it does to the heart.

Like candies and toys
in a glass cabinet at the arcade:
it breaks it.

The sun catches
inside four glass bulbs
in a long string of previously
unlightable lights.

My neighbor screams when she sees this.

It was once common to scream
when a lightbulb lit up,
but it’s pretty rare now,
so congratulations to her
on what is generally considered
an antiquated reaction to light.

I want one more week on earth, at least, I think.

But it’s no matter.

I know the great miracles
are the ones I don’t think to request.

And anyway how devastating
to get what we ask for—
a dolphin key chain,
more beautiful than an actual dolphin,
suddenly extracted, yours.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Something special
is that even though it took a little while
my parents really came around to me.

Can you tell me again about babies
and how they assess reality
by taking it into their mouths?

How nothing exists until they taste it?

Chessy Normile, from “Like Poem,” Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Crowded rock mountains/
clear wet rivers going white.

Lemuel points to beaver dams I can’t see.
But I trust him.
He is trying to help a small bug
fly out of our moving Saturn.

When I was born well who knows.

My favorite song plays.
It makes me cry.
May that it play forever.

I’m feeling the kind of happiness
you try to hold onto—
so lit and soft
it’s almost sadness.

Put Lonesome Crowded West on again.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

A lot of men in the books I read
are supposedly still alive.
I wonder if they’re still afraid.

Right now, in the school library,
holding my place in a book
on The Secret Art of Alchemy,
nobody’s raping me. Superb!

The book says if you achieved
THE TRIPLE CROWN OF ENLIGHTENMENT
then you were inducted into
THE BROTHERHOOD OF LIGHT,
which means you are still alive today.

Maybe you’re in this library with Ally and me.
Maybe you’re standing outside it. Either way,
you’re experiencing your crown. Do I hate you?

The most divine secrets
were never written down.

For instance, the Druids were,
I’m pretty sure, wizards,
and this alchemical stuff’s the same—
we used to keep what was precious private.

That’s how it ought to be:
that our secrets light us up,
that we spit the rest out.

____________
____________
____________

Soon!
Someday, so soon,
I will do it.

I’ll say your name out loud.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

I believe in believing.
It’s done well by me.

So when Death arrives in bedsheets
like a child in the yard I inhale,
perform a miracle where I turn
bread into toast, and seek to ready my soul.

Every last thing, everybody arrives and I have
three, seemingly revelatory thoughts:

               We think the heart is the mind
               and then we think the mind is the mind.

               Sometimes, in a sexy mood, I’ll say, destroy me.
               Mostly though, tbqh, I’ve been like, wait, no, don’t.

               We wait, ah, whether we know it
               or not, for a day like this: a last one.

Satisfied, the child floats towards me
in the narrowing and relative grass.
My vision pares down to a point.
It reminds me of something.

I remember that I am a goat. No, that’s not it—
it’s the toaster. I remember to unplug it from the wall.

Proud of myself, I lean through the door,
a motion I expect to feel silky & ethereal,
but which in fact translates to my tripping
over Nothing and tumbling out into the grass.

I look up at the ghost, in what is now
a vanishing thimble of sight.

She is pulling her sheet off in one long, fluid tug.
The yard turns to static before she is finished,
but I feel positive that,
                                  had I been able to see it,
                                  she would’ve had a face.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

I’m reading a book on consciousness
that tells me I have never seen a tree
when August calls to tell me
there’s a supermoon outside.

I leave the library to find it,
but the buildings are tall and surround me
and I’m not even 5′8″, I just tell people that.

This is frustrating
until two girls
run towards each other,
each yelling
the other’s name
‘til they collide.

Oh, there it is: full and yellow
against the waterblue sky,
light in the way
the sky sometimes gets at night,
with dark, misty clouds
floating past and around it.

I love the moon and I love girls,
but my book would say
I’ve never seen the moon and
I’ve never seen a girl,

I have only seen this planet’s moon
and these two girls and in my mind
have formed their concept.

The book says language
asks us to understand
the concept as the thing itself,

that the pear tree I steal from
on my walk to church becomes
one part of my belief in trees.

I ride the bus home and pass Le Rouge, as always,
a lingerie and costumes store on the side of the highway
that I can’t for the life of me figure out how to enter.

J says the moon is always
the same size in the sky,
that you can measure it with your finger.

It just appears closer or farther away from
the things we’ve built and believe in.

You live in “New York,”
which feels far away
because I live in “Texas”
in a low, yellow duplex
with a torn, purple hammock.

It seems there is some secret to unlock
in the language of our distance
that could transport me directly to you…

If I could look ahead of me
and not call this space
would it collapse?

When I get off the bus
the sun is setting.

I can’t believe I’ve never seen a sunset. 

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

“doobiedoobiedoo”
would be a nice thing
to hear someone
with a cool voice
say right now.
Maybe a bug
with a tiny microphone.

Last night I thought the moth on my carpet
was dead, but I investigated the scene gently
and found out the moth was alive, which was
great. I got to carry her outside on my finger
and feel like “hey look you’re helping!”

We stood on the back porch
not wanting to climb off. It felt
like our blood was merging.

I am a gentle girl, mostly.

Can people change? Like,
“I’ll stop now”? I think yes

because an example is I stopped
being afraid of white eastern european men
who are over 6 feet tall b/c I knew it was just b/c
one white eastern european man who was over
6 feet tall happened to beat me up one night

and it gave me
sort of a stupid
animal reaction
for a while,
but like I said

I worked through it and it’s
totally chill now I’m past it.

There is a moth on my bed.

Hello, there.

Very familiar and
suddenly obviously
alive.

It feels good to watch
her fly around—land
there, land next to me.

Even if she lands on my face,
I’m cool with it. I accept.

I am a column of loving you.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

We don’t get a lot of opportunities to give men feedback.
Personally, I hated being raped.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

I’m fine, things are fine. You know how space
can crack into three, like the light inside
your eyelids? Yeah, me too, I know about it.
Today, though, the dark searches me like a wound.

I am here in the window, I’m lifting my foot,
beneath me is soil and above that white wood.
Last night at O’Connell’s I split into two,
the room was a river I had to swim through.

Be here. Right now. Be here.

I found ten things to show you:
a blue bird pulsing in his skin,
a wet car in the rain combed over by the wind,
my body like a stone dropped deep into my sheets,
the roses grown inside of walls, how the wild patternless repeats.

If you were here, I’d name them for you—rock and self and cliff—
but when I see you, I’ll pretend I didn’t carry you through this.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Understand
a column of silvering
light for what it is:

the moon selecting
one animal for you to notice.

Chessy Normile, from “Mortal,” Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Marie says it’s shattering to be recognized.

For what you want
to reach back towards you,
say,I see you.

Maybe this is why
I’m crying all the time again—
in the chip aisle at the grocery store,
at my beige, wipeable desk,
in bed, six AM, suddenly awake
like a big leaf
flipped over in the wind.

My eyes are turned
to liquid and suspended—
not pouring out the sockets,
just warbling on the edge of themselves,
like screen savers.

Blue, white, silver, pink, black.
To name five of the colors involved.

I turn the volume up and watch
little gray parentheses ripple out
from the cartoon speaker icon.

                    )))))))))))))))))))))))

Oh g/d, oh g/d, oh g/d

I am 1,000 times more shattered
than I have ever been before
barring like ten other times.

I feel invisible. Or no,
what I mean is
I can’t see me.

But you can
if you want to.

Just stand across the street.

I figured that out last night
walking home from church.

My bedroom lights were on
and in the window there stood Sam,
swaying in his small, white underwear.

He was smoking a joint and
changing the radio station.

He had a baseball cap on.
It was deeply moving.

So there it is, I whispered.

Matt Cook has a poem about death
where he says it’s like seeing
your own home from across the street.

Was this the reverse of that?
Or that?

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

I misunderstood what kind of boat party we’d been invited to.

You were screaming in your sleep beside me,
thrashing like a dead shark
held in the arms of a living man.

You were both the shark and the man, which impressed me.
My dreams don’t scare me like that anymore.

Sweating, you woke
and walked swiftly off the deck.

Time passed until, over salmon,
I got to congratulate us
on our perceived humanity.

Agreeing heartily, you poured
champagne into a flute and I was like,
He just ruined that flute.

You proceeded to play the most terrible music.

Love hath made me stupid.

I should’ve thought,
This guy is a terrible musician, shut it down,
but instead I became
a shallow bowl of strawberry milk
riding a fictional boat through a very real storm.

Anyway, after the terrible concert and the great sex it was morning
and in the kitchen you noticed a paper bag folded in on itself,
a spoon cracked with white yogurt lying on top.

Because of my knack for espionage
what you didn’t notice was me,
seated in the corner like a chair.

I watched you find the spoon,
break it apart from the table,
and lift it up to the light.

You stood still, gentle as a rock
sinking to the bottom of a lake, and I thought,
When we die, may that someone lift us purposefully as that.
May they consider us a little then decide
we are suited to our death before they let us go.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)