Oedipa Strips Away

A Chapbook by C. Derick Varn

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The Scarred Feet Say It All
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The regulars never notice
Oedipa’s feet. Tissue eruptions
mark her ankles like ley lines.
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Each time she touches
the scars, she remembers
father’s barbed wire
left in the tall grass, the
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whites of her doctor’s eyes
as she cried for her father
who did not answer. When
a lover touches her
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toes, she always whimpers.
She doesn’t know if it is
pain or its lack.
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The Edge of Waycross
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Oedipa sleeps through Easter
after her Papa died. She would
have slept through the lilacs
blooming if it would have
mattered. The sands
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shift into spring. Tuesday
she awakes to mix his
ashes into the banks
around the Satilla. Sugar
egg wrappers bob
in the current. It’s easy
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for a man to say God
is good, she thinks.
A kingfisher flashes
over the water, brings
her eyes into focus.
The ash sieves
into Georgia spring.
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Fear of Music
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The LP warps with sound. Oedipa
watches vinyl spin Talking
Heads over shag carpet.
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This Ani’t No Disco resonates
from her father’s speakers. Lonely,
how these things work: her
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father’s Mohawk scalped
by time, his denim moth-eaten,
his LP’s sun-faded like
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overexposed photographs.
The Polaroids burning with
absence, the guitars
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warble in her ears. Memories
Can’t Wait croons David Byrne,
but he lacks her DNA of desire.
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The notes repeat. The vocals cool
super-heated memories: the music
of calloused hands that never
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picked her up to watch the Sex
Pistols at CBGB’s or even took her
to Waycross to pick tobacco
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with her ailing grandfather.
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Sudden Motion
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As if God is always looking
tall-boy to throw back
down the gullet
to the center of creation.

Nothing could be
so boring, Oed
decides touring
is akin to running
akin to the sad
anthropology
of a cosmic
joke at which
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she forget to laugh.
Collections of lovers
like silt and detritus,
shame like the dross
of dreams, a history
of bird watching:
cormorants and pelicans
awkwardly squawking
amongst fish carrion
and careless condom
wrappers on the sand.
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It is time to leave: To
reconstruct the South
along the ley lines
of old Punk albums.
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Crossing The Line at St. Mary’s
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Oed kisses her boyfriend
to the sound of cicadas
and Duran Duran. The bangle
bracelets rattle like oracle
bones, mapping
out the future.
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Her hair dyed pink and cropped
like a Marine, she thinks
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of the town without
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a theatre, the clinging grit
of tobacco leaves, the land
which seems to stretch out
beyond the piedmont.
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As their tongues touch,
she sighs and then bites
down on his lips until
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he bleeds. Since it is
the end of the decade,
a goodbye to Reagan,
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to share croppers, to
nighttime soap operas,
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 she relishes his sweet
salt for that one second
before he pulls away, and
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for a moment, she relishes
how he breaks his pose,
she relishes
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his squirm.
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Where the Naughty Children Go
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Now that all the clocks
have melted, the minute
hands slouch toward
elongated sevens,
the faces twists
into a white satin dress
with laughter
as Oed’s feet slip
across an auditorium floor.
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Of course, there
is giggling, tension.
A wire coiled.
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Oed slips Cindy a book,
instead of tongue,
about that hell-hound
love told in poems
by an old drunk.
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Oedipa’s Fourth Week on Stage
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A symmetry of blue tiles swim
around a single woman, breasts hung
like egg yolks. Oedipa is bored
and counts the squares as she gyrates.
Past stale beer, a bear in Oed
waits to catch each flash of blue
wriggling upstream.
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Her world; fixed and regular like
a customer’s fresh drool. After
the light’s fade, after the liquor
license is lost, after she is bones and
Joey the bouncer is bones, squares
will swim in symmetry, extending
to the sunset. These small regularities,
Oedipa thinks, retain this world.
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Waking Up Naked in a Foreign Town

So please don’t go jack-jawed,

Oed’s frame forgetting,
hair slithering around skeletal
collarbones bent like handlebars
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Oed’s frame forgetting
how to bounce down the stairs,
collarbone bent like handlebars
warped like ladder left in rain.
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How to bounce down the stairs
just like a thrust on a bed, body
warped like a ladder left in rain.
Breathe, there is no reason for sighing
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Just like a thrust on a bed, body
hair slithering around skeletal
breath, there is no reason for sighing
so please don’t go jack-jawed.

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Sleeping Alone
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Oedipa sticks to cotton at two
in the morning. She forgets who
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was supposed to be nuzzled next
to her. Perhaps Cindy with the pink
mohawk and a meth habit that
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keeps her waist so very small.
Or Patience, who is only curious
and sick of men who smell
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of three-day-old beer. Or
Karla with twenty tattoos,
the smell of garlic, and a worn
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rosary that she palms after
every private dance. Tomorrow,
Oedipa will go home,
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admit to her roommate
the whole failure. No luck
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last night, she’ll say about this
concubinage to the lean,
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sane tyrant of herself. She’ll
leave for work mid-evening
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and manage to say goodbye
to the stale air of the second
floor hotel room. She’ll ride
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home in her cherry pick-up,
shirt unbuttoned
so the air can kiss her.
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Oedipa Ponders Trees After Three Beers
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On the old pine she notices
bark graying from beetles and rot.
The trunk’s curve still brown, sagging
with blight. The air sticks
to the back of her throat. Oedipa sees
the shadows flirt with the branches,
the fence slats promiscuously eying
the grass beneath. Oedipa is
a voyeur, at best.
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But why does nature always
equate to fucking, she wonders,
as if sex and war are the only
metaphors. For a moment, she smiles.
A grasshopper crawls
 near her feet. Oedipa flips her
bottle cap, watches where it dive
bombs the dirt, all flash and
glint against the evening light.
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Apples and Cigarettes
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Cindy takes a long drag, blows smoke O’s
out of her mouth. Oedipa knows this ritual,
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drinking bourbon on the porch. Soon Cindy
mumbles about The Velvet Underground and
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how she wishes she was Andy Warhol,
a white-haired, soup man of a woman. Says
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Warhol never used his dick anyway. Oed
takes a pocket knife, cuts a Granny Smith
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down the core. Takes a bite and
 swallows even the seeds. Cindy don’t
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be a cunt, she says. Oed feels the heat prick
her face, her slicked arm, for a moment
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she’s exposed, a hermit crab in the salt
marshes at low tide. But the Apple
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brings her back. Cindy stubs her
cigarette. Oedipa stares at clouds,
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takes another bite.
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Oedipa Ponders a Distant Drum Beat After the Bar Empties
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After the 9:00 show, Oedipa flips
beer-soaked cash in front of a fan.
The hum raises hairs on her back.
Her foot taps. A snare
drum rolls like a snake’s rattle.
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Oedipa does not bother to pull
on fresh panties. Left exposed
and hutched, she imagines
national guardsmen marching
through the dressing room
like specters under the fluorescent
bulbs. The beat slowly turns
into a mushroom cloud. Oedipa
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stands back, rushes
to the sink, swigs tap water.
The way life surges
and undoes each muscle
as easily as taking off a bra,
leaves men gasping, then
nothing.
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Castillo de San Marcos, August 1994
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Oedipa breathes the brine,
runs her hands across
the old, bleached
bricks that guard
St. Augustine
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from the ocean.
The gravel
scratches
her hands,
the dirt in her skin
has a grit she doesn’t
wish to name. Oedipa
sees the cannon
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in this old Saint’s
city. In the midday heat
of the off-season, all’s
quiet despite the
implied blast. The
tide laps at the shore.
She shuts her
eyes and imagines
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God’s eyes closed
like a drunken lover
sleeping at the bar
who doesn’t hear last call,
who doesn’t answer
when the beloved’s
hands try to rouse
him, who is,
above all things,
quiet.
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Another Weapon in Venus’s Armory
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Oedipa knows
love like blood
carries disease
hides in the DNA
masquerading between
two amino acids:
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it tricks her
like the heat
of a sweaty
tumble in a
sterile
Bed.
The wounds
allowed in
Venus has a
Trojan
Horse.
Love
laughs
at her latex
and her wounds.
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Unsaid
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Oedipa speaks for birds:
the unsaying wing flaps
like the Kung-fu masters
 she imagined her boyfriends
to be. Kicking the air
the way she could not
kick off her father
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Oed clips her wings
carefully
avoiding the Mind-Body
gap, and hopes
that the fate
of flightless
birds lingers
mercifully little.
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Rites
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Kneeling at the altar
after the communion
wine settles on her
tongue as blood
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In nomine Patris
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she thinks of
the man in her bed
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et Filii
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and the absence
of rosary beads
from her apartment
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et Spiritus Sancti
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and she hasn’t
confessed to a priest,
to Cindy, or anyone
but God, just judge,
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Amen
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when all is said,
she knows she has
the right to remain
silent.
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Fear is Fashion
 Atlanta, 1999
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Girl in spiked heals with
spiked hair, tips dyed
red, she turns
herself in an
razor,
an angle
to cut through
the tangled
mass which
makes the maze
of Peachtree
streets. Oed notices,
a sneer pointed
towards a cop,
a flash of
teeth at the flash
of blue, she almost
losses her step,
facing forward,
almost losing
face, losing the
rebellion of surface,
breaking the razor
coated in honey.
Her pulse quickens
as she rushes
across the sidewalk.
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New Orleans in August
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Oedipa knows this city: the Mississippi mists
over the gutter trash, dampening each paper cup.
This is the sex of the world, Oed thinks,
wet and tossed aside like a cigarette butt. The lights
glare across the windshield. Bourbon street trolls
by and the street mimes blur past Oedipa’s eyes.
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She knows the heat kills, even in this cab. She
knows how the streets flood, how the Mississippi
is pumped out into the ocean. The streets here
are impossibly narrow. A bus cruises by and
buildings shake. Oedipa knows
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this city: an orgasm pulsing that leaves
plastic beads and side-tossed people.
Oedipa knows this city the same way
she would recognize her own skeleton.
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Going to the Desert, Becoming the Sands
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After evening mass, but before Oedipa swaggers
back on stage, before she is another drunkard’s
prayer, before her body swings a litany punctuated
by two-dollar shots, Oedipa wants to turn herself into
the Atacama desert—her skin flaking into sand, her mouth
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tanning away its moisture, her eyes becoming cold
as waterless skies. With Te Deums ringing in her
chest, she longs to house the desert fathers
and have her sun burn holiness to their flesh. But
for the grace of God, she’s left arid and smiling.
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Hymn
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Eye Pennies on the river’s edge—
Unpaid fair glazed with ibuprofen
and paramorphine. The hours dripping
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into a basin at the bottom of the bed. Ever
notice the swill of the overhead fan?
Who is she, now? Half-forgotten pain
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hardens on the tongue and in the thigh.
Oed wishes she were hanging beneath trees
but even in a dream, the river flows
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sterile. The dirt seeps septic and sky
phosphoresces. If you meet the free
wheeling Mr. Death, please give him
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her wishes. She hitchhiked here.
When Oed awakes in the hospital,
whiffs of hydrogen peroxide
are what is left to remind her.
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Oedipa On the Snow banks
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The crystalline crunch of Western
Pennsylvania, the mouth is null:
White. On White. On White.
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Oedipa, bundled in goose down,
Covered. And covered Again.
Out of her element without
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the repository of skin. The
sunlight blinds here. Deeper
than sunlight too. Each flake
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a convex mirror,
the frosted black gum
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tree crusting over. Oedipa
does not know what to
think. She knows, however,
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that this much light,
can only calcify and
blind. Make Pupils
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White. On White. On White.
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There is No Such Thing
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The water drips into the yard--
a vapor into the mess
of time and green, and then
pools around a Ziploc bag.

The plastic seems eternal--

if dirt digs itself around it
the polymers may last
till starburst, and now
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Oed realizes that even
this is a myth: not
alone and not idle,
but plastic will break
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down as stars will
collapse into pulsating
density and even that
will burn slow and
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ever-widening, and out.
Oed placed hope on plastic
like ants place hope on a
rat’s carcass, like
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the water’s spectrum
reflecting back: No, there
is no such thing, only
the constant slipping
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into something dimmer.
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Similes Against Sex
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Like the flutter of birds against fir needles
when a tiger mauls a hunter against a backdrop
of monochrome snow: Like the wheels of a bicycle
spinning, spinning while the rider cannot stop
without plowing deep into the pavement: Like
an orchid blooming on demand, out of sync
with its season, petals half-wilted: Like night’s
heavy winds that rip down branches and pull kinks
out of matted hair: Like the hoarse moans of Coeds
fucking so hard the stereo cannot muffle each
breath: Like a picked over crab left dead
and covered in high-tide sand as the beach
recedes into the Ocean: Like cauliflower
molded: Like touching ice: Like waiting hours.
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Warm Wine
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In a television’s
static ambience, Shiraz
stains the table for two hours.
Outside the starlight just reached
Oed that left before her birth,
some before birthing of her
ball of dust and hydrocarbons.
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Wine in Oed’s belly, the greatest
declaration Oed has to make:
warming cosmic dust.
The red swirls, galaxy-style.
Oed’s notice the book pages yellow
and wonder if naval gazing
is just star gazing writ miniature.
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Hallelujah, Anyway
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Oedipa can’t turn away, the aphids red glare
on the roses stems and red ants trailing scurrying
for the honey dew. Oedipa can’t turn away
as gasoline fire creeps to the blooms.
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Oedipa sighs as the exoskeletons pop and
spread across her field of vision. A fireman’s
hands pull her back from the burning bush
and the crackling thoraces, Oedipa’s steps
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stutter from the smell. The exodus of
each tiny life mutes her tongue
while she wishes to say a prayer for
the driver of the pick-up, who
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no longer moves as gloved hands
pull him out of the driver’s seat. Oedipa
does not understand one man’s muttered words:
aleynu v'al kohl yisrael v'eemru. Amein.
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Kindled
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Now, a cottonwood leaf in Oed’s
pale hands, the wind collects
and deposits it in the burning
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brush deep in a ditch
on the edge of the yard.
Her grandfather perched
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in a bomber over Dresden
from a ball turret, he eyed
similar embers. The dross
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before that: this parched ground
knew the smell of oak fire
and rife smoke. Sherman’s men
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marched, boots thick with cracked
brown earth. Kindling sparks
rise in this time as in any other.
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In some future, there may be
blue flames gulping the Potomac
in the inward sulfurous tide.
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Ducklings will hide on
the capital mall to avoid ash.
But now she burns the leaves
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and listens to reports from Kabul
from a television in the illegitimized
backdrop from her living room.
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cherry blossom branches sway
in the black veined wind.
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Oedipa Returns Savannah
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She, like a broken horse not yet
met with a shotgun slug, drags
her legs through the sand off
Tybee, and let’s the water
clean between her toes.

The body betrays

each tiresome sore
of a country well-traveled,
galloped-upon, and now
washed-over. She pondered
rolling out with the waves,
but decided each sore movement
was worth the quiet, lapping water.
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