Editor’s note: This week in Poetry Corner, GT features the work of Nin Andrews. Her poems and stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2003), and Great American Prose Poems. She is the author of several books including “The Book of Orgasms,” “Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane,” and “Sleeping with Houdini,” just out with BOA Editions.  HER WORD Poet Nin Andrews and friend ponder the deeper message found in all relationships. Like ThisWhen I was a girl, my father said, every twenty minutes we vanish, go silent, join the dead and our dreams. If you could time it, and knew when to start the clock, you’d see them, too, lingering there between one thought and the next. Some steal a breath of your air or give you a pinch. Others walk right through you on whim. A sudden chill, a shudder, it’s the natural response. Try to stop them if you can, repress or pretend. Say no one’s here. You’re all alone in the evening air. It makes no difference to them. They know where they’ve been. And how much they like it, touching you like this, traveling through you again and again. CrossingSuppose the dead can’t help looking back, pressing their wings against the glass like giant moths as if they don’t get it, that the flesh is a cell, the light a 50 watt bulb. Maybe this dim life of regret is heaven after all. Like seeing you again at dusk, or imagining I do, there in the shadows of pines leaning through my windows, your arms waving in a frantic dance. When you kissed me, my back arcing like a bow, I remembered thinking the last kiss is always the best. I read that in a book about Tibetan monks who were paid to practice dying, to come back with news. After a while death became as familiar as a shirt slipped on or off. A kind of love affair, the monks discovered, an unspeakable intimacy. Some monks discovered a death that is just the right size, an ocean designed for the palms of their hands, each thimble-sized wave preparing for flight. Occasionally, one got stuck on the other side. Unable to touch the living or leave for good, he would call for help again and again, flailing his arms like the drowning, inhaling the ache in the distance between heaven and earth. I know how he felt, his silent cries, hot pebbles in the back of his throat. Male LogicI finally had to face the facts. Men believe in logic. Control. Only a man would tell me, as you often did, “It’s the thought that counts.” Not my body or the pink dress I am wearing or the day of the week or the words of my dreaming pussy, the ones, I am so sorry to say, you never heard. But they are all the same, Love. What I think is in my body and clothes and words. No matter how often I told you this, you never understood. One day, I gave up and said, “Listen, Honey, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m just having a bad day.” That’s when you gave me that tape entitled, Reason Your Way To Bliss. I tried to listen to it. Honestly, I did. But I stopped, every time, at the point where the speaker (a man, of course) was saying: If you take a rock and examine it beneath a microscope, it is no different from a human beneath a microscope. Everything is just atoms and molecules. But can a rock have a bad day? Can a bad day be seen beneath a microscope? Of course not. If a rock is smart enough not to have a bad day, then how could you be having a bad day? I had to turn off the tape. This, Love, is male logic at its best.
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