Simone Beaubien
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Simone Beaubien makes her home in suburban Massachusetts, working as an EMT and volunteering for the local ultimate disc league. Lifetime nerd and part-time athlete, she is proud to co-host the open mic and slam every Wednesday night at the world-famous Cantab Lounge in Boston.
Simone's poetry runs the gamut from sonnets to slam, including themes from feminism to the laws of physics (sometimes in the same poem). She was lucky enough to compete at the 2001, 2004, and 2005 National Poetry Slams as a member of the Boston/Cantab Slam Team, and received the 2002 Best Performance Poet (female) award from the Boston Poetry Awards. Currently, she is a member of Dr. Brown's Traveling Poetry Show.
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Poets in Love
They meet in a bookstore. She drops Sappho
on his foot. He feels obliged to purchase it
and so they pass stanzas back and forth over
coffee for the rest of the afternoon.
They don't quite have the hang of talking
and so they send letters.
In his first he encloses something from e.e. cummings.
She retorts with Amy Lowell
and so they court:
each appropriation more meaningful
than the last.
Finally, he sends her Shakespeare and she doesn't respond.
Fearful that he's moved too fast, he retreats to the safety of Basho
but when she replies flirtatiously with Ono No Komanchi
he understands her needs,
encloses Issa in his next reply.
He uses William Carlos Williams to ask her to move in.
They have a lot of bookshelves.
They have breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins every day.
The grocery list is in Bukowski's handwriting
and life falls open to a comfortable page each morning,
closes into soft, dog-eared security when night falls.
One day at work the man has a meeting
and is going to be late for dinner.
He gleans anthologies for an excuse
but poets only seem to have affairs
or funerals. In a pinch he settles for
John Donne and when he opens the door
hours after dinnertime, she looks up
from the kitchen table, eyes wet, and hurls
Erica Jong at him, pages flapping.
He ducks,
runs to the study in search of something
to put the situation right;
desperate for a writer who's done something wrong
and is sorry for it,
a hit poet guilty of incidental miscommunication
and she stands in the doorway
infuriated, confused, betrayed
a doused muse, fists full of Plath--
and that's when the wind comes up
and knocks the power out.
O, lucky lovers.
The only book he can identify by touch
is the dictionary.
The thesaurus is next to it
but he doesn't know the page number for "sorry,"
hasn't memorized the a of synonyms for his love,
and in the lightless room he has no choice
but to take her in his arms,
fold her under his elbows
into creases the two of them never knew they had,
the Braille of two readers
who never before had to run their fingers across the lines of a page,
never let their mouths move around the printed word
for fear of their own sound.
Finally, they realize it's too dark
to read, and so they just hold each other,
empty lips pressing kisses to the night
as the white moon rises in a black sky.
Simone Beaubien November, 2001
Extended Metaphor, or, Eventually
I got a jigsaw puzzle for my birthday this year.
It's the world's most difficult jigsaw puzzle:
the puzzle is abstract
and printed on both sides
and every piece fits.
I put it on the table by the door.
In my spare moments--
between taking off my shoes
and putting down my keys
or putting on my coat
and turning out the light--
I've been trying to put it together.
Oh, I haven't opened the box.
I just pick it up and shake it a little.
Eventually, statistically speaking,
the pieces will randomly migrate
into the correct configuration,
given infinite time.
Granted: I don't actually have infinite time,
but there's the reason
I never opened the box
in the first place.
I've taken to writing the same way:
I leave the computer on all the time now,
and when I walk by it, or think of it,
I just go over and hit a few keys.
Eventually, some words come out
that I can fit together, do something with.
It's not Shakespeare--
I don't have a hundred monkeys--
but it's something
and it's easier than doing things the real way:
sitting down and systematically trying every likely word,
looking for one that fits.
That never seems to work;
I get so close, almost line things up
and then everything pushes away
like repelling poles of magnets
or like the errant breeze
that snatches a sheet just before it settles onto the mattress.
Or like that awful scientific fable
about the electrons: how matter never actually touches,
how everything just slides along everything else
on a thin blanket of negative charge.
That kind of science makes me want to drop eggs
all over the kitchen floor.
Some people will tell you
that you can clean that up with chemistry:
cover a raw egg with salt, wait ten minutes,
and you can sweep it up like so much dust.
I prefer to fight gravity with semantics.
"Mess? What mess?
There are no eggs on the floor. Only a fool
would think so."
--Keep saying things like that and eventually
you'll end up like me:
waking up in the middle of the night, hovering
above carpet and comforter
below ceiling fan
an uncurled yolk
in an unseen shell.
I understand
that when you put your arms around me
you are trying to make me feel
less lonely.
