WARDROBE BEST DRESSED: NATALIE SHAPERO’S “INVOCATION: THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION OF THEM THAT HATE ME”

Invocation: The Third and Fourth Generation of Them That Hate Me

 

All you need for a piano is a tree

and an elephant. I sit up sick and humming

K381, which means I am like Mozart,

having heard the music once and now

it is in me. Mozart had his harpsichord,

I have my ugly mouth. I whistle

at my plants to make them smarter.

I learn from them that Sistine

is the adjective of Sixtus. I learn from them

that Mozart was atrociously behaved,

and the pope was always angry, and the devil

was always angry, and you can’t make

something flower using force, and the sins

you undertake alone will only turn you coarse.

How difficult to be a rare animal,

the pressure to stay alive. Even colors find

themselves in danger, blue eyes

that should have died out by now,

spare in their occurrence to begin with

but passed on against the odds. This can only

mean it’s common to seek a blue-eyed lover.

Yes, I too have done it. I am, as the Icarus

unveiled at the wax museum, highly

lifelike. I highly like life, though in a faraway

and pent-up manner, in the way of the assassin

pining for the actress. His common

letters I have sat up reading, mouthing out

the worst of them as though

in peaceable worship of a genius teen oh DON’T

YOU MAYBE LIKE ME A LITTLE BIT? YOU MUST 

ADMIT IT I AM DIFFERENT.

 

“Invocation: The Third and Fourth Generation of Them That Hate Me” appeared in Natalie Shapero’s book, No Object, available from Saturnalia Books. Purchase your copy today!

 

Natalie Shapero is the author of No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), and her poems have appeared recently in The Awl, Copper Nickel, Pinwheel, TYPO, and elsewhere. She lives in Gambier, OH, where she is a Kenyon Review Fellow. 

 

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Lyric Dunagan. Dunagan is the Development Assistant at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and a graduate of the University of Tennessee. She was awarded the Bain Swiggett Poetry Prize in 2013, and has been published in The Volta’s Evening Will Come. She is currently waiting to hear back from various MFA programs and hopes to begin graduate school in Fall 2014.