The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil

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Love Song with Contradictions

Side A

What were you listening to, Great-gramma
down at the lake, that Saturday nite
when you felt you couldn’t breathe? Not those lo-
riders waxed and raring, but the way souped-up
carburetors suck oxygen to drag
along the strip, your gulping breaths, gurgling,
ineffective. The ambulance fetched you.
In the hospital, they lopped off your thick braids
(to think you never grayed!) “for convenience” or
“to ease sweating.” Gramma brought them home,
kept them in a candle box next to her bed.
Each night she’d slide back the lid and touch them.
The surprise of it—oh! sorting the clutter,
              after the house sold, ma found them under the sink
next to the Brillo pads. It was unexpected—
not the way as a girl, when I first touched
myself, thought I’ll die from this, more like
a child wandering aisles of jarred foods who
looks up and can’t spot her mother, howls a siren
of rage. Love is not a boat moored on a lake
that bobs on waves, more like a house, it’s foundation
drilled into bedrock, that in an earthquake
still shakes. Can you explain this inheritance? Gramma
knotted to her bed so she won’t “sustain
a fracture.” O to be found but never claimed!—
picking bright pink cherries not for glitz but
for sweetness. Pay attention, ma said. Keep up.

Side B
with two italicized lines from Bernadette Mayer

On the avenues, white exhaust tinges blue;
a pigeon nearly gets me, perched over the red church door.

For lunch I pack a ham & turkey sandwich;
I want to hose the city down with bleach.

Mostly images don’t form patterns;
or they do—it’s my mind

arranging them, giving an impression
of continuity, not unlike the man with a serpentine walk

I’ve avoided all my life looking down at my shoes.
When I say “the man” I don’t mean my father.

Of course, I’m told we walk alike;
from behind we have the same stooped cadence,

arches collapsed, soles worn on a slant.
Is that him I just passed?

I don’t like cooking dinner;
I get bored listening to my husband’s yakety yak.

“I have to send my meeting notes in the morning,” he says;
I stir-fry the tofu/get distracted

by the inner turmoil of paying rent
& what it means to be a good person.

              In another place or through window tint
              it appears to be raining on asphalt.

Storm pipes branch beneath swarming feet;
we weave around each other like flamingos

on takeoff or just before dancing, each of us
moving in unison, a dot on the GPS.

Little Dot, move left;
Little Dot, don’t move, just blink in vertical space

going up the office escalator, toting coffee in a paper cup;
Little Dot plugged with earbuds.

Riding backwards on trains we’re time-lapsed;
or we flicker like flamingos

mating in the infrared;
each orange splotch with a yellow heart pulsing

at once above/below;
It’s easier for love to have a million neighbors

seems a breezy thing to say, appropriate
not slutty, our mouths’ sucking frenzy;

yet like zebra fish we zag in blue swaths,
flashing eyes, lacing fins, in fact

yes, I’m avoiding the text
just in from my landlord asking WHERE IS THE RENT

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

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