Bridget Iverson

Silver Chain (song)

By Bridget Iverson
Mount Mansfield Union High School, Grade 10

He gave her a necklace of stainless steel
coated with silver so that it looked real.
She bit back frustration expertly masked
and said she’d lost it the next time he asked.

She’s used to reading her lines from a page
and she’s convinced that all life is a stage.
It doesn’t matter what the actors know,
just that the audience enjoys the show.

She’ll keep on going until it’s too late
and like her mother she’ll blame it on fate.
One day the chain of the necklace will break.
The crowd will find out the whole act is fake.

He thinks she’s simple but fun to deceive
because she can’t tell what not to believe.
He gets his joy from messing with her head
and trying to lure her best friend into bed.

She’ll keep on going until it’s too late
and like her mother she’ll blame it on fate.
One day the chain of the necklace will break.

Do not mind the soldiers of the night.
You cannot hear their taps upon your door.
Watch instead their brides in lacy white,
drifting till they land and drift no more.

You cannot hear their taps upon your door;
tiny feath'ry bodies make no sound.
Drifting till they land and drift no more,
icy soldiers blanket the wet ground.

Tiny feath'ry bodies make no sound.
You cannot hear what you choose to ignore.
Icy soldiers blanket the wet ground,
mourning young men fallen in the war.

You cannot hear what you choose to ignore.
Watch instead their brides in lacy white,
mourning young men fallen in the war.
Do not mind the soldiers of the night.

Do not fear the voices in the night.
----They speak only to me.
And do not ask why I cannot get older,
----why my beard can’t lengthen and turn gray
as you shoot up; six, seven, eight years old now.
----I watch you sprint across the starry fields,
plucking flowers black beneath the sky.
----I know your books tell of colors bright,
of yellow suns and flowers softest pink
----instead of midnight dark as shadows here.
But you know better than to believe fairy tales.

Do not fear the bloodstains on the mantle.
----The dead cannot hurt you. Not anymore.
And do not ask their shady origin.
----I will tell you when you’re older, twenty, twenty-one
with gentle curls framing your pale face,
----your probing eyes. You’ll look just like
your mother, yes, that milky skin, those perfect curves,
----her belly swelling with my child, you…
you have the same name, did I tell you? Rose.
----I picked it out myself, both times,

i.
I used to dream of sailing a floating library
down the river, down to Lake Champlain.
I’d live among the books, lay beside the stacks
and frame the perfect stars in skyscrapers of pages

and maybe, if I climbed all the way
up one of the ladders with wheels at the base —

I could touch the sky, breathe in blue,
discover finally exactly how clouds taste: —

like sugar, I was certain: cotton candy spun
from sunlight, wound around the vapor-trails
of planes. Never mind they’re just water.

Clouds taste like dreams.

ii.
I lost myself in books. Hours spent
stretched out flat on my rust-red carpet,
bookmark in my mouth, eyes intent
on the times new roman exploits
of Charlie and his chocolate factory,
Ella and her curse, Howl’s castle

while the gray Vermont rain
streaked the window, trying to get in.

I kept my window closed.
Reality was not allowed
in this ink-scented paradise
of not here.

iii.
But characters in books cannot talk.

History class, for Merc, was characterized by a low dull drone reminiscent of the final buzzes of a dying fly. It was the sound of chalk against the board, of the monotone of the teacher’s voice, of students softly snoring as they drifted deeper into a collective eraser-scented doze. The sun heated the classroom like a greenhouse. Merc stared blankly at the clock, eyes slipping closed.

Then the hands started spinning.

Fast. The minute hand sped over the numbers, dragging its partner along behind it as the second hand zipped in circles almost too fast to see, like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings—

And stopped dead.

Merc shot upright, looked around. The chalkboard was full, unintelligible white shorthand covering what had been blank black just a moment ago—

—an hour ago—

What the heck?

Merc snuck another glance at the clock. It was ticking along smugly as normal at about half the pace of her racing heart.

Tell me of a fire, whisper
a tale of blade-edged flames
climbing to the leaves of the soot-streaked trees
that groan, sigh as the wood-breath rushes out--
--------------------------------------------------------tell me
of the blazes twining with the branches burning,
fiery arms blackening the wood they caress
so tenderly, so eagerly--
--------------------------------hungrily--
--------------------------------mad passions burning--
Do you see the faces in the flames?
Lovers' hands on lovers' skin--
the heat in the touch, breathing in sync--
------------------------------fire streaming in the wind--
sparks igniting, coursing through
their blood, their limbs
twining--blazing in the night--flames leaping higher--

--------------------------------------smoke
curls upwards. Footsteps in the ash.

The flies are coming in, lazy heat-drunk specks
that zip around the classroom, dodging hands
aimed for their demise.
---------------------------The slowest smash
and the rest begin to cluster by the windows
tiny bodies pounding at the glass
-------------------------------------until they die:
little corpses littering the sill,
-------------------------------------wings poised to fly.

I'm one of them today. I lean against the glass
icy on my arm, against my cheek,
------------------------------------eyes drifting shut
beneath the stare of artificial light.
I want to break a window, smash it with my hands;
to run, scream harsh and cracked and raw,
to sprint along the grass until the wind bites at my throat
and I collapse
-------------------breathing hard and free.
Let me get outside, get away,
anywhere but here
-------where voices rise and pound against my skull
-------and throngs of people dodge across the halls,

I’m another person among people,
boys, girls,
cutting away old identities
like hair

until we’re
ghosts of who we no longer want to be
drifting through this poetry world,
brushing the edges of reality
with the spirit-ghosts of our
…friends?
in search of some connection between worlds.

Haunted,
we’re haunted, pursued
by the ghosts of past ghosts
and the ghosts who
aren’t ghosts anymore
but might as well be:
it’s history now;

haunted by the past
which wasn’t that long ago, no,
I’m only fifteen

but the girl I once was
flamed out, phoenix of the ashes:
she died, and now

she’s just another ghost
of what used to be.

Milkweed

By Bridget Iverson
Mount Mansfield Union High School, Grade 10

Tiny white-tuft feather-birds of fluff
drifting on nothing, skirts spread
light and wide, balancing on air —

So close —

My fists clench in frustration.

Some people’s minds are harsh,
steel-cold places lit bright
fake and shining shadowless
with secret thoughts confined
to cabinets locked tight:
Pandora’s box

and I am Pandora.

Others are soft and tangled-light
as yarn, as wool dyed vivid green,
purple, yellow-red and threaded through
with gold. My fingers trace
the wish-lines, gently spun
and tangled with each other, weaving
a fabric of a life, a pattern

only I can see.

But her —

her mind is delicate, tissue-thin
lacy, soft and cool-sweet
as mist, as fog, as clouds —

I probe deeper. Beneath the filmy white —

iron teeth and razor blades
sharpened hard, pounded in the forge,
sparks raining down, dragon’s breath —

Dust like sugar in my mouth, dry and sweet and rough. Seven o’clock. Half an hour to go, half an hour before my watch alarm goes off and summons me to the base of the ferris wheel to go home. Half an hour to myself.

Dust like sugar catching in my throat. I fumble with the wet-slick cap of a plastic water bottle, one-seventy-five from the man by the entrance shouting out his advertisements: “Hot day, hot afternoon, you look thirsty there. Water, lemonade, iiiiice-cold soda.” And underneath his words, hidden behind the bobbing fair balloons, a different voice. Buy from me, I’ve got a shitload of water bottles if you’d just buy.

I walk on.

She’d never been much good at running but now she ran, sprinting fast and hard until the frost-edged wind tore at her throat and lungs and she stopped, bent over and hacking and trying to find her breath. The sky was clear and derisively blue, fringed with the skeleton black arms of winter trees. She swore hoarsely

and his fingers twitched across the keyboard, a jangle of notes colliding and rolling over the edge of the polished table to flood across the floor, tangling with the threads of the carpet and the jagged edges of the mug he’d dropped that morning and never swept up

and she coughed hard and spat into the dead leaves at the base of the tree, gulping in air as sharp as icicles and trying to shake free from the image

of the long-haired boy bent over the plastic black-and-white keys, pounding out the melody that tumbled from the speakers on the floor

and swirled around her ankles in currents and eddies and surges of notes

Fire...

She loved watching the little flame, wavering, curious, peeking its orange head over the top of the clear purple-blue lighter, reflecting off the fingers that gave it life. She killed it quickly with the flick of her thumb, then brought it back a moment later, a phoenix, reincarnated...

She lit leaves, tiny twigs, isolated in shallow pits she scraped in the cool September dirt of the park. It was sandy soil that didn’t grow much but stiff-stemmed grass. Dried rivulets and gullies snaked across the field, steep-carved little canyons downhill. To a mouse, the tiny streams were giant lakes, slim rushing oceans. The girl’s small flames were bonfire signals that flashed against the night.

I.
I don’t remember when I retreated from the sun.
It was gradual, in increments, little incidents
drawing me further and faster into darkness.
I didn’t realize until the morning
I opened my mouth, words came out,
and nobody glanced toward me.

I hated this prison, this half-self-made cage.
I could see, I could smell, I could hear --
but I could not do.
I wouldn’t let myself. I’d be exposed.
People might see
what the mirror reflected so glaringly.
But what do mirrors show
but truth?
It’s our eyes that lie.

Once, when someone asked me
what animal I’d most like to be, I dropped my gaze
and said a maple tree, tall, thick-trunked,
steady branches spreading wide and up.
A tree is in the background; a tree
observes and whispers what it sees
and doesn’t care that no one looks its way.

II.
I leaned against the slick white bark
and listened for the footsteps of a no-longer-ghost.
It would be so easy, so fitting,

I’m caught in the moment and that’s not where I want to be, struggling with my own limited horizons and the traps of the trivial and immediate. History is in the past, it’s gone, we told my teacher. He couldn’t explain why we needed to know it. I write poetry through his classes now.

History is over, we said to him--to ourselves. History is a series of dates and wars and long periods of complicated economics in between. Why should we bother to learn it? Why focus on the past?

Because the past was once the present, and horrors do not diminish with age. The number of innocents slaughtered does not reduce as years pass. Death is the same anytime. It doesn’t change.

Worms have eaten the skin of the dead; bodies have been reduced to skeletons in the ground. Rows of headstones stretch into the distance. Lives to numbers. The present replaces them, and we forget.

For what good is remembering?

Geta

By Bridget Iverson
Mount Mansfield Union High School, Grade 9

The kimono-fabric straps press
cruelly into the tops of my
feet, but the wood is sanded smooth
to the point of
almost
soft.
The shoe is
wood
and fabric
and a little piece of metal on the
sole
that has no purpose except to
make a clicking noise
when I step.
The bottom is
pitted, pockmarked, marred
with the indents of
gravel
from when I wore these outside last summer.
They seem
disfigured, now;
scarred by the bite of
gravel teeth.
A tiny, complicated
geometric symbol
is carved
painstakingly
into the back of the
thick wood sole.
Am I the only one who notices
it's crooked?

She sings, sometimes,
when nobody's around
(but she secretly hopes somebody is
listening)
never in the shower
(she washes in the shower.
Why waste time
singing?)
but outside, when
the sun hits the birches
just right
to brush them with copper dust
and the whole world's taking a breath
to prepare for the
dim night.
She's been told she's
terribly off-key,
and she wishes she
didn't know
because maybe she could've thought her music was
beautiful,
not just the secret tunes of
a girl outside with the birches.

She slept, almost, her
face perfectly
chilled and chiseled in
the image of
cupid's elder sister, wiser
in the ways of the
world. Her lips were
black stone, but
between them whispered a
gauze of breath, swept
up over across the
rose-petal sidewalk.
She never really slept. She
dreamed her whole life
and her eyes only closed
to shut out the sight of
distractions from her
internal worlds. She ignored
the footsteps around and over
her body, basking in the
frosty sun and the snow,
stretched out like the cat
that watches her from
its window above. It
pauses in its scrutiny to
bathe a paw, and returns its
amber eyes to her
still figure below.

Fingerlengths of desperate blue
melt slowly in the snow
and the birch trees' strong skin shines
with ancient trapped sunglow.
The whole earth outside my room
is inking dark, it seems,
night flowing lightly through the woods
and bringing with it
dreams.

I painted you an image
in lipstick and lies

on glass I held before me
like a shield.

I should've known
you'd see through it.

And now it's lying shattered
in fragments on the floor

and when I try
to piece them back together

I just cut myself.

She walked through the sliding door,
sat down,
smoothed her skirt.
The cameraman
flicked the switch
to on.
She cleared her throat.

“Good evening.
This is Channel 65
and this hour’s news.

The prime minister of someplace unimportant
eloped with a gazelle this morning,
causing mass confusion
and general disarray.
His wife was unavailable for comment,
due to being dead.
A man in a blue shirt
walked up to a member of Britain’s Parliament
and stabbed him through the heart
with an unsharpened pencil.
The victim reports
slight bruising.
Later on, two chief negotiators
in the Middle East peace talks
engaged in an eyebrow-wiggling contest
that resulted in a new wave of rocket attacks
between Israel and Palestine.
Somebody important in India
disappeared for a full afternoon
and returned with several piercing,
dyed hair,
and a tattoo that says
‘this is just my day job.’
The president of somewhere
admitted to kidnapping Colonel Sanders,
and the reporter you are watching
is now telling you to f*** off.

Good night.”

The automatic door
slid shut behind her.

It was hot out. So hot the neighborhood's cats shed themselves bald, and Bernie's wife chased the panting pack off her porch with a broom, thinking they were rats. So hot Dave and the rest of his pagan book group performed a rain dance in the middle of the shimmering street and collapsed on the curb, breathing hard, until Mrs. Robson brought them all iced tea. So hot every child under twelve hunted in vain all afternoon for a fire hydrant to bust, and ended up rigging Old Man Woodard's lawn sprinklers so the jets arched towards the sidewalk instead of his vegetable garden. So hot Old Man Woodard didn't even care.

Softly did the desert's eye
slide gently into sleep.
Slowly did the clan chief's wife
slip from his vast bed, her life
clutched in her hands to keep.

Under slowly inking sky
stained darkly blackly blue,
she wipes sandy footprints clear
breathing fast with careful fear
and steps toward life anew.

Proudly, dusty, drifting high
sly moon betrays smug day,
casting his silver-washed glow
on the dusky road below
where footsteps lead away.

No more shall she meekly lie
beside her husband's door.
Once she was forced to obey.
Once tradition made her stay.
Now she's a slave no more.

Four Years

By Bridget Iverson
Mount Mansfield Union High School, Grade 9

It wasn't an end so much as
a moving on.

The plastic chairs in the gym used to fit her
in fifth grade but now
her knees stuck up too high

and the plastic surface
clung to the fabric of her skirt.

The principle congratulated the music award winners.
She stared at the foam balls caught in the ceiling fans
and heard years-old PE classes
echo in the applause around her.

She wasn't sad to leave.

In high school she could
maybe start better than she did
when she was ten,
better now that she had four more years
of life.

Four years of homework
and teachers
and purple-carpeted floors with
bits of crumbs the janitors never caught.
Four years of walking the halls
with friends, and sometimes
walking alone and wishing someone was with her.

Four years of possibilities
that were never quite possible
for her.

Four years of life.

Four years she was leaving
behind.

If I had a cat I'd name her Sheba
And her nickname would be Queen.
If my life was a movie
There's be music in every scene.
If I could see the night sky
I'd salute every falling star.
And if I could change the world
No things here would stay the way they are

It may seem
No one listens to you
But there's a dream
Everyone's entitled to--

And that's to change the world
Just a bit of the world
To change the world
Just your corner of the world.

Yes, to change the world
Just a bit of the world
To change the world
Just your corner of the world.

Not everyone says what they mean
Or what they mean isn't true.
But from how your life has been
Maybe it's true to you.
And maybe this means nothing,
Nothing to you today.
But maybe when you walk away
You'll remember what i have to say--

It may seem
No one listens to you
But there's a dream
Everyone's entitled to--

To change the world
Just a bit of the world
To change the world
Just your corner of the world

To change the world
Just a bit of the world
To change the world
Just your corner of the world
To change the world
Just your corner of the world
To change the world
Just your corner of the world...

I know what it looks like,
sounds like,
seems like.
I know how you think
it is:
blurred.
You tell me
be quiet,
don't do it,
please stop,
you say
without saying
a word.
(I'm sorry.
I know what you mean.)
(I can't say it's not
how it seems.)

Purpledeep

By Bridget Iverson
Mount Mansfield Union High School, Grade 9

Bent over the typed
pages,
deciphering and
deciding:
what goes here?
Blanks stay
blank, questions
remain unanswered and he
dredges through a
purpledeep pool of the almost-known
(slipping through the too-wide
holes of his borrowed net).
Maybe it's--there--a
ripple, a swirl
of dark water,
barely out of reach--
slides through his reaching fingers
(mind)
grasping blindly at
nothing.

I turn my head
away
away

(I can't deal with this today)

away.

My wall's a little weak right now
embarrassed, twisted, scared.
I don't know when or where or how
I'll ever get
repaired.

(Not today.)

Normally I'd be okay,
I'd talk, I'd laugh, I'd be
the person that they like to see,
the one who's not the current me.

But here I'll stay.

A collection of
red-painted buildings
held together by
chores, denial, and
cows.
We're always just ahead
of the next
crisis, always
barely pulling
through,
always
thinking and
holding
on.
Because if I just concentrate on
keeping my grip
a little longer,
maybe I can
keep from
falling
at all.

She refuses bread at
dinner
and crams it into her mouth
in the kitchen.
Whenever she holds knives
she has a sudden urge to
dance.
She's fascinated by matches
but scared to strike
even one.
She loves photographs
and hates cameras.
She won't eat anything orange.
There are days when
she speaks nothing but
French.

She wishes somebody would notice
her.

Try

By Bridget Iverson
Mount Mansfield Union High School, Grade 9

Let me see the place you sleep
Let me breathe the biting dust
Let me tell what you can't keep
The whole world's starting to rust

And so we try-y
To erase those fears
And the kids don't cry-y
'Cause it's wasting tears
And the sun pounds dow-own
On the des! ert! floor!
Why can't we try
Just a little bit more---

Let me feel what you do all day
Let me carry some of the weight
Let me hope things don't stay this way
That it can change--that it's not too late--

And so we try-y
To erase those fears
And the kids don't cry-y
'Cause it's wasting tears
And the sun pounds dow-own
On the des! ert! floor!
Why can't we try
Just a little bit more--
Just a little bit more.