Yellow-Haired Girl

Another day with her sparks in my hair in my mouth, our heat blown back so delicious we melt a little wax into a puddle and jab the candle there. I think cough and we cough out a puddle of flame. I think breathe and we breathe the fire slow back into our lungs, delicious as that first breath God took over his bouquet of sunflowers and stars. My yellow-haired girl’s yellow hair burns my voice box and I’m breathing it down a staircase and blowing it out again, her face erasing itself and then reappearing as whisper of flesh at a horseshoe diner later in the day, reappearing as wild blue mask-strapped-finger puppets attached to the ends of God’s fingers flashing everywhere against the air.

I’m late in the day lookout almost tap dancing this bus station bench pretending to be hard and poor—poor enough to charcoal my skin from the inside out and float my heartbeats with their heartbeats on this everywhere jangle bus. The way we with our beats burn holes through the air, that red mob of coals we keep hidden behind the jackets and grocery sacks and briefcases we hug so hard against our chests. We wing our lips, ash blue or ash gray, along the dirty wingspans of streets, our heartbeats breaking holes in and out of pharmacies and factories and taverns, all windows all ajar to let our steaming bodies steam out. Our doors to our screen-door houses slap closed at night—more tin heartbeats—as we burrow inside our papery walls, our bedroom dining room living room walls all smeared with rose petal ash and flame.

In one breath I’m swivel seat diner. In another breath I’m hammer cocked back and smacking and smacking, my yellow-haired girl’s face flashing at the ends of God’s fingers then vanishing. Then I’m bus station bus floating my rickety rock heartbeats burning home. Only God is typing something with my yellow-haired girl’s face draped over his fingertips. He’s banging out blue drum and delicious—delicious vowel and delicious consonant—banging her bruising her stain all over the air. I’m wetting my lips against her lips flashing. I’m smearing my whole mouth outside the slide back, wind window bus, the wind inside my own yellow hair. I’m pressing my lips against her lips flashing at the ends of God’s fingers, flashing everywhere at once God is typing so fast.

37 Pages
$9
isbn 1-882983-79-3

Gordon Lish: Do not ask me about the estate of poetry in America today unless you want to hear me say Rybicki is in residence in America today. Hey, the man is Rybicki, Rybicki in America in Michigan today, an estate of poetry doubling in domain all by itself.

William Tester: Wholly American, bold and unfettered, Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider is the prayer of a poet calling out to God in the wilderness. Whitman-like, and splendidly rendered without formula. In these twenty-four hallucinatory poems, John Rybicki writes with a fiercely original and astonishing talent.

Amy Hempel: (on Rybicki’s earlier work) John Rybicki ignites the page. His vital, urgent poems celebrate pleasures some would call—mistakingly—small. …I have copied out lines from his poems and kept them on my desk for years; I needed them that close by.

You should find Rybicki: he preaches on street corners all over the world. Drop a crumb of bread into his cup. Rip a page of song from your own pocket and knock him off that milk crate he’s standing on. If someone nearby is smacking dice against the curb, rattle and then sprinkle a handful of glass across the street. Tell them all it’s some lost language. Use the streetlight if you have to, some interrogation lamp, so long as it shines.

This review appeared in the March-April 2005 North American Review: Rybicki seems a latter-day Donne or Hopkins, writing poems—no, prayers—with fiery panache, especially in “Dearest Flaming Crumbs in Your Beard Lord.” But the true intensity is the speaker’s fire for his beloved, the “yellow-haired girl,” the poet's very sun, the universe. Read this chapbook: love is its engine, its mute explosive center.
—from Synecdoche by Vince Gotera in North American Review.

Also by John Rybicki: Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Poetry Press)