Dug For Victory: Poems from RIP-TV

By Liz Mackie

A memorable collection of epitaphs and obituaries for the age of digital confession. Artists, athletes, activists, entertainers, evil-doers, rich widows, philosophers. . .40 poems from eight years in a lesbian novelist's on-line diary salute the famous dead—and tackle onslaughts of the ambition, desire, daydreaming, self-berating, fear of aging, loneliness and faithless women common to contemporary America. Sharply observed, often humorous, Dug for Victory also offers an anti-war record of existence in Brooklyn, New York during the days and years following the attacks on nearby Lower Manhattan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liz Mackie
• Release date: Mar 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301467204

Liz Mackie

With LAMENT: A SOVIET WOMAN AND HER TRUE STORY, author Liz Mackie launched Nostalgistudio, an independent publishing company for high-quality American writing. Three volumes deep into FAMEPUNK, her picaresque historical-fantasy novel set in the world of women’s tennis, she's also published a poetry collection (DUG FOR VICTORY: POEMS FROM RIP-TV), a travel novella called THE HAPPY VALLEY, and the on-line writings collected at www.liz-mackie.com. A long-ago graduate of Swarthmore College, she lives and works in New York City, and has climbed Breakneck Ridge with the kind help of friends.

Book preview

Kurt Cobain

B. 2.20.67 Hoquiam, Washington / D. 4.5.94 Seattle

Suicide/Shotgun

What are you looking for in a woman?

Someone who can cut my hair.

2001-05-23

2

Edgar Allan Poe

B. 1.19.1809 Boston / D. 10.7.1849 Baltimore

Alcoholism / Voting

Anyone in your past for whom you’d drop everything?

Anyone? Anyone?

An echo beckoning from any quarter of your globe?

Be honest.

Everything. Everything.

Recurrences of absent people’s faces, forces, powers to charm:

At Christmastime, these séance chimes

Why do they sound?

The calendar’s silvery tintinnabulation

as beauty muffled in loose wraps pays a holiday call:

How can you hear and not answer?

Go walkabout among the sere overgrown sites of old flames

Toast your shivering ghosts with cups of sacrificial dream-blood.

It’s become a custom.

2001-12-15

3

Seymour V. Reit

B. 11.11.18 New York City / D. 11.21.01 New York City

Fright

My vanity haunts me like a ghost

Boo!

A vengeful ghost

I killed my vanity before I could correct it

Now it’s just as bad as ever and it never lets me rest

Hahaha hehehe. . .bump every night!

My needs haunt me like ghosts

Bang!

I jump out of my skin at their topplings of tables and bureaus

bookshelves and mirrors

and the world sees a twitch

There was it again

The world diagnoses: frustration

The kiss of death.

2002-11-12

4

Marcel Duchamp

B. 7.28.1883 Blainville, France / D. 10.1.1968 Paris

Suddenly in sleep

a snapshot of myself at night when I bother to switch off the light while undressing

something in black and red or black and chartreuse

a well-framed still of the pantomime I perform while denying myself to the neighbors

the clock radio time bathing my naked haunches in haze

as with hands like rakes and fingers like bat song I pursue my pyjamas, bottoms and top, into their separate hideouts

nude fondling a bed

I know exactly where they were

nude persistent in fondling the same few patches of bedspread

full-color image of my naked self, one arm withdrawing from the light switch

woman completing a series of gestures

2004-01-03

5

William Henry Harrison

B. 2.9.1773 Charles City County, Virginia / D. 4.4.1841 Washington, DC

Pneumonia

Woke up wishing I could split or be unzipped

Prolong the z a pulse for every zipper tooth

Or that I was from chin to groin already slit

Make a powdery Poof!

Like a milkweed pod

Let it all hang out

Please

Please

Can't I tip a canoe-full of need onto the wind’s tongue?

Pity.

2002-12-05

6

Aimee Semple McPherson (b. Aimee Kennedy)

B. 10.9.1890 Salford, Ontario / D. 9.27.1944 Oakland

Barbiturate Overdose

You put a chip in me

Ba-wah-wah-wah-wah

Baby since you

you in the colors of the flag

my eyes have never closed,

not properly.

I think you put a chip in me

and ulu-lulu-lation!

Being, beneath you

I'm splayed in perpetuity;

In-a-gada-davida-da-da-dah

you planted

my civilization.

2003-11-08

7

Susan B. Anthony

B. 2.15.1820 South Adams, Massachusetts / D. 3.13.1906 Rochester, New York

Heart Disease and Pneumonia

In follow-up

last night I dreamt of Adrienne Barbeau

representing the Ephesian Artemis.

She scolded me:

"You don’t love yourself as a woman!

You don’t love yourself as a hole in history!"

I fell to my knees

I clasped her knees through the thin fabric of her patterned mumu.

Against my chest I could feel the lowest of her eight breasts bump and roll—

How old she’s turned!—I thought, crying:

I love YOU Adrienne!

2003-12-15

8

Princess Countess Barbara Hutton Mdivani Reventlow Grant Troubetzkoy von Graham Rubirosa Doan

B. 11.12.1912 New York City / D. 5.11.1979 Beverly Hills

Done

All men are gay.

2006-10-03

9

James Joyce

B. 2.2.1882 Dublin / D. 1.13.1941 Zurich

Post-Surgical Complications

With me it’s never been that I like women more than men

but that I like them differently.

I am the Mommy of my fate.

Though I steer a more or less consistent middle course for Neither, Really

pillowed ports are often on my mind.

Spyglass in hand: A tit!

But no landing! I’m too busy saying things like this:

I have read Ulysses four times through. On a fifth attempt—my second overall—I skipped the parts I didn’t expect to be tested on but since then I have read it three