Sex Ed: A
Prerequisite at Columbine
by Anna Broome
Title
Foreword
Quote
1: BAD
1. Sex Ed: A Prerequisite at Columbine
2. A Cold Colorado
3. Love Won’t Love You in the Morning
4. The Capitulation of the Alphabet
5. Decay
6. Logic
7. Lying Me
2: FATE
8. Student X
9. You Were Always the Target
10. Mother’s Words
11. Noise not Daffodils
12. Pineapples
13. War in Peacetime
14. An Ambulance Poem
3: LOVE
15. An Earthy Villanelle
16. Victory Over Puritan Vanity
17. Defined as Living
18. Blind Shadow
19. Christ
20. Dreams
21, Optimistic Delight
Bio
Poems and art copyright 2022 by Anna Broome
Cover art by Brad Wallace
Back cover photo by Rick Mendoza
Published by Four Feathers Press (http://fourfeatherspress.blogspot.com)
Foreword
“From
Columbine to Robb, 169 children have died recently in mass school shootings. We
have become used to cartoons which have appeared on sites like The Onion, which
offer a photo of the most recent school where such a tragedy has occurred,
along with a caption reading: Nothing Can Prevent This, Says Only
Nation Where This Regularly Happens. But what, one wonders (if
anything), would America be willing to do to save one child’s
life?
If
the answer is truly nothing, then perhaps we might as well give up on the whole
antiquated notion of the public good. But for those not ready to give up yet,
one book that exists to imaginatively explore this dilemma is Anna
Broome’s Sex Ed: A Prerequisite at Columbine, which
happens to be a collection of poetry. One might at first question the choice of
genre, but on a moment’s reflection, it makes perfect sense, because the most
moving, memorable, and effective literature of social protest has always taken
the form of the protest poem. In fact, Broome’s poetry plumbs the cultural
intersections of violence, abuse, sex, and gender in a harrowing way that to me
recalls the best protest poets of the post-civil rights era. When I read these
slender, lyrically charged lines that beg to be read aloud, I think of great
poets like Lucille Clifton and June Jordan . . . The rhymes, which might be
considered playful were they not so urgent, always drive the meaning onward, as
in this sequence:
“To
be alive/your sex drive/from an erroneous/Erogenous zone moans...”
Reading
this collection convinces me on a deeper level of what I already know: we need
to do more, risk more, try harder. We are going to have to tackle this Faustian
problem from the inside, and as we attempt to civilize a society blighted with
violence, it very well might be poetry like Clifton’s, or Jordan’s, or Anna
Broome’s, that lights our difficult passage.” –-Michael White, Chair of
Creative Writing Department University of North Carolina at Wilmington
“Offer
me solutions, offer me
alternatives,
and I decline…”
–
Michael Stipe of R.E.M.
1 > Sex Ed: A
Prerequisite at Columbine
Coming isn't
Erotic
not like original
sin --
or bear skin
Sex isn't
Sexual
Like
reverberation--
Or passive
aggression
You're turned
on --with
your
pants off
You seduce
with your
obtuse
Mouth --
You're both so
erect
though miles
apart
having the best
sex
of your
lives
thanks to Psycho-
analysis and
Gastro-
bypass
You’re a
sycophantic
pre--
pubescent
A walking
hard on
popular
In song:
"What are
you
Doing in your bed
On your back?”.
You’re
too
High
Or too low
To embrace
Abstinence
Or a promissory
leave
Of absence, or
just
To be alive
your sex drive
from an erroneous
Erogenous zone
moans:
“Love is
promiscuous.
Lust chaste.
Passion -- A
chafed
Sentimentalist”,
And when you're
born,
you're sexy
and in your
coffin,
sleazy,
and in between
your life of
porn,
a common theme
of religious
tapestries
In a closet of
violence
An arsenal
of silence
a fisted Tec-9,
An
Indigenous
mind
lying down with
Knees
Spread wide
for a derisive
mankind
You’re the
Kindest of
suicides
Deep
inside her
Now— Coming
More Symbiotic
than
Erotic, the new
paradigm:
A Sex-Ed
Prerequisite
at Columbine.
2 > A
Cold Colorado
Colorado boasts
the World's
Largest Black
Bonnet,
And— As the state
populates
by the
probability of Failure,
the main Road
finds its way
by going
alongside the oldest,
dragging River.
The men cling
to curse with
their Teeth on the edge of empty, already bloody—
a Population of
Arms
press— dirty and
coarse
from Time to Time
to the World
how little
Colorado cares
about Appearances
over
thrift Fidelity,
toiled Virtues:
(infinite Scraps
of
nothing but
Scarp).
Does the Body
exist—
landless— in a
Walk so slow,
pains every
Step a
"tireless tossing"
like on every
street
Corner, a
Brother:
some younger,
some on a Knee,
some in a Parade
of Pistols;
This is the
sub-state of
Colorado— soon
few
broken into many
hurriedly
elude, and
black Bonnets
make an awful
Row— must go in
Violence
see Colorado fall
mindless,
inside the red
Rocks— of a —one-day-gone-away State.
So few Trees
grow in the
Valley
of white-on-white
Mothers— their
Fields made of
White,
always— White
is the longest
living Eye.
3 >
Love Won’t Love You in the Morning
Love is a miracle
Like a loan
approval letter
You can’t wait to
open
to see your
monthly
Payments each
double
The loan amount
and there
Are years in
months of paying back
What you borrowed
Every month until
you’re dead
Then it passes to
the executor
of your estate
which belongs to the
Loan provider.
That’s love.
A loan you can’t
pay off. Even after death your corpse owes it back at three
thousand percent
interest.
Your mother lived
in debt. Your father
left debt to your
mother as a departing gift of love.
You love to hate
your parents.
(Or love to hate
them loving you.)
When no one
accepts who you are
you beg them to
love you
but not when
you’re loved.
Then you just
want to be alone.
Because love is a
loan that free
loads off your
self-loathing
and emotional
childish masochism
as a matter of
child impairment
and adult
entitlement.
Sleep is off.
You’re old enough
to drink more
than all the love
causes of hangovers.
Young enough to
hang your ruined politeness
with a clothespin
in the sun.
Love won’t love
you in the morning.
Again.
What are the
values of love abandonment
epiphanies marked
as liabilities
according to your
accountant? A financial wizard, according to her,
who calls you by
your Christian name.
You can’t stand
her terms of endearment or her.
You love to hate
her math skills.
You always tell
her you love her when she’s waving
goodbye with cash
in her hand.
And from a
distance so everyone hears that
you know how to
love. In public.
Now. Thanks to
her. Because of your frequently
professed love
for the bitch. And because of your need
for a more
expensive loan to reduce your love loan
bankrupting your
over-priced gold plated heart that
you couldn’t
afford when you bought it and certainly
not after your
store credit you signed for.
You’re a slave to
love.
When will you be
love free? When you don’t qualify
for a low
interest love loan you don’t need
and just makes
you look fat.
You hate love and
the people who
pay for it as a
show of success.
Projection.
What cost is
within your budget?
A budget your
heart would invest in if in love for the first time.
And. If on sale.
Here’s the wisdom
you deplore.
Don’t pay back
your loan.
Send the bill to
love.
And let love let
the statements pile up
that keep coming
until the loan defaults.
After all. Love
is the co-signer.
So Ruin love’s
credit score.
Why not? Love
ruined love for you.
Thankfully.
You’re thankful.
Now, that you’ve
fallen out of love with love
and its bartering
loneliness for aloneness.
You’re dreaming
not of instant gratification purchases
or love’s
charming personality.
You’re dreaming
of love loving the destruction of the world. A destruction only love has the
power to pull off. While you’re satisfied loveless, worldless. Heartless as
love itself.
4 > The
Capitulation Of The Alphabet
She’s very
POPULAR
--So
SWEET
To see. And--
A devilish
Sense of
HUMOR.
A Queen
With good
VALUES--
Already beginning
Her life’s
JOURNEY.
She’s a parent--
She’s a
SIBLING.
SHE has a
PEARL
STRATEGY.
YET IN THE
SPOTLIGHT
SHE IS NO MORE
THAN
A throne
A crown
A title.
She can’t
SPELL--
her name.
The letter “A”
Such a wanting.
Such an
obsession.
Such an
impossible
REGRESSION--
LIKE A STUTTER
BUT REALLY
A REPETITION
TO GET HER WAY
THROUGH
THE SONG
“A”
26 TIMES
Such an
auspicious
BEGINNING.
Such Nepotism
Is so UGLY--
DONT BOTHER
ASKING
HER WHERE’S SHE’S
GOING. (NOT FROM
HERE.)
The GRADE A blue
BLOOD inbreed
Doesn’t even know
The difference
Of her-- loyal
SUBJECTS
Syllables from
vowels.
5 >
Decay
The world
Eating me
Undressing
My ticks
And fleas.
Biting me.
With the lies
A being
If human
despises
Who is the
patriot
Who
Rises
For the sake
Of having
Risen
To be forgiven.
I hate
Myself
For having
Swallowed
It all whole.
My lungs
My liver
Stomachs
Still young
As wire
As munich
Repugnant
Pregnant
Servant
I hate your
Best self
Unread
Unbled
Unsaid
Like me
Like the world
Dead
A dead prayer
A swear
world
Decays on me
fast
free of me
Of the world
Of the world
Dead on me.
6 > Logic
Holy
or beautiful
(you want
out when
just)
Justly coming
I have
tidily
Followed
Narrowing
Homelessness’s
used for
An
Irrigation
I’m a
Birthing
Within
Our not
Faults
Or tilting
Falsely
titillating.
7 >
Lying Me
Outside my
Face
You can’t
See the inside
Of the
Lying me
Inside my
Mind
Your eyes can’t
Find the outside.
8 > Student X
A Chatty
Skirt hem
Hocked
Out
And hiked
Up from a
Not yet away
still
Young
Time variable
In the morning
Ten to twenty
Years
In the stairwell
Sometimes
It flies
Crawls
stands
Still
Until
The breakdown
And a recuse
Reached level
Of prosecutory
Misconduct
And filth
Wishing
It were
Longer like
An old person
Not troubling
To be a hero
Just brush
And be
Noticed
existing
Above
A
Pair
Of well-
Drawn leg
Wounds
Rejecting
The border wall
Unable to
Do anything
With this body.
9 > You
Were Always the Target
As terror is best
When no one has
the
Right to live.
You’re home alone
The power is off
And the taps run
cold
Half bottles of
liquor
Rifles you know
how
To load but it’s
your
Name you can’t
remember
Maybe there’s a
sister
Or a neighbor
To explain how
You got here
Or if the house
has been sold
Forgetting and
not knowing
Are just the same
But what’s left
of you
Isn’t enough to
remain
Where is the body
Or the shadows
In frames
Leaving isn’t
Arriving when
returning
Isn’t the
ambition:
That’s your
destination
And confession
That like all
those
Before you
Sentenced
To death
But not
resurrection.
A ghost never
born
No headstone
For an
inscription
You’re an
assasination
Dust to dust
Ashes to ashes
Trained for
execution
With a perfect
reputation
If you were to
blame
Yourself
You’re best to be
right
And if you place
it on others
You’ve only
reclaimed
Your right to
fight.
10 >
Mother’s Words
The Gulf of
Mexico
Can say the word
Azul
In English
If you feed it a
lemon
And call her
Beautiful.
11 > Noise
not Daffodils
(Inspired by William Wordsworth)
For half an hour
I wandered lonely
as a softly motivated noise
On surprised and
frightened lovely gold
Thin and delicate
under the impression
Of incurable
authority
This attitude
toward life
The little
satisfaction
Human beings
always represent
Fierceness of the
fierce
The same
fundamentals
Fluttering,
dancing in the breeze
Thick about these
machines
Driven off the
road
Among the last of
irrigated fields
Is modern warfare
10,000 saw I at a
glance
Softened,
blackened, melted
Out of respect
Was the sure sign
To an extent
interpersonal
Millions of
civilized people.
Tossing their
heads in sprightly dance
Though had not
come through
For oft when on
my couch I lie
My nerves shadow
water
And mysteriously
toward an interested soul
And that is the
bliss of solitude
And then my heart encounters a beautiful stroke
High in a
spirit’s passing
Like trees on
grass
And then so
powerfully
on faith made to
meet
I dance at last.
12 > Pineapples
They don't grow
on a vine
Ask me a million
times
And I still won't
break
One over your
head
They don't grow
in pots either—
Once I drowned
one in butter
and put it in a
pot.
I loved the way
it died.
All sunken and
yellow
And all
protracted and
resigned.
"What a
fruit,"
You say I guess
to yourself
An easy deduction
Sense you never
Seem to talk
directly to anyone.
And when you're
home
Or when you park
your car
And then on the
street
Or at work
The mouth on your
face
Looks like a
pineapple
5790 thorns on
one side alone
I counted during
a pina colada
Fisted Sunday in
June.
I wanted to pick
them out one by one
And hide them in
my napkin.
They aren't
indigenous to Scandinavia.
And the Haitians
hide them under the bed to
Ward off evil
spirits.
And the
Venezuelans launch them at the Columbians.
(Allegedly)
The French stamp:
l'ananas sont le fruit du diable
on every can as a
health warning.
What is it about
the pineapple
You admire?
Its similarity to
the porcupine
Or its social
duality as
An introverted
extrovert?
It's
vulnerability as a garnish?
Whatever it is
The synesthesia
can't be waved off
And that's why I
can assure you
The pineapple is
an herbaceous perennial
Discovered by
Columbus in the West Indies
And I know this
with the same certainty
As I know that
pineapple in a palindrome in Italian
And with the same
certainty that I know
you –- and that's
what I like about
pineapples.
13 > War
in Peacetime
Everyone loves a
good war. It
makes a good
impression:
Priests and
doctors, cheerleaders and morticians
are all in the
war effort.
And as the right
brained toasters
pop out
strategies, the servants blow brass horns, and the housewives hold blue faced
babies --
Everyone is in
the war--
the war is
ongoing.
(It's fun. It's
easy as I, II, III, IV) ellipses
And the glowing
crowds of hoodwinked goats sing,
"Oh say can
you see..."
Peace is an
illusion.
Houdini was an
illusionist.
Houdini was a
spy,
Peace is a spy,
or just small
puffs of time
for pipe smoking,
tale-telling, cartoon watching.
(Until the
killing begins again;
the killing is
always beginning.)
Personally, I
like the generals
on cereal boxes
and
cigarette ads --
their
fat heads and
armless hands
buried in cherry
pies...
while the girls
are screaming and the boys are bleeding.
(Tomorrow's
victims are today's fans.)
We all love a
good war:
The bloom blue
Navy and green gray Army--
the invisible
Marines
And don't forget
the protesters:
A war’s biggest
fans
On broken streets
with broken feet--
always a place to
stand.
And customers
line up
For shovels and
trumpets
And headstones
And music
lessons.
And pigeons lay
on
Hero’s ribbons
As the bodies of
soldiers
are in position.
And the highest
Rank drop anchors
And sink every
year
In August.
We that means you
and me
are all in the
war effort:
We that means you
and me
are all moving
forward with the war plans.
14 > An
Ambulance Poem
The roads are
loud with the sound of Ambulance
Illness,
violence, Accidents, Intentional Harm
winding down,
around the downtown speeding
lights, in, out
of lanes sending ahead sirens
alert the living
the lack of insurance
all the mess
meets hands on insurance
with legs, arms
and heads inside the ambulance
The proof of
purchase of pain-ridden harm
counted with the
rounding of sirens
each of a winged
creature whose speeding
Is singing to the
curbside viewers speeding
their tongues
like Spanish “r” insurance
that at least for
a time this siren-
shrilling,
death-defying, blood-soaked ambulance
belongs to
another type of ham-shaped harm
known to downtown
life wailing and screaming.
The horse-driven,
screaming-
less version is
never speeding
as death often
follows harm
with the
insurance
of no
clear-the-way siren.
the way to go is
toward the siren
bring to mind
each own screaming
mocking the sound
of ambulance
in keeping with
the need of speeding
to a place of
filed insurance
to a place of
harm
After all what is
the harm
standing in front
of a siren
without insurance
to be the
screaming
to stop the
speeding
to end the
purpose of ambulance
the screaming
is the harm
lives downtown,
is synonymous with ambulance
15 > An
Earthy Villanelle
the earth in me
is a place I know well
there is no comfort she offers no peace
I am just a place for her to dwell
there is a love
where heart and land stand still
where breath between can and never cease
the earth in me is a place I know well
Deep in the
confines of the darkest chill
a simple life in the bout of cost and lease
I am just a place for her to dwell
inside me a
sanctuary unreal
hardship lands the greatest placeless
earth in me is a force I know well
a place I can
live but can’t feel
a place blameless as bliss
I am just a place for her to dwell
I know I can make
a home to kill
around this Earth she is my sentence
the earth in me is a place I know well
I am just a place
for her to dwell
16 > Victory
Over Puritan Vanity
Newer
Than the
fewer
In attendance
For
Puritans
Spread wide
To fill
An inherited
Vestibule
Transparent
fire
Circle
I loaned
Dressed for my
Executor’s
Funeral.
17 > Defined
as Living
The nature of
Peace
Follows the time
Of Remorse.
Like the flavor
Of Vanilla
On the lips
Of a child’s life
A longevity
survives
Alongside
The embrace
Of mortality
(What else
can be known
By any other
Kind of mind.)
Witless
And full of folly
That finds
absorption
By some other
reality
A preferable
Confinement
Since as able to
escape
As to
Resemble
Where it resides.
Such all
Is deliberate
Even
fantasized.
18 > Blind
Shadow
Untested science
stopping friends
Like a trembling
leaf
Tingling like a
limb asleep
A Bird shroud in
song, flowing through dandelions and escapes of the heart
To a dark corner
of rebirth.
Of cold
Bound by snow
All the memory
No one deserves
No less
Defrosted
Than preserved
A spring uncovers
the truth
Of every Earth
19 > Christ
Every person
Is a Christ
Awaiting
crucifixion
For a martyr’s
conviction
And
antiresurrection
In the King James
Version
Blind sided
Blood stained
periphery
Hurriedly easily
Tearful gratitude
Preferred varying
spirituality
A body long lost
Inside the tender
skin
Forgotten by the
mind
Without a head
Taken from him
20 > Dreams
Dreams are such
A menace
Even in a palace
My feet
Full of callouses
Pace the rooms
Of doom
Decor
So sore
I wish
I dreamed
Of being poor
Many dreams
Every night
Each one
More horrifying
Than before
My dreams
Of gore
Leave me blind
The morning
After my
precision
Sight sees evil
visions
In the darkness
core
When I scrape
Them off
And place them
In a chalice
They free
themselves
And reappear
21 >
Optimistic Delight
When we first
arrived
The mothers of
invitation
Where notes of
music
Just a waste of
time
Like all four
walls
Chaotic, peaceful
vibrations
Love was a
far-away land
A concubine elite
After the sacred
sound
Cheap or easy or
any of those terms
Look up to see
the perfect prove anything
-- unprecedented
ideas.
Fall in true
love,
Salivating,
Into another
person
Obsess in person
A misunderstood
sigh
Clenched then
unclasped
Flapping in the
wind
Save the moment
Come back to
treasure!
Like it contained
Like the secrets
Many times about
these moments
Retreat into the
beat
Birth the
breaking and the entering
Forget the
relationship with the divine
Telling something
romantic
We are there
again
Leaving the
entrance
Anna Broome is a Los Angeles poet and producer of performance art. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, Poetry and English Literature and Language from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Her first book, Orthodox Bats, was published in 2019.
Reading this collection convinces me on a deeper level of what I already know: we need to do more, risk more, try harder. We are going to have to tackle this Faustian problem from the inside, and as we attempt to civilize a society blighted with violence, it very well might be poetry like Clifton’s, or Jordan’s, or Anna Broome’s, that lights our difficult passage.—from the Foreword by Michael White
Anna Broome presents a passionate articulate look at a moment in time regarding the impact of our careless ways in aspects of society and community. There’s a raw, bleakness in its description, investigation and examination of the neglect and rejection resulting in deadly deeds contagious and therefore ubiquitous. In the midst of the campaign for the unborn the born are being severely negated: Mothers can’t mother, fathers can’t father schools fail to meet needs. Here is an outcry for our lost children. –-Lee Boek - Actor, Poet and Producer of Live-performance-art, Storyphile
When Anna Broome speaks her voice is
loud. When Anna Broome writes her words are loud. SEX ED: A Prerequisite at
Columbine is the just published collection of 21 new poems by Ms. Broome… and
they are all loud. These are poems which need to be heard by the ears rather
than only seen by the eyes as we read. Even if you are alone in a room with
this collection, read it aloud and speak it loud. She writes about teenage
sexual frustrations which are redirected to violence. The bullet understudies
for the few inches of skin which usually joins two lovers. She gives us love as
a debtor’s nightmare with the repayment of the principal more and more unlikely
as the time passes. She personifies the ambulance, its siren becoming a
screaming crying voice. With this collection Anna Broome has gifted us
beautiful poems about the horrors visited upon some by others and by ourselves
upon ourselves. --Los Angeles Artist Mickey Kaplan
