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SKIN, BONES When I lifted my shirt, I had to summon a feeling of armor. N pressed the needle gently. The line down my sternum where they a drew a wrist, I could feel in my bones. When E touched me, it felt like they touched my bones. I didn’t say this out loud. The character on the show has to turn their face away to say what they feel. What you feel is and isn’t what you mean. The way C folded their glasses and set them on the pillow. The word set. The word folded. The thought of A asking for more, a little gasp as my hand folded deeper. It felt good to feel the inside of a person. I couldn’t imagine how good. I couldn’t imagine feeling. A gold cord. A hoop of bright, stone spears. I could be an I at the center of a ring of names. I could feel I could do better and I could do better. I took the tomatoes and forgot them till fruit flies flew from the knotted bag. I had stopped saying my heart, my heart, like it was a little animal. I put a peach in my mouth. I gave up the dream of pleasure for which I had rearranged the room. I didn’t want flowers or a beautiful meal. I clipped my hoop earrings together so I would lose both or none. Probably, I had forgotten something on the road, but had forgotten what it was. Beauty leaked, from its wet center. I could shear a piece of paper in two. I could let A tie my hands together. That kind of pain. What ruin means. Irreparable harm, and that which survives. The tombstones fallen in the leaves. Coneflowers blooming from a small grave. I couldn’t decide if I didn’t believe in ruin or if I closed a door to refuse its terror. The night’s edge bled at the mouth. A wet nest. A skin suit unzipped to reveal more skin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CLOSURE In the trees we talk about historical women who loved each other and were married to men. I mean to say something like life inside constraints is still life. We watch a snapping turtle knock a smaller turtle off a log. We used to be in love, and I love you better now that we aren’t. Snakeheads, you tell me, have invaded the lake. They eat too much, I guess, the wrong things. An orange goldfish swims by, abandoned here or flushed. My friend’s husband tells me their backyard has been designated a bird sanctuary. It’s just a square plot of grass with tall sunflowers. Life on earth is about applying pressure without understanding what it might do. I wouldn’t take it back, someone at the party explains, my traumatic religious upbringing. Nothing would have made it easier for me to arrive here, I believe now mostly, aside from abandoning the belief that something would have made it easier for me to arrive here. I do want my friend to find a place to sleep for longer than a few weeks. I do want to put flowers in the mouths of everyone I love and call it art. I receive a midnight visitor and taste apples on their tongue till I can’t feel anything. I let someone else make me biscuits while I sleep. Capitalism, the poet says, is the main impediment. It could and couldn’t be easier to survive. The snakeheads hid when the rangers drained the lake to try to round them up. Some life persists, greenly, without menace. It is or isn’t called life, or real. The arc is or isn’t towards anything like freedom, or arrival, or certainty, or truth, or beauty, or property, or accomplishment, or a yard with flowers in it, or one’s one true love. Nothing changed and everything changed. I knew who I was, and then I didn’t, and then I did, which meant I wouldn’t, and then I would. I thought the poet was going to be dull and pretentious but his lines made me laugh, and three mice like circus animals scurrying in the corner made me laugh, and the image of my friend cowering on a picnic table while cicadas wriggled up from the ground made me laugh, and discussing meaninglessness over one beer while gazing at another friend’s electric orange eyeshadow made me laugh. Nothing matters, I keep saying, to everyone when they ask how I am, which I say to mean I’m doing fine. The end of the movie where we watch a woman sob, and then laugh, and then sob again, is perfect, we decide. It’s perfect. The end. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- HOT VOID Whether or not she drifted Farther away / feeling ruin eclipse The old fortunes / therapeutic habits I could stuff a bright ruined girl inside me What I love is unabashed blood / blood dabbed on The tips of my fingers The bloody machine I harbor She bleats weakly / I picture her A muscle streaked pink / slick and taut No one as interested in me in How the cervix slides up / Could this be why belief in unseen prisms of power The god who sounds like a woman filling The girls drinking a cup of blood God covering a bloody girl with force Blood from the first scene to the last The women describe not caring anymore about What they say / being pounded Or having hair pulled I lean in to your fingers as though I hadn't before been touched Feel after coming like I could Be tossed out in rough sea Everywhere, caves, like a sapphic joke Carved rock / the ledge where You could leap off / drown My medicated cunt / salty and wet Whether desire, a mechanical urge to As though never before picturing The froth of myself in two directions at once I don't know / to be as ambitious as a wet rose Dead already / on a clipped stem |
