[ sr ]

Scientists have created Anteros out of a fruitfly.
A simple gene tweak and a bug becomes a god,
Irresistible to every other fly that finds it now.
This means nothing for us, for the gods do not exist
outside the stairwells of imagination, the whirligig
nature of human desire. We’re in love! we say.
We’re in love! With the open palms of history,
with the potatoes growing silently in the garden.
I could grow moss in my pocket, and never be alone.
I am lost without it! I am not lost. I am standing at a threshold
of mossiness. There is cold weather coming in either direction.
The wind curls itself around my body and sings
and it tells me that every chemical in my body passed first
through the body of a star, so I have nothing to worry about.
I was dead before I reached me. My spindly legs are the result
of the atmosphere, the rough journey down to the face of this earth.
I’m a crippled constellation masquerading as human.
The glint in my eye is more than just an expression. My sense
of direction is skewed for good reason. I’ll never find a point to end on.
Everything happens in circles. One day my life
will get caught in the orbit of another, and no one
will know which way to follow.

…we must learn to bear the pleasures as we have borne the pains.        
Nikki Giovanni

Stories tied tightly in bags of sacred sorrow,
Tangled paper tucked away like treasures but forgotten.
I think of California sadly,
Three children born so quickly during a hot, dry season,
In a place so far from home.
Cowering in daylight dark apartments,
Winking through window cracks,
To glimpse silhouetted strangers beckoning at the door
Nursing the fear of a three day notice to pay or quit
Breathing the shame of night after night alone.
I think of those days sadly,
California sunshine sparkling against the windshield, brightly beating
On back seat babies tucked into blanket envelopes,
Sleeping gently, eyes closed sweetly,
Hands curled into delicate fist balls against sweet, fresh faces.
Driving unknown city streets in Glendale or Big Bear or Pacoima.
Unfriendly places far from familiar faces,
Places to write bad checks for diapers,
Places to get well, to breathe better air.
Places chosen with the hope that redemption resided somewhere near,
Somewhere mapped with a compass rose.
Radio loud, smoking with the windows down,
Cigarette ash burning sharp red against window wind.
Wind whistling lullabies through the car.
Humming in my ear,
Blowing against my face, across my skin
Swaddling me sweetly to remind me I am often lost
But find my way somehow somewhere.
What of other places that came before?
Those other whispered, childhood sorrows,
Of looking into windows from winding roads,
From Mosheim to Woodmore, across Route 66,
All the way to California and back again.
Precious coddled sorrow memories,
Stacked carefully against the wall with pictures, letters, scribbled late night journals,
Holding tightly to close little treasures of hurt and ache,
Each wrapped in strings of delicate sorrow,
Lullabies singing loss, brave battles lost,
Sweet, still sorrow held near.

I can taste the silence when they leave, like
copper or dirt and I wonder if they know what it is
to be still and alone. Sometimes I can hear them
when I’m sleeping, a voice in a solemn place.
Their noise echos around the room like the stretch
of flowers, sound searching for light. If I could
gather up their dried overshells that they leave on trees,
behind car tires and on benches, maybe I could hold
their outer layer the way I hold my own bones inside me–
close and pressing. Still, not quite hollow, my bones sleep
cradled within me: the bumps of the spine, the curve of the
ribcage. The thin, pointed fingertip. These are the rocks
I carry within my chest. The locusts have been listening
to my heartbeat; pulsing, sweet. They have been quiet.
They have found the crop. If I asked, they would know the answer.
They would tell me that it’s not death– only bones
like at the church at Kutna Hora with the
40,000 dead all piled and bleached white together.
The locusts stay together and hum. I touch my arms.
I feel the hardness. I will have a garden on my grave.

I wonder what Daddy saw in that deer’s eyes
Before he put the bullet through its head.
And how Mother’s heart felt
When she looked at him and smiled
And congratulated him on his kill.
When she lies beside him at night,
Feels his skin and studies his face,
I wonder if she can see that deer’s eyes
Trapped inside of Daddy’s.
Or if she wants to run from his bed
When she feels it kicking through his skin,
Warning her to set herself free.

My cousin is an atheist.
He wrote me a letter
explaining the way the earth
moves differently for him
or something similar to that.
I can’t be sure because
some words where rubbed
by his anxious sleeve
almost as if he subconsciously
wanted to erase his thoughts.
I believe our souls are connected,
He wrote.
Do atheists believe in souls these days?
I put the letter down on my table
and feared it like a disease
or a question I knew I could not answer.
A week of the corners ripping
and being smothered by books
and bags and coats.
And then another one came.
Do you hear me clearly?
Am I breaking up?
Yes, you are sounding a bit like static
on this nervous page.
My cousin does not
make me uneasy because of his disbelief.
But I fear the way he tastes
his self-diagnosed insanity
slowly and lovingly
like a warm cup of coffee in the morning.
He wants this for himself.
He wants persecution like Galileo,
but America doesn’t really give a damn.
He thinks his eyes are more wide
than they really are.
He thinks he is being eaten from
the brain out,
but I still like talking with him
about books and movies
and he still makes good jokes.

At absolute zero, helium is the only liquid. Here,
it is frictionless, free of viscosity.
I watch grey clouds suck a balloon
into their midst. A toddler cries out for it and
collapses in the sand. Weighed down by
winter clothes, he rolls around, trying to get up.
I am suddenly reminded of Dante’s Satan,
crying and stuck in ice. At any given time,
15% of the world’s oceans are frozen.
As I kayaked around Alaskan glaciers,
I was amazed by the cold that ice emanates,
the kind of cold that works its way inside your
gloves and past the jingling door of
a ginghamed pizzeria. It’s cold the way
I didn’t call out for the balloon too.

My body is attached to your body by a thin spittle of thought.
When you turn away from me, my thought is broken
and forms anew with something else. Ideas are drool.
Beauty has been slobbered over far too long. God
is a tidal wave of bodily fluid. Even the flea has some
vestigial wetness. We live in a world fleshy and dark,
and moist as a nostril. Is conciousness only a watery-eyed
romantic, crying softly into his shirt-sleeve? Is not reason
a square-jawed businessman with a briefcase full of memory?
I want to kiss the world to make it mine. I want to become
a Judas to reality, betray it with the wetness of emotion.
The coin that holds the two sides of experience will become
a mobius strip trailing snail slime to infinity.

There’s a photograph, crumpling
under the glass top on my dresser,
of the snow angels we made
on the frozen lake. It was there
You told me you felt most at home
in the sky. among treetops.
The cool, light sugar of pine.
But no one photographed the day
You took a breath underwater.
The day you decided you needed
The salt in your lungs,
the biting, savory heat, to live.
So you spend your time divided
among the two. Wondering who’s
a fish and who’s a penguin.
I say it’s simple. If you love both
worlds, make your home in the sky.
But how could I know?
This is something you’ve learned.
Psychologists call it a conditioned
response. I call it muddy water.
No ice. I hate winter and so do you.
something we have in common.
Remember the lake is still frozen.
the only warmth the snow angels
holding back the water’s breath.