Tie it in a knot.
Entered
We is stiff and rare with the making of sense. Impressions debate the monotony. We doesn’t know a needle from a conjunction. We helps the bulbs of language sprout. We learns the length of a month and the next month, it already feel short. We has sexy eyes that dawn open and the lessons murmur in keys and closets, and we reads your pale vocabulary like a limit. We eat tiny planes with our ears and telephone the world with our loud voices to notify nature of our safety. We leaves and returns, having purchased some terrible mistakes from our intricately creased elders. We lurks slightly ominous in our white van with our oatmeal and greetings and cooperation. We opens ourselves back up to the littler lives possible. The dark is waiting, relaxing, leaning into us, arriving.
We is speaking and instancing. We opens the windows and lets the cold dedicate itself to us. The helium delays and we find a god with two bodies that swims and fishes itself through us. Geniuses is waving at us and we presses and kicks and burns and deadpans back at them. We soaks in our shame, even alone in the woodland at night. We culls our fears in promises. We leaves the evening undealt with when we can. Every day we rushes home to see what is causing the sunlight to smoke and jimmy. We is distracted by attractions.
We rests and thins ourselves out. Can we asks you something? Your thin bodies pathing circles inside us, does they ever feels like practical jokes? Can you feels the bright muscles concentrate and scatter? Can you hears the crows caw the morning open? We writes poetry the way pleasure tells lies.
A Willingness & Warning
Millie is happy here in the forest, saying “Beware,” again and again. She has wept smoothly down long trails and squeezed herself into skirts of certainty and now I wouldn’t be surprised if she never wants to leave. She comes up behind hikers and campers and the wayward youth whispering: “The ground shall tell all,” and “The eternal lies beside you and me.”
Millie grew up happy, but a switch was flipped somewhere once and then flipped back again later. What I’m trying to say is that she has known the reverse — bare and farther away from the present, still. She learned, “Murder finds time in a minute one doesn’t even know is there,” and also, “A minute is not long enough to ask all the questions the yellow rooms later will.”
Young opinions and decisions happened everywhere and the peaceful spinning wheel of memory was catching it all. Millie would note that the man disappeared and then the next minute he would still be gone. Poems and apartments were left behind. The subway platform filled with sparrows. Everywhere. Millie thought, “I was almost a fool,” and “I am swollen with caution now.”
That night, Millie only got as far as the buried trains would carry her. She had heard of a land where trees grew tallest on the skyline, where the twisting days sounded only slightly, like bird calls and rustling leaves. She would find that place soon, but for now she had another strangled night to lay down with the city. The hot concrete beneath her fought the voices that passed unawares. She dreamed of nature beyond the eye of the city and of the dead plants from the hallway of her grandmother’s house.
When the dew woke her, heavy on her skin, Millie found her way to her feet and her feet found her walking the questionable distance between city and country. This area looked something like a road with a small gravel shoulder. Millie was unable to see much more because she was remembering from where she’d come and imagining what was ahead. Before she knew it, a truck carrying a man traveling the world around with a load at his back had pulled up and opened his passenger door. “You’re not a foolish missionary are you?” and “Don’t you know there’s a certain finger that works better than that one for hitchhiking?”
When they had traveled only a very short distance, Millie asked to be let out. The driver refrained from asking questions. Millie climbed out of the cab and down into the field beside them. The driver didn’t wait to see if she got where she was going; he had work to do, including steering himself away from this point. Millie aimed herself at the woods beyond the field and her focus made the distance seem short. She hummed and whistled while she made her way to the trees.
Millie made herself a life of clean work and reality in the forest. She had made her mistake and now she was committed to surviving it. I have seen her. The “Beware” from her lips has landed beside me by the campfire. I can see the clean nests in the branches above me and it’s easy to tell that she sleeps in a different one each night so they won’t find her. When I feel her near, I say, “They’ve stopped looking,” and “Come out now; it’s safe.”
More Mysteries
I let it get to the point where only shallow water filled our bellies. By that time, there was only one person to ask: my brother had just been released from rehab. I was watching to see if he’d still go awry. The throaty noise he made while we drove him home didn’t bode well. He asked if he could stay with us for a day or two before going back to his own apartment. He wasn’t ready to be alone.
He watched cartoons slowly, laughing a little late at the gags. I had a son, four years old, and if I didn’t have the money to pay the water bill, well, daycare seemed like a joke with another adult who could spend the days with him. Jimmy had slowed since getting clean, but my desperation allowed me to believe he could manage keeping an eye on Sammy.
I worked as a custodian at the hospital. I’d scavenge the left behind, finding stuffed animals abandoned in quick transitions to the ICU, flowers to place on my table to convince myself I lived a different life, half-empty boxes of candies in rooms occupied by non-contagious patients placed on feeding tubes.
The substance of our home shook looser every day. Each morning showed a shelf sagging, its contents sliding to the ground before I noticed. I felt denied of choices, but when more than one option showed up, I broke down, so unaccustomed to being able to make the right decision.
I’d parade through the hospital like I knew the answers. I forgot whatever I could in the daytimes. I played sick pranks on myself. I attracted men with issues and put effort into keeping them around. Someone else’s scars are always more mysterious. I’d invite men to sleep in my bed while my brother slept on the couch. When I went to work, everyone would still be sleeping, and according to Jimmy, my men would sleep all day. Jimmy watched cartoons with Sammy, microwaved cheese sandwiches, pretended to forget they hadn’t brushed their teeth. It was a workable arrangement in the worst way.
Most of my day, I did a good job of being courteous, falling easily into the patterns of politeness. If truth had been an element, though, you’d have noticed the holes. At work, I had to write everything down: if I checked a bathroom, if I failed to mop a floor. Always a record. My supervisors would glance at it, but no one would tell me to do anything different. My thumbs peeled from the strong chemicals and I waited for someone to tell me I didn’t have to come back. I’d become ambidextrous in my scrubbing. My arms were the same size. At the end of the day, I’d look hard at the ceiling while I lifted my uniform off in the locker room. I’d take a deep breath and hold it while I tied my shoes back on. I’d hold my hands under the hot water until I couldn’t stand it. I’d make malfunctions I could fix.