A JEW, A SHRINK AND AN ASSHOLE ALL WALK INTO A BAR…
— Thanks for your well wishing. I understand the want for jokes. My throat is ripping, clogged and cracked now. My back creaks when I think. I pray into my dirt most evenings for the urge to snicker again, green. You should see what’s become of our peach trees. The bloat. The blackened axis. The bow and bending of our city buildings. Slow roll of corrosion. If I had the nerve I’d build a guitar. I’d string it with my hair, white at age twenty. I’d play in rhythm with my stomach — the new roar that’s replaced our baby’s bump. The boggy burp’s best bass. Oh, what songs we’d make together, me and my doppelganger, cheek to cheek.
COULD YOU BE DOING SOMETHING MORE?
— I spend my evenings these days in the kitchen. I knit new clothes for our child. I learned to knit after the death of cable TV. I use colored wires ripped from dumb machines. I would have made him bonnets. A cape. A canopy above his crib. My lips would tickle the stubble on his under-neck once he was old. Tell your mother where you’ve been. Now that he’s quiet and the skies have settled shortly, I hold my grieving in the folds of my elbows, neck and knees. The way time robs in futures pissed. Sleep-rooms in pools up to your crown. I’d have liked to think me kinder, but the neighbor — I hear his kids beg and think: coffin nails. Sometimes I know they’re not even there. That their pounding is only more of my dumb pulse.
HOW WILL YOU REMEMBER?
— In my loose teeth. In my knocking knees. With the stripe of morning across the yard; where the worms rise, where the earth spits up its dinner. This house grows older with me every night. How I’ll remember? In the burning. In the cloud rattle. Each time the roof thuds above me. Each time I wet my face in squirm. And there’s always all this paper — our receipts, shorthand and thank yous, birthday rhymes composed by strangers; notes and trash and mail unopened; photographs, if water-warped. Sometimes I recite my life aloud for hours. Sometimes I just don’t have the heart.
GLASS
The glass came first in early morning. I watched through the only safe storm window. The sound of sky come ripping — some sour music box, cranked to crack. The panes shattered on impact, each giving off a second spray. We watched the dead yards, already buried, now held under new refracted light. Glass over grave sites in display. Glass slit through awnings, billboard faces. The facemasks became more dire in the scatter, each inhale suspect, lined with slice. Glass specks embedded in our eyelids — count the new ranks of the blind. The glass came in many colors: some pure translucent, however tarnished; green and brown burst bottles; backed with silver as in mirrors; blue from Depression-era heirlooms; stained from the awe-stuck eaves of churches. The shriek of glass on glass peeled my skin. The screech of all things scorched around me. The brassy, tinkled detonation. Shards of wronged birds. Real birds impaled and writhing. Even the sun had hid its eye. We were several layers under now. We could not think of other times. We called truce and splayed our fingers. The sky would not forgive.
WANT FOR WISH FOR NOWHERE
My first child splurged inside me. He ate what I ate — ate it all. There never was enough: my milk, my eggs and honey, my hunks of ham and strange things craved. I picked gnats out of the carpet; chewed through the shower curtain; swallowed blood. Baby hungry. Baby want. His teeth nicked in my linings. He tore my inner-skin, his nails already long and gleaming in the manner of what I used to shave my pits.
I would not contain him long.
Soon my belly was my body. All my weight belonged to him. I stooped through the apartment, cords in my back clenched. I still lived alone in those days. The man who’d helped me make the baby had left to find his way into the television. Specks of skins of selves he’d been in other years still lay around me on the air; and, as such, I’d breathe him in. I pulled his long hair from the sink pipes. I swelled with child until I could not stand. Until I could not remember where I was or where I’d been, whenever. I’d find myself on the phone with no one. I’d find my fingers caked with grease and the window open, half-hung on the sill to jump.
To keep my wits about me, I whispered to the child. Certain words called walls of color though my vision: where washed my day with yellow, ouch tickled green, tomorrow pink. Other terms caused lengthy tones to nestle in my ear, tympanic. Sometimes the ceiling would be caving. Other nights I couldn’t see.
My hair began to fall out. My face stopped looking like my face.
Then one night I felt something open in me. Then one night I knew: a window. A threshold gunning in my stomach. I felt several things collide.
I crawled to the front door and out into the breezeway, where the air stung, where the porch lights had burnt away. The pods of moths still swarmed around them. You could see them strumming on the moon. The scummy husk of their glazed wing skin. The wooze. Trees had overgrown the stairs.
I cooed, my belly bulging, my hope composed in newborn bone.
I might have gone on alone forever.
I’m still not sure who took me in.
On the table, they cut me open. I observed from overhead. I watched them rip a seam straight up my middle. The curdle of my insides spread into the room — some kind of flesh-held flower. My eyes were open. My skin was white.
The doctors supplanted my softer parts with metal. They affixed me with a mask. If there was sound, I could not hear it over the fluorescence; the churn of something in me, bruised, innate. Small raw spots clung among the corners of my phantom vision. I felt a gauze around my head. I kept pulling at it, my short breath shaking. I swam over myself.
And from myself, from out of me, came my firstborn, came the boy.
There he was. The him. The seedling.
I watched him rise up from my gut.
I watched in silence, vibrating slightly.
I’d wanted so long for something somewhere.
I did not expect to be called back down.
The boy was very large. His skin was slick and bright and runny. The doctors strained to lift him out. There was squealing on the air.
Back in my body, I saw ultraviolet. The room’s girders trembled. The gum.
The walls folded and unfolded. I could not taste my tongue.
The baby measured longer than a machete — his massive skull, ruined fruit. His chest and belly were splotched with something. His head of hair — blonde like Father’s — grew over his ears across his cheeks. It’d spread over his eyelids. I could see him. He could not see me.
They took him somewhere else to clean him. I heard a whisper in my ear.
I watched, half-spinning, while they sewed me up, a long rosebud in my gut, matching the one I had inside me. I could still feel the gap from where the boy had been. I waited for him there inside my arms.
They did not bring him.
They did not bring him.
I screamed a sermon at the roof.
I screamed for him to appear before me. For what I needed. In the itch.
I suffered such a long stretch of expectation curdled in my yearning. The years and years of days unraveled. Everything at once seemed far away. Far and cold and small and wilting.