* * *
Far up into the hills above the stretch of land between Cobscook and Passamaquoddy Bay, if you go looking for it, you’ll find a house all by itself in the middle of a brambly field of good straight corn and green garlic. It’s an old place, but kept up, the whitewash fresh and the windows clean. The roof needs mending, it groans under the weight of hensbane and mustard and rue. There’s tomatoes coming in under the kitchen sill in the kitchen, a basil plant that may or may not come back next year.
Jenny Sazarin comes by Sunday afternoons for Latin lessons and to trade a basket of cranberries from her uncle’s bog down in Lincolnville for a loaf of bread with a sugar-crust that makes her heart beat faster when she eats it. She looks forward to it all week. It’s quiet up there. You can hear the potatoes growing down in the dark earth. When October acorns drop down into the old lady’s soot-colored wheelbarrow, they make a sound like guns firing. Agnes starts the preserves right away, boiling the bright, sour berries in her great huge pot until they pop.
“D’you know they used to burn witches here? I read about it last week,” she says while she munches on a trifle piled up with cream.
“No,” the demon says. “I’ve never heard that.”
“They did. It must have been awful. I wonder if there really are witches? Pastor Dryland says there’s demons, but that seems wrong to me. Demons live in Hell. Why would they leave and come here? Surely there’s work enough for them to do with all the damned souls and pagans and gluttons and such.”
“Perhaps they get punished, from time to time, and have to come into this world,” the demon says, and stirs the wrinkling cranberries. The house smells of red fruit.
“What would a demon have to do to get kicked out of Hell?” wonders little Jenny, her schoolbooks at her feet, the warm autumn sun lighting up her face so that she looks so much like Hubert Sazarin and Thomas Dryland, both of whom can claim a fair portion of this bookish, gentle girl, that Gemegishkirihallat tightens her grip on her wooden spoon, stained crimson by the bloody sugar it tends.
The demon shuts her eyes. The orange coal of the sun lights up the skin and the bones of her skull show through. “Perhaps, for one moment, only one, so quick it might pass between two beats of a sparrow’s wings, she had all her folk around her, and they ate of her table, and called her by her own name, and did not vie against the other, and for that one moment, she was joyful, and did not mourn her separation from a God she had never seen.”
Cranberries pop and steam in the iron pot; Jenny swallows her achingly sweet bread. The sun goes down over Bald Moose mountain, and the lights come on down in the soft black valley of Sauve-Majeure.
The Melancholy of Mechagirl
Prefecture drive time radio
trills and pops
its pink rhinestone bubble tunes—
pipe that sound into my copper-riveted heart,
that softgirl/brightgirl/candygirl electrocheer gigglenoise
right down through the steelfrown tunnels of my
all-hearing head.
Best stay
out of my way
when I’ve got my groovewalk going. It’s a rhythm
you learn:
move those ironzilla legs
to the cherry-berry vanillacream sparklepop
and your pneumafuel efficiency will increase
according to the Yakihatsu formula (sigma3, 9 to the power of four)
Robots are like Mars: they need
girls.
Boys won’t do;
the memesoup is all wrong. They stomp
when they should kiss
and they’re none too keen
on having things shoved inside them.
You can’t convince them
there’s nothing kinky going on:
you can’t move the machine without IV interface
fourteen intra-optical displays
a codedump wafer like a rose petal
under the tongue,
silver tubes
wrapped around your bones.
It’s just a job.
Why do boys have to make everything
sound weird? It’s not a robot
until you put a girl inside. Sometimes
I feel like that.
A junkyard
the Company forgot to put a girl in.
I mean yeah.
My crystal fingers are laser-enabled
light comes out of me
like dawn. Bright orangecream
killpink
sizzling tangerine deathglitter. But what
does it mean? Is this really
a retirement plan?
All of us Company Girls
sitting in the Company Home
in our giant angular titanium suits
knitting tiny versions of our robot selves
playing poker with xray eyes
crushing the tea kettle with hotlilac chromium fists
every day at 3?
I get a break
every spring.
Big me
powers down
transparent highly-conductive golden eyeball
by transparent highly-conductive golden eyeball.
Little me steps out
and the plum blossoms quiver
like a frothy fuchsia baseline.
My body is
full of holes
where the junkbody metalgirl tinkid used to be
inside me inside it
and I try to go out for tea and noodles
but they only taste like crystallized cobalt-4
and faithlessness.
I feel my suit
all around me. It wants. I want. Cold scrapcode
drifts like snow behind my eyes.
I can’t understand
why no one sees the dinosaur bones
of my exo-self
dwarfing the ramen-slingers
and their steamscalded cheeks.
Maybe I go dancing
Maybe I light incense.
Maybe I fuck, maybe I get fucked.
Nothing is as big inside me
as I am
when I am inside me.
When I am big
I can run so fast
out of my skin
my feet are mighty,
flamecushioned and undeniable.
I salute with my sadgirl/hardgirl/crunchgirl
purplebolt tungsten hands
the size of cars
and Saturn tips a ring.
It hurts to be big
but everyone sees me.
When I am little
when I am just a pretty thing
and they think I am bandaged
to fit the damagedgirl fashionpop manifesto
instead of to hide my nickelplate entrance nodes
well
I can’t get out of that suit either
but it doesn’t know how to vibrate
a building under her audioglass palm
until it shatters.