by Unknown
JACLYN DWYER
Baby Bird & The Barren Wife Gives Birth to a Girl
Two Essays
Baby Bird
I will do the nursing. The suckling and swallowing. He will do the singing. The calling and crooning. We will both do the raising. Hatchling to nestling. Who will do the plucking?
I will do the bathing, the preening and pruning. Tearing and chewing and brittle nails between my teeth. He will do the dusting. Hoovering dead skin out of the nest.
We will both do the testing, the needles and screenings. We will both ask the questions. We will both submit. Who will do the plucking?
I’ll hold her arms and he’ll hold her legs. We will farm out the nursing. We will abandon the waiting. We will brood over weekends. We will groom in the dark.
When the cancer comes who will do the plucking? Tufts of fuzz. Downy peach. Molting daughter. Who will do the plucking?
The Barren Wife Gives Birth to a Girl
Press new pennies between her teeth until they shine with sour milk. Letter her name across the cake. Lick every piece but hers. Sever paper girl chains cut from newsprint with her name in every headline. Slaughter the stork before he can croon with credit undeserved.
Drown the dolls so their skin puckers a rumpled linen no one wants to wear. Witness her lungs inflate in that dress. Muzzle anything she says unless she is saying yes. Shake her hard enough and she will rattle, her hollow filled with rice.
Stain everything she ever loved, even you, with burnished pawns and borrowed baby shoes. Snap all the pictures she can stand and some she can’t. Arm the origami heart brigade. Bazooka any bastard who tries to bitch about the afterlife.
Blast broken bones until the bright shriek of birth rubs clean the creases of her lips. Fold opposite ends until they meet to make a diamond that hides inside itself. Stand back. Marvel at all you’ve done.
RACHEL EDELMAN
How Humans Use Dead Animals
Now the orchard rows
are frozen streams of ethylene
and he’s selecting
moths from the morgue.
I stumble through his pictures:
vials lining freezer walls,
ants cauled in alcohol,
glass-topped casket
strewn with notes he scrawls
while their joints thaw.
He bifurcates out branches
by microscope sight.
He’s cast off
base pair matching
so his tweezers can tease
uneasy imprecision
out of each being’s filaments;
his book of orders
holds the names
required for preserving
precious specimens.
My brother writes epitaphs.
He sets designations.
Wing by wing, he maps
Heliconius migrations
along dichotomous keys. And once
he’s cross-checked all known patterns,
he proclaims the first of a species.
RACHEL CONTRENI FLYNN
Chime
The children smash
the mother’s glass doll
and can never
fix it. They hold the bits
and cut themselves
trying. The mother
cries then is ashamed
and quiet. After the breaking
the world
becomes surprising:
winter brings steam,
summer, ice.
One morning
the mother seems done
with the punishment.
She grabs lengths
of piano wire,
a short stick. She
rigs a curtain
of ragged glass
to hang on the porch
and make rough songs
the children learn
to bear
in all their comings
and goings, even
in sleep.
KRISTEN GLEASON
Plumpenthroat
His first week north he caught a case of the ancient plumpenthroat, which swelled his eyes so that he seemed to the ladies and the children on the bus to be both incredulous and diseased. That morning, he’d written a note to his landlord. The note read: If I weren’t so alone I’d be patient. But I wake up and I don’t know the time. I don’t know the vocabulary that would enable me to buy an alarm clock, and when I roll over to open my computer I am expecting a connection that never comes. I open to false time. There is no function. Do you see that I’m sitting here with a cold slab of duck in my shorts? Please. I need the internet.
He’d slipped the note into the mail and thought, For what?
The world outside was twice itself, and the twiceness was white, nothing but. The ladies on the bus wore hats like balls of white moss that had settled at the bottom of a lake. But if he seemed to be marveling at their hats it was only because he could not close his eyes, which were bursting, which any second might drop from his face to the cold metal floor. Stroking his eyelids, his throat, he thought, The plumpen, and knew he was growing fat from the inside out. The ladies on the bus noticed his look, but didn’t engage him in case he were not amazed but sick or a fanatic. He clutched a pillow that he intended to return to the store because he felt it ruined his neck, made him sleep like a swan or a lonely prince, and in part he blamed the pillow for his plumpenthroat, though it was loneliness that was tearing him down.
Blue neon crosses lined the street he knew best. He stepped off the bus, and a pale blue beam lit his way down the sidewalk. Under the kind light of these familiar crosses, he slid and slipped but didn’t fall. This blue was the blue of a ghost parade, though only he could be seen marching there on the ice, solid and growing and hugging his pillow. He would have cried but that everything inside of him was dry. He hurried down the street, searching for the right shop, searching for the cure.
Plumpenthroat pulsed in his mouth and rolled into his stomach to breed. Briefly, he tried to imagine that this was a good multiplication, like that cherished by young couples in pursuit of life, but he knew the truth. This was a thing that signified absence—his terrifying disorientation, his apartness from life.
He stopped a caped woman in the street and asked, Medicine? He cupped his hands over his throat and then splayed his fingers. Plumpenthroat, he said. The woman wrapped herself up in her cape and suppressed a gag. Her hand, through the wool of her deep red cape, waved him away. She, a shadowy spear, moved backwards, kept her eyes down, stepped slowly, until all that remained where she’d been was a gesture of dark gauze, a floating, feminine question mark.
He spotted a sign in an alleyway. Red cross, not blue. The cure. He tucked his pillow under his arm and slogged through the snow toward the tiny shop. He hadn’t mastered socks; he wore one cotton pair, and his feet were leaden. But the shop was warm and familiar inside, like any healing shop in the world. The shopkeeper’s head floated before the rows of herbs and tinctures, and it was slick and round. She wore her yellow hair short, straight across on the bottom, and her uniform was a good shy gray.
He tried to blink as a courtesy but felt himself lurching toward her, wide-eyed and monstrous, scraping at his throat with his fingernails. He knew his hideousness was spilling over. Plumpenthroat, he said. She did not look away. Mercifully, she stepped closer. Her hand was tiny, fish-boned, and she reached out to him with it cupped, so that she seemed to be offering him, reservedly, a sweet bun of air.
The plumpenthroat moved into his legs. He could not bend his knees, all stiff with swell, so he leaned forward at the waist to meet her hand. She pressed the back of it to his bare eye. It didn’t sting. He leaned into her, felt the jelly of his eye go flat. He said, Help me, and meant it.
He’d taken the cure for plumpenthroat before. He knew it to be a bitter liquid, amber in color, a metallic tincture brewed from nails or coins, and also cold, a resting cold, so like the north, where his feet slid, per
petually, on ice, where his bed would not warm, and where he did not want to be. He would swallow it up, the cold. He would make it disappear.
He saw the old cure on a shelf behind the woman’s head, labeled twice, once in characters he could not understand and once in heavy lettering: PLUMPENTHROAT. He gestured stiffly toward the cure, asking for it with his entire head. She offered, still, the little bun of air in her hand and shook her head no, and suddenly he noticed the womanly gauze around her head, but not dark this time—cream-colored, benevolent, shifting like a cloud in the private sky of the little shop.
She was gone. To where? He rocked from side-to-side and got around like a ladder. He was drawn to a small and elegant pillow that sat alone on a far counter. On the pillow was what looked to be a single coffee bean ringed with fur. He took a closer look. It was a tiny hoof. He pressed it with his jointless finger until it vanished into the pillow’s silken mound.
The shopkeeper returned and the sound of her step was confused by another step, the step of a little soldier, a tip and tap. He couldn’t believe his wide-open eyes—a miniature reindeer walked beside her. He looked to its hooves and saw they were fully intact. He was delighted for the first time in months. He thought of the little hoof on the pillow, and he derided it—here was the living gem. No pillow. Attached! A true and mobile curiosity. Not a relic without use.
The woman was behind him, her arms wrapped around his stomach. She whispered, Down, down, down, and down he went. She bore his weight and cooed to him in soft, foreign strings, and the two were briefly inseparable, figures in a churchly painting. His head rested on the pillow he’d brought, and he marveled at the sudden domestic felicity that had changed the pillow’s softness and made it right. He kept his eyes closed and listened to the sweet and stony tap-tap of the deer walking around his body. It traced him and he thrilled to feel its body touch his own, to know that nature would brush up against an illness so raw.
His body was inflated, at the height of fullness. His skin stretched and creaked, but he felt at ease. He let his mind wander to the bay and the channel waters, the men on wooden boats, the impish, mirthful ice. Maybe the twiceness was not cunning after all, just a style of dress the street wore. The dark was a loving joke.
He felt the reindeer poke his side with a single hoof. It pushed gently and tried to find purchase. He kept his swollen eyes closed as best he could and let the little thing hop up onto the mound of his stomach and stand there. The shopkeeper yipped and he opened his eyes at the sound. She said, All time cure. No more plump. The reindeer balanced on his body and their eyes met, his sickly globes and its diamonds, set beautifully deep in its thin, soft face, and a gentle shock passed between them, a livening sting that dazzled him and opened a hole in his head. He saw the reindeer rear up on its hind legs and turn, frozen in its pose, as if in a music box, both legs arced high, its nose to the sky.
Now it walked up his chest and stood on his bursting throat. Its hooves felt warm on his neck and its slight weight didn’t hurt him. The reindeer opened its mouth and showed him a silver tongue and a dark throat studded with stars. Is that what’s inside me? he thought. The deer knelt on his Adam’s apple. Was it his? Could he have it? Would it live freely in his little room?
The shopkeeper sat cross-legged on the floor and swept his hair back from his forehead. He wondered if she’d ever seen the night of the throat of the reindeer. He couldn’t make out her feeling as she sat there beside him. She watched him as someone on land watches an empty boat drift further and further from the dock.
The reindeer rearranged itself on his chest. It folded down its hind legs and then its front, bowed its head, and finally extended one leg forward, presenting to him the fuzzy underside of its little hoof and a surprising splitness. He felt something cool on his arm but didn’t want to look away from the reindeer performing on his body, and so he didn’t until the coolness started to sting. The shopkeeper held a thin knife against his arm. Cut hoof off, she said, All time plumpenthroat gone. Never more.
The reindeer, its head bowed, shuddered slightly, and he felt, then, what the reindeer felt: Woe is me, I am hopelessly adrift on the sea of man’s stomach. He took the knife from the shopkeeper. There was the harbor, the sluggish metal boats and the blonde men on the boats. And there his room with the flowered curtains that shut out nothing but darkness. There he could not read, there he could not reach a single acquaintance. All largeness of spirit gathered and clotted in his veins, stopping him up, as he thought of his present circumstance. He was a lonely boat, the loneliest floater. This was an opportunity for something different.
The shopkeeper pressed his bloated wrist between her fingers. Bad case. Bad case, she said. Only hoof will cure. Fresh hoof. He took the knife and pinched the reindeer’s hoof to test its toughness. It was a pussywillow, dear and fuzzy. And where were the hoofless herds? Dead. Though the plumpenthroat was in his skull, squeezing his life away, he ignored the woman’s urging, Only hoof, only hoof! He went away for a moment.
He’d heard on the other side of the channel, over the ridge of mountains, an abandoned fishing village was populated entirely by animals. It had been noted by researchers that they’d formed families and that those families were not always all of one species. Each family occupied a home, and the families visited one another. In addition, animals had been observed performing human roles. A feral cat presided over the town; it was the mayor. A flock of crows kept the streets free of refuse: garbage men. But did they have a dancer? Did they need a dancer? Of course they did. They were waiting for this very reindeer, they needed it to arrive soon, to be their champion, to dance in the middle of town, to twirl and twirl and dazzle with diamond eyes.
Should he return home to find his internet working, he would not know who to write. There was not, for him, a boat waiting in the bay. He’d never settle under a cloud of gauze and fall asleep. He was without joint, without bend—rigid and lost. The little reindeer struggled to maintain its pose on his growing body. He felt the shopkeeper press her hand against his forehead. She pleaded with him, Quick. Cut for no more plumpenthroat. Bad case. Bad case. What would he do? Slice the hoof from its body and watch it die? Place the hoof in the middle of his sorry pillow and march home through the streets with his prize? Would he kill on the stage of his stomach just to keep from swelling with this feeling—a feeling he had, after all, earned by living?
Here was the gem, the heart, of the animal village: the eagerly awaited dancer. There was the large bag of trash, the plastic bottle he filled with water from the bathroom sink, his hallway socks, his outside socks, his sleeping socks.
He brushed the reindeer from his stomach. It landed neatly on its feet and stepped reluctantly toward him again. No, he said, and it fled clattering behind the counter. The shopkeeper stood, clucking. She reached for the old cure, the yellow jar labeled PLUMPENTHROAT, but he insisted, No. No, thank you. With the thin knife he sliced through his shirt and poked at the skin beneath.
There was a fledgling universe inside of him, growing and growing. It grew without regard for what was possible. It grew without fear of space. He pushed the blade of the knife through his skin and let himself go. Blood burst joyously from the hole he had made. A red screen dropped before his eyes, and through it all his horror turned to relief. Then his flesh sighed and pushed. He drained. Next his throat collapsed. And though he stood in a pool of slickest blood, he was surprised to find that he had no trouble keeping his footing. He traced some rosy letters on the floor, his initials!, and saw his skin hanging loose from his bones. This was lightness. Lightness! He could hardly be called a man! Now he stood on his toes and spun around. Danced and danced. Stretched and flourished and then—an arabesque. The music was light as mist, it came on the back of a channel wind and was the collective call, the breathy summons, of the animal village. He would go there, he would. Someday soon. Not as a man, but as a dancer—the artless, bloodless champion of species, every kind.
RODNEY GOMEZ
&
nbsp; The Clowns
The first clown appeared in May by a café. He resembled Bozo, but he didn’t smile. His eyes were red, and in those marbles a violence. A little girl sipping chocolate saw him first and screamed. Then others saw him and were cocooned. He disappeared into a winery. You know a city only by walking. Clowns in all guises appeared in everyday places. They knew the neighborhoods, the streets. They knew the dark angles where people kissed, the lakes where they rowed to dislodge their secrets. One clown became a doula and delivered the first infant clown in full makeup. Another destroyed a young boy’s dreams with a series of somersaults. One night I encountered a clown in an alley. He was holding a burger which I found so delicious I sprouted two big feet appropriate for floppy shoes. He said, seek first confusion, not understanding. That night, in a purple wig, I painted two stars on my face. It was freeing, yes, but mostly it felt like a tine striking hot cement.
KAREN GREEN
from The Willful Ignorance Project
FACE-OFF, 2014
THE LATE MIDDLE AGES, 2014
Detail of “RASH AUTHOR, ’TIS A VAIN PRESUMPTUOUS CRIME/TO UNDERTAKE THE SACRED ART OF RHYME,” 2014
HAVING NEITHER WINGS NOR HORNS, 2014
HAST THOU SEEN, 2014
SNAKE DISARMING, 2014
MAP PROJECTIONS, 2014