by Paige Lewis
is not that these women swallowed light. It’s that,
when their skin dissolved and their jaws fell off,
the Radium Corporation claimed they all died
from syphilis. It’s that you’re telling me about
the dull slivers of dead saints, while these
women are glowing beneath our feet.
WHEN I TELL MY BELOVED
I MISS THE SUN,
he knows what I really mean. He paints my name
across the floral bedsheet and ties the bottom corners
to my ankles. Then he paints another
for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
saying, Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your
shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels
of your shopping cart. It’s all very polite.
Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take
them to the Laundromat—the one with
the 1996 Olympics–themed pinball machine—
and watch our shadows warm
against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we
stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my beloved grips his own wrist,
certain it’s mine, and kisses it.
WHEN THEY
FIND THE ARK
Fox News buys exclusive broadcasting rights.
My mother is sobbing, pressing her nails
into my palm. She asks, Is this live, is this live?
When the men break their way into the ship, I swear
I can smell a mixture of figs and lupines.
The men don’t need light. The ark is bright-
pulsing. Its floors are hay-dappled and wet-warped.
Its stables—wide and filled with women.
Women whipping around on all fours, their
heads pulled back, their mouths a frothed blur.
Women sleeping straight-backed against
wood beams, women speaking in trilling
chirps. My mother says, This can’t be the ark. Where
are the bones? The men? The men find
one woman alone in her stable, curled
around an overturned bowl. The men lift her up.
They lift the bowl, which gushes dust and
dust. The women stop moving as the ark
fills, but the men want to save it, they don’t want
to see it dust-drowned. They throw the bowl
out of the ark. Our TV goes black.
Outside, Lake Michigan is slopping up a thick
gray paste, coating the stones. Inside,
my mother replays the moments
before the cameras stopped. As the clouds press
against our roof, she asks, Don’t you think
the women running look a little like me?
I LOVE THOSE WHO CAN WALK SLOW
OVER GLASS AND STILL KEEP
all their blood inside. I want to lick their smooth arches.
My beloved says he could walk over glass too—
It’s all about weight displacement. He ruins
every illusion by staring at his own hands. I
ruin every illusion by threading it to hunger.
When Eric the Great was twelve, he ran away
to earn money for his family. He returned
to his mother, his pockets filled with coins,
and said, Shake me, I’m magic. So often our bodies
betray us. Just look at our feet, how they point
to what we desire. I don’t notice mine until I’m
headed out the door—I get that from my parents.
My father, overgrown boy with a tight smile,
was always late, stopping to confirm his face
in every window’s reflection. My mother was
a phone call saying Go on and eat without me.
The wind in this city is the cruelest, the kind
that searches for soft spots. Pulsing tender skulls.
I only know mirrors are silver because I’ve
seen one scuffed. All my spoons are weak-necked,
but I was wrong when I said the most desperate
sound was silverware clattering from a fast-pulled
drawer. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the built from
the grown. Sometimes it’s our fault. The serinette
was invented to teach canaries how to sing correctly.
When my beloved tells me I’m correct to love him, I
realize the sound isn’t metal at all. It’s not the coins rattling
on concrete, but the fingers scraping to pick them up.
As an adult, Eric the Great changed his name to Houdini
to honor Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who would open his palms
to the audience and say, Nothing here now—neither anything,
nor anybody, before pulling his wife from the ether.
MY DEAR WOLFISH DREAMBOAT,
STAND STILL
I don’t want to alarm you,
but I’m pretty sure there are men
living on the surface of your eyes.
I can see them pairing up. Little
umlauts—fighting, maybe, or else
dancing. Do you think they know
life as you know it—as an arcade
where every good game is broken
and no one tells you, so you waste
token after token? Or would they
have more sense than that? I bet
these men love it most when you
get tired because they get tired,
too. When you press your palms
against your eyes, do they see
the sparks of light and create new
names for stars? Give them more.
Give them a moon—here, balance
this egg on your nose. Oh darling,
now they’re building a telescope!
Do you think they can see me?
Clearly? Does it hurt?
II
THE TERRE HAUTE PLANETARIUM
REJECTED MY PROPOSAL
for more tactile audience participation.
And sure, their decision makes sense
if you consider the fact that no one likes
being pelted by meteorites, if you consider
the fact that I’m a miserable excuse for a planet.
Wildly rectangular orbit. I move
through life like I’m trying to
avoid a stranger’s vacation photo.
Still, what do astronomers know
about public appeal? When naming
the color of our universe, they
had the chance to vote for either
Primordial Clam Chowder or
Cosmic Latte and they chose the latter.
Lately, I’ve been feeling betrayed by names:
the king cobra isn’t a cobra, the electric
eel isn’t an eel, and it turns out my anger
was fear all along.
I fear that I won’t be respected until
I can sharp-whistle. I fear that I’ll
come out the other side of rapture
with nothing but a taste for rapture,
no better than the plowboy prophet
who feared his words becoming
more dangerous than his hands.
Now, with my planetary hopes dashed,
I’m revising my lecture on futile repetition.
Imagine a line of identical circus clowns
frantically passing a pail of water from
the fire hydrant to their burning tent.
Now imagine a hole in the bottom
of that pail. Why would you imagine
such a thing? That tent was their home.
See, I’m afraid I’m not used to this
much control. I’m a miserable excuse
for a weapon. All stopped up with dread,
; useless. I’m like a snake who, having
swallowed its fill of goose eggs, can
no longer escape through the gaps in the cage.
If I say, Trust me, you probably shouldn’t.
Even I don’t trust myself enough
to end on my own words. But trust me,
there are others who are powerfully worse,
who mold command into ammo, answers
into amnesia. I come from the same place
as everyone else, the place where
people take and the taking becomes
its own person. Where everyone hurts
and gets hurt, and the hurt can be heard
asking the same question—Why isn’t anybody
stopping this? And the powerfully worse take
a vote, they elect their answer carefully:
Stopping what?
ON DISTANCE
It’s nothing. The sun, with its plasma plumes
and arching heat, is five million miles closer
to Earth than it was in July, and we are still
alive. Today, I need you to stop thinking
about such small numbers. Throw out your
ruler. Your retractable yellow tape. Send that
blue egg back up to its nest unbroken. There
is no way to tell how far it fell, so it never
fell at all. No more contests. Make the dirt
spit its watermelon seeds back between
children’s teeth. Take the trophy buck
from your father’s house. He won’t be
angry. I promise he won’t come looking
for it. Are you willing? What I mean is,
in California, a city celebrates the life
of a firehouse light that’s been burning
for over a century. The citizens throw
parades, they take photos, and they share
this light live through websites. What I mean
is, this one light can reach as many people
as the sun, and you only have to reach me.
GOD STOPS BY
to show me how healthy He’s been. He’s
sleeping more. He built his own gym.
Mostly muscle now, He gives me the fat
off his steak. I eat because He offers, not
because I need—it’s hard to feel hungry
when everything in this world tastes small
and wrong, like rubber grapes or sun-boiled
eggs. When I was small, I was certain
that what was holy was mine—I caught
moths in the garden, pressed their wings
between my thickest book, and waited
for new moths to sprout up and out
of the pages. I ask God if He considers me
a cracked seed of grace. He says,
Yes, dear. I understand. It would be exhausting
to lead a life with careful consideration
for all things—stepping over anthills, saving
lizards from pools. I mean, if I was God enough
to be idolized, every statue would be a golden
depiction of me riding a goose-drawn chariot,
absentmindedly resting my shepherd’s scythe
an inch away from their curved white
throats. Before God leaves, He clears the table,
pats my head, and presses two messages into
my palms. In my left, You are the bridge.
In my right, You are the dust.
WHERE I’M FROM, EVERY HOUSE IS A
HOUSE WITH AN OBSTRUCTED VIEW
of the ocean. Oh, we are boring and superstitious
in my city. We believe tides are caused by millions of oysters
gasping in unison. Our rooms are eggshell white,
and our eggshells are poked through with silver spoons
to let the demons out. Yes, we fall in love,
but our love isn’t golden so much as it is Midas lite—hard
and cheap—everything it touches turns green. We run
out of swoon quickly and respect the loveless, who are paid
to stand naked in department store windows, eating
homemade granola and sketching caricatures of anyone
who stops to stare. Yesterday, I gawked at a man
who wore a yellow knit cap on his penis. I was impressed
by how acutely aware he made me of my forehead,
which took up more than half of the portrait. I tipped him
generously with one hand and gave myself bangs
with the other. As a child, I was just as impatient and always
justly punished. When I tore the buds open in my
garden, I lost my garden. When I threw rocks into tree
branches to shake fruits loose, gravity was ruthless.
My new bangs do a marvelous job hiding those scars, but I
still miss the flowers. Where I’m from, we are practical
and ready to grow our mistakes. We whisper our heaviest
confessions into seed packets and launch them toward
the nearest planet, where they’ll take root in neat rows—flower,
fruit, flower, fruit. This is how we build our new home.
How we make ourselves light enough for spaceflight. When
I arrive it will be easy to find which garden is mine.
YOU BE YOU, AND
I’LL BE BUSY
chewing five sticks of Juicy Fruit,
turning my jaw into a clicking, pain-
pricked mess and reaching for
another pack because hard work
is defined by a body’s wreckage, and I
want you to know I’m hard at work
writing my presidential acceptance
speech: A dartboard in every garage!
A prison sentence for anyone caught
explaining magic. You be me, and I’ll
be the man leaning against your fence,
expecting compliments on my new
haircut. Now, be you and take
this personality quiz. Do you scrape
your fork against your teeth? Results
are in: you’re the kind of person
who has to stop doing that. You be
you, and I’ll be racing across the yard,
trying to catch robins to prove how
tender I am with tender things. I’ll be
Glenn Gould, hunched and humming
at your piano until it suddenly springs
a leak—the notes too full to hold
themselves together. I’ll be me again
when I open the windows to keep
our apartment from flooding. Don’t
be the woman on the sidewalk below,
drenched and furious. Instead, take