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Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
1. Liquid Flesh
Artless
Head Handed
All Possible Pain
Nemesis
The World’s Arm
This Person-Sized Sky with Bruise,
Glassbottomed
Streetlamps
Liquid Flesh
2. Double Life
Parallel
Visitor
Why Should Only Cheaters and Liars Get Double Lives?
It Never Happened
The Seven Deadly Sins of (and Necessary Steps toward) Making Art
Karaoke Realness at the Love Hotel
Outfoxed
Inappropriate Dreams
Products of Perception
Miracles
Big Game
3. Arcana
Card 5: Hierophant
Card 12: The Hanged Man
Card 0: The Fool
Card 20: Judgment
Card 14: Temperance
Card 7: The Chariot
Card 9: The Hermit
Card 16: The Tower
Card 19: The Sun
Card 6: The Lovers
Card 17: The Star
Card 8: Strength
4. Family Trip
Family Trip
I Wish I Had More Sisters
Magi
My Water Children
Vacation
Cover the Lamp with Its Own Light
Mermaid’s Purse
Vanity
5. Our Andromeda
At the Book Shrink
Headlong
To My Twenty-Three-Year-Old Self
To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self
To My Twenty-Five-Year-Old Self
To My Thirty-Eight-Year-Old Self
The New People
If You So Much as Lay a Hand
Nachträglichkeit
Hearth
Hide-and-Seek with God
Our Andromeda
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Donor page
1. LIQUID FLESH
Artless
is my heart. A stranger
berry there never was,
tartless.
Gone sour in the sun,
in the sunroom or moonroof,
roofless.
No poetry. Plain. No
fresh, special recipe
to bless.
All I’ve ever made
with these hands
and life, less
substance, more rind.
Mostly rim and trim,
meatless
but making much smoke
in the old smokehouse,
no less.
Fatted from the day,
overripe and even
toxic at eve. Nonetheless,
in the end, if you must
know, if I must bend,
waistless,
to that excruciation.
No marvel, no harvest
left me speechless,
yet I find myself
somehow with heart,
aloneless.
With heart,
fighting fire with fire,
flightless.
That loud hub of us,
meat stub of us, beating us
senseless.
Spectacular in its way,
its way of not seeing,
congealing dayless
but in everydayness.
In that hopeful haunting
(a lesser
way of saying
in darkness) there is
silencelessness
for the pressing question.
Heart, what art you?
War, star, part? Or less:
playing a part, staying apart
from the one who loves,
loveless.
Head Handed
Stop belonging to me so much, face-head.
Leave me to my child and my flowers.
I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that.
It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead
and no talent for creatures.
No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s.
Don’t you have a place to go, face-head?
Deep into the brick basement of another life?
To kill some time, I mean. That furnace
light could take a shine to you.
There are always places, none of them mine.
And always time—rainbow sugar show
of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky—
but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply.
“Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans
and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it.
All those prodigal particles,
flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment
of glitches. The chorus just more us.
But nowhere bare and slippery have I
got a prayer. If I had two hands
to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.
All Possible Pain
Feelings seem like made-up things,
though I know they’re not.
I don’t understand why they lead me
around, why I can’t explain to the cop
how the pot got in my car,
how my relationship
with god resembled that
of a prisoner and firing squad
and how I felt after I was shot.
Because then, the way I felt
was feelingless. I had no further
problems with authority.
I was free from the sharp
tongue of the boot of life,
from its scuffed leather toe.
My heart broken like a green bottle
in a parking lot. My life a parking lot,
ninety-eight degrees in the shade
but there is no shade,
never even a sliver.
What if all possible
pain was only the grief of truth?
The throb lingering
only in the exit wounds,
though the entries were the ones
that couldn’t close. As if either of those
was the most real of an assortment
of realities—existing, documented,
hanging like the sentenced
under one sky’s roof.
But my feelings, well,
they had no such proof.
Nemesis
The sun has its neme
sis, evil twin star,
not its opposite but its spirit,
undead angel,
extra life. Another version.
The Andromeda Galaxy bears children
who become us, year after ancient,
ridiculous year. The children,
the alternatively filled selves unrecognizable
to our faeries, our animals and gods:
us utterly replaced.
The kids we were, rejected like organs
donated to the wrong body.
Why aren’t they dear to us?
Why is that child least loved
by its own grown self?
If you aren’t me then be banished from me,
weird orphan with limp and lisp.
Who, nameless brainsake, are you?
Not my substance or my shadow
but projectile vomit, a noxious gas.
Don’t be me, please don’t be me,
says the adult, looking back into wormhole
as if jumping into foxhole.
Not me, never again: that terrible child
with the insufferable littlesoul
and bad mom and sameself sister,
and balky, stalky brother
and monotone uncle and messed-with cousins,
and let’s not even talk about the father,
the fater, pater, hated, fattened, late, latter dad.
Perhaps the Andromedans are such early
versions of us we can’t hate yet, ghosts
or our pre-living selves, earliest babies.
Perhaps they’re only lifelike, like
a robot cook or a motion detector,
not like a dog we love and know,
or claim to know,
who nonetheless attacks grandma
somehow. We say so, said so, toldya so.
That’s what you get for believing in aliens,
for replacing our earhorn of plenty
with a megaphone of corpsedust.
Listen, it’s moving closer, the Andromeda
Galaxy, this other us, this museum of mucus
and keyboards and keyboard fingertip records
that their governments are already optimized
to keep post-digitally. All of which looks
much more like a craps game to us, a hinky
life-filler, time-killer, the best selection of credit
card pill extensions with rapid-release hypo-air
no one but addicts can tolerate.
Only 2.5 million light-years away, lessening
daily, and that’s collapsible
space, of course, made of light. Just flip
the switch and poof. We’re there.
The space, then, the dog-run-sized length
between the golden retriever
and the Labrador retriever,
isn’t so much space as time, and since time
is breath…well. Take a deep one.
We have all day, as a matter of objective fact.
Slip on a glossy patch of antimatter
and I’ve inhaled my unutterable
opposite potential self, smeared out
the tracing of my nemesis: Olympic
gymnast teen me or seventh-grade best friend
Shannon, or the cricket-eating
self-sister with the spiny-belled name I dream
at night and call out but can’t ever know
in this world. Such a thing is called a soul?
A personality? Sometimes diagnosed “possession”?
Nemesis, namesake, nevermore.
O funny other self,
how I long to know you! You were ingested
so easily, absorbed like a lotion
in the desert. Even in the evening.
For there are no light years. Years are heavy.
There is only light. It never bends:
that’s the property it mortgaged in order
to pick up speed. But parallel lines can meet
just like that if someone breaks the rules.
Some criminal sharing my name
or an alien name sharing my crime.
The rules are there are no rules. Lingua franca.
Isn’t the space between what is
and what coulda woulda Buddha been,
that same space between short skull
and long face, that oiled jaw hinged
for supple expression, for saying
and blaming and braying and allaying
and naming: I this not I that, tit not tat,
want not waste, and yes not yes, but…
What your mother
tells you over and over to shut,
to smile, first to not talk to strangers
and then be kind to them.
To sponsor the tail of another winner’s
horse. To Go for It.
To become something in this life.
But once the gardenias
are floating in seawater for the themed gala
of your body, this special night,
they are dying, bacteria or no bacteria,
life against life, this world
butted up against the next.
Simultaneity aside, we are all next.
All go to the light.
Heavily, with our childhoods we go.
I’ll go with my stars,
and my sorry body, stranger
to myself, will say go.
The World’s Arm
A strong, pale wind on the thighs,
it was no seaspray, no AC,
but cold mnemonic, a breath
of spotless decision,
a kind of bulk, a true surface
thickened by foreign pears
as if winter brought its fruit
first to me for approval
before it let December
fill its basket to capacity.
I spoke too calmly for one
who didn’t believe in anything.
Mouth full of pears,
full of promises I’d no way
to speak, much less keep, I tended
to gesture toward a Universal
Field of Grass, hoping to break
as many blades as my wide self
could in one pass. One pass—
but we’re wasted with feeling,
breathing funny and stuck rough
like an IV into a paralyzed arm.
And that’s the World’s Arm
that can’t write anymore,
or sign its name, or pick
the thickness from the trees.
My fingerprints transform
into proboscis, by degrees.
This Person-Sized Sky with Bruise,
simultaneously orange and violet
(though my eyes are closed), is
either my inner color (that covered mirror)
or simply dusk.
An opaline sheet
pulled because the night is ashamed
to come in front of everyone,
blacking out in joy.
Too shy to spill its milk on the stained
tablecloth of strangers
as I have. When it’s finally dark
outside, it’s finally
loose inside and the doubleness
of things seems too true to be good:
my way and the highway.
Night. It has two hands
I can use. Its fingers in a plum
too ripe not to split.
I had to split it. It was so much
itself—bloody flesh,
wild purple skin. A fistful
so lush it was almost imaginary,
smelling of love, it didn’t matter whose.
Glassbottomed
Amplified blueness,
that is to say, I can hear it,
though it isn’t music
or a voice but a self
apart from self itself. A handiwork.
Its horrible it-ness.
If only the plain brown splotch—
my home, my head—had a place,
a say, the way rancid meat still
has protein. Something to offer.
A little brown dog waves its paw
as if to say, I know all about it.
The it-ness. Broken into bits
so sharp everything gets cut to
sharp bits. Anything small has a kind
of integrity—whole, ridiculous—
god simply cannot have.
I mean, where’s the magic
or the logic in being It
and hiding It? In seeing
foolishness, remaining wise?
Everyone’s mouth of music
swallowed with salt. Oh, to be
in those waters when it matters.
Our Andromeda Page 1