by Quan Barry
with vermilion, ash superior for eyebrows, how a second honorific set
should sit just below the hairline, be applied by thumb as he was more woman
than a woman could be whose neck would snap like a sakura branch
under the sheen of a thirty pound wig, the cherry blossoms strewn
along the hanamichi where he makes her entrance, legs bound in the twenty kimono
she wears at once, this woman who asks nothing of love but the right to die,
damask robes cut to show her back glazed like porcelain as she manipulates
the ribs of her fan in the wisteria dance, taking the black silk in her mouth,
lips lacquered like butterflies, to keep from crying onegai, onegai, onegai, please
to an audience as captivated by her wanton passivity as I am because
I didn't know I could want one night of koi with a woman, perhaps any woman
so skilled in ruth.
Kaiserschmarn
Komm Herr Jesu, sei unser Gast, Und segne was du uns bescheret hast.
With your paring knife
remove the rind from one small-sized lemon, then grate
the peel until its shavings coat your palm. Blend this
with enough white sugar until the mixture yellows
like the underbelly of a young hare in spring, then set aside.
Separate four eggs. Before cracking hold each above an open flame
to see that the yolk is unbloody and intact.
When you have satisfaction, break the shells
being careful to let each fluid fall at its own speed
distinctly. In a small glass bowl
beat the whites until they ridge, peak.
To hold the stiffness, add a pair of heavy pinches white sugar, beat again
then set aside.
In a large mixing bowl whisk your yolks until lemon-colored
or one shade past canary. Then, alternately,
stir in one fistful of flour, a half glass milk
until your batter is as pale as polished pine.
Using a wooden spoon, fold the egg whites into your mixture
as if you were folding satin on a bolt, doubling
the batter over and over on itself
until its consistency is uniform, ribbon-sleek.
Heat your skillet
to the same temperature you use for grouse.
Work one pat of butter over the entire cooking surface,
then cover with batter and raisins.
When the bottom begins to brown
like the farmer's freckles in the planting season, flip carefully.
As the other side cooks, break the pancake
into bite-sized pieces using a knife and spoon.
Serve with lemon sugar and the old world's grace,
an added dressing of melted butter optional.
for Mimi
lullaby
for X—who couldn't sleep without one
Dear Sir:
I know what your body holds for me—shame, oil and shame. When you first touched me it was like the morning of my seventh birthday when, in helping Grandmother prepare the cake, I cracked open an egg laid by our best hen only to watch a shell's worth of blood slip into the batter. That is to say I find your kisses dark and gelatinous. They ruin things. Do you know that on our daily walks while in your company I have never seen a bird? What powers you must possess to spirit away such beauty! I have heard tell the grocer's wife makes it known to all who would listen that last winter she observed you unaware in the cemetery, that you stood a full hour before the stone of your dearest mother who died in your inexorable birthing and that when, at the approach of dusk you turned to leave, your face was bathed with light, tears and light. I myself have heard the grocer's wife tell this very tale innumerable times, and with each telling I see you grow more and more the little pig of children's games. Yes, the comparison is apt—you are the little piggy who cried wee wee wee wee wee wee all the way home and I am the one who had none. Perhaps you know where this is going. I tell you of my revulsions not with any hope of forgiveness, but because I must.1 I know now that you are not Satan's darkling but a man and a needy one at that. Sir, can you hear me? This is the oldest story we have. Your love is buried in the earth and by now has fallen to ash. Because my breasts were not made for such unholy thirsts, despite Genesis I would leave you as—
My Own Excision2
* * *
1 True, true, these are the spinnings of my mind's dark helmet—fabrications, pejoratives and fabrications. (Let the record show there never was a daily walk, a best hen, tête-à-têtes with the neighbor's wife, etc.) You may ask who am I to write such puritanical obfuscations in the year nineteen hundred and ninety eight. I defend myself thusly: at times the bright lie makes a more honest truth. Or more accurately, I prefer the landscape.
2 This is the pleasure of adopting a heightened rhetoric. While admittedly the atrocities detailed above are purely fictive in nature, the cathartic hysteria has allowed the speaker to arrive albeit late at an epiphanic moment in the text. Yes. It is now safe to say in plain speak sleep on this: I hate you for who you are and what you did.
lunar eclipse
Chiang Mai
Nobody knew it was coming.
Evening
we fell out of the river.
The elephants took us with them
because they had to. Some of us laughed.
The boy with the bamboo crop
said we were almost there. He smiled
like a flower, pressed and red.
In the village of the people
with the necks long as glass,
the children dancing for coins,
we spent all night thinking
of waterfalls, how summer's black razor
opened our faces.
Then we knew.
Like a soldier dying with a message.
The bloodspice, the smoke.
We saw pages of darkness.
The earth lay down
like a child in the road.
We spoke into our own mouths
and still they were shells of bones.
High in the Thai hills
a people wiped the caul
from the eye of their only god.
The how is a secret, the why
brought our conversion.
Fall on your knees. It's rising.
Out of the forest with its
trophy of hair.
maleficium
The Devil came to me and bid me serve him.
—Tituba at her 1692 examination
I. GENESIS
I tell the marrow only of truths. A tall man
In black clothes. The steeples of Boston
Hollow as skulls. Before
My days were filled with sugar. Before that,
With life. We ride upon sticks and are there presently,
Sails wimpled in idolatrous wind. What once was fed.
As always slavery is an institution of finery. Leisure.
Unnatural silence. What shouldn't survive.
Like a city on a hill or a commonwealth of swamps.
When He comes, the praying towns fall diseased
In a communicable reign of sores. I know what exists
Before the beginning, crawls shin over shin
From the thicket of ribs. Such suggestible maidens.
Now divining the manner of next days, separating
The beast from shell, gelatinous white from natal wing.
A box opens in water. Someone remembers
The covenant with good. It's breathing, upright
Like a man and wholly misunderstood.
II. EXODUS
He tells me he's God and I must believe him.
Here I was made; we lick toads to see spirits—
Even His. On this island, its killing floor
Stalked with sugar, I have awareness
Of what comes in threes. The death's
first pustules.
Ships. Negroes stock cattle and utensils listed
On the deceased last voluntary act and deed.
Some marks red, some yellow, a great many.
I too am marked in his ledger—“Tattuba,” adherent, slave.
I'm not even black. He gives me this name
And my soul stays with me. I become the feminine
Of us, a people thinned by an indigenous river.
Then I find myself bound for a winter of tongues, my new lord
Like a prophet and his staff—a tall man with white hair
Who won't let me go. The sloop like a heresy
Bearing us to fire. Against him and his, I couldn't intend
More. I say—even a threshold proscribed with blood
Won't keep him from knocking.
III. REVELATION
There will be others. With white silk hoods.
With topknots. Commonwealth of gallows.
I know what motivates them, such suggestible citizens
In a world of lords. The real crime is that so many
Felt deserving to die. After everything I did,
Me, the one who versed them in survival.
Is it really such an offense? To rejoice
Even in being kept? As is right, amnesty
Cloaks those who can afford its treatments.
I am the feminine of my nation, the ones traded
Like beads. Nobody knows my name,
Can decant my soul from its true appellation.
Now in the hour of omega,
One like a man comes as I am going to sleep.
My rightful master unburdens me. I swear on my life,
This dark leash the good people fastened. I want someone
To set it down. I was never alone.
masochism
after Lucie Brock-Broido
was the meek.
was montgomery overcome.
was bombed. was empty buses.
was bull's eye to bullet,
the billy club, the bloody church.
am black. historically
was skin kindling. was prey
to hook and hood. was the named thing
and never called. learned
to take a beating. was silent
despite the presentation of the throat,
the brick and truncheon,
the gutting clean. nineteen
fifty five and the we
walking there and back. was the seeing
of things for the first time, the tele-
vision, the web of fire.
opposed the politicians in the door,
the turning on of the dogs, the sicking
of the hoses. am the nonviolently
strong. was the women and children first.
was song. was the lifting out of egyptland.
was black eyes. was swollen lips. was asking for it.
the sitting down. the giving over.
Meanwhile, Back in the Relative Safety of a Ticker Tape Parade, Buzz Aldrin has a Moment of Epiphany…
Yes, the moon is made of gunpowder because that's how it smells—
the whole Sea of Tranquility's a CIA sham: it's really a loaded keg, miles
of galactic hotbeds waiting to blow those pinko commies off their asses
should they ever land one of these days & POW! right in the kisser
& then where will Comrade Khrushchev go? I keep the moondust
stored in a cool dry place in the third lobe of my right lung because
Neil keeps it there too, I can tell from his hot bronchial breath
that he's hoping to corner the market on this organic gunpowder thing, yeah
he told me as much over Madagascar when we crossed the terminator
into the cold cislunar night, the vacuum between heaven & hell/New York
City. I might add vacuum is no longer just a word to me like Rigel Fomalhaut Altair.
Holy mother of the eagle has landed! I was born here & I'll die here
against my will, against my will, I'm practically singing I'm so goddamn
full of earthshine—
night soil man
Although I did not perceive it at the time, for me he represented my first revelation of a certain power, my first summons by a certain strange and secret voice.
—Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask
I.
All love is vascular. You pull
yourself out of earth's thighs, body
sullied with the body's rot, two heaping pails
steaming with profanity.
II.
It's post-war Japan. There are no cows.
Still thirty years from Kobé
and the beef famed for beer, massage
tenderizing as a fist in foreplay.
III.
Stark like the eyes of a dead fish
and as conscious. Your hands begin
a motion they've never been taught.
Even St. Sebastian converted among men.
IV.
Simply: to fertilize is to love
as feet are to gloves. You mine in drifts,
deeply, deeper. The ground's bowels shriek
like a duct cleansing itself of itself.
V.
When your wife comes to bed
smelling of lilac and soy, you picture her in
trousers, you desire her with each cuff
stained by subterfuge, the masculine weapon.
VI.
You remember everything about your birth—
the porcelain dish, the clasping light,
the first minerals passing through you,
dust to dust, like to seminal like.
oracle
Snakes don't lie.
You should have killed me
when you could.
Before the rain. Now
harboring your own death
like a feeding tick,
like a child.
Didn't you think I'd survive?
The night a wall of teeth,
the ocean's slow stew.
Daddy, I know how much blood
it takes to make life.
Open your chest to us. It's time.
plague
There was a young man from Back Bay
Who thought syphilis just went away.
He believed that a chancre
Was only a canker
That healed in a week and a day.
—anonymous
I. TREPONEMA PALLIDUM
After three weeks a chancre forms—an ulceration
with a hard edge, springy center—the way a button
feels through a layer of cloth. Also, the lymph nodes
in the groin begin distorting, swell like vulcanized rubber,
painless though immunologically ineffectual.
Week eight. The primary lesion sloughs down to a scar.
The host's hair combs out in patches, the body
a culture of warts, rashes, the mucous gray, moist
as snail tracks. In the secondary stage, ten percent
lapse into irritation, meningitis. Finally
one year after infection, after the pustules scab and flake,
remission—for some a permanent stay. For unknown reasons
in many of the untreated, the third stage fails to develop.
The skin never rots away, the skull is never kissed by light
as the brain shrinks, the spinal cord racked with tabes dorsalis,
shin pain said to feel as though someone were beating
the legs with the back of an axe. No. Thirty-five years
after the initial act, some lucky syphilitics
never encounter the mental deterioration, concentration
less and less, their emotional control slipping, the episodic
rages, the delusions of grandeur, of guilt.
II. SOMEWHERE
an unsuspecting man is walking you across a carpet.
> Like a slave, you go where he goes, a white bacterium
coiled 20 mu, slipping by the thousands
through the membranous eye of a needle.
You know evolution, the descent of man
for what it truly is. Que será, será. Every day a gift.
III. THE CANON
Hitler. Dürer. Van Gogh. Nietzsche.
Three popes, countless kings, which means
all their lascivious courts.
Inspired by a rational phobia
of boils, Catherine the Great allegedly
kept royal tasters—“les Epreuveuses,” six women
assigned to venery, given two calendar seasons
to diagnose those who would love a tzarina.
It's present in Cellini's casting of Perseus, the disembodied
head still wriggling like a spirochete. In Keats's dame
sans merci, the warriors pale, enthralled.
Schopenhauer found reasons to hate
just as Giovanni Casanova found reasons to otherwise.
Caesar, Cleopatra. Abraham, his “sister” Sarah. Pharaoh,
Pharaoh's harem. Goya. Gauguin. Consequently Tahiti.
The sometime Calvinist James Boswell bemoaning what he thought
was a “winter's safe copulation.” Said one of the damned,
“A man who does not have the pox
is not a polished gentleman.” Said Don Columbus, back
more than ten years, brain inflamed in the tertiary stage,
“I am God's Ambassador,” his body dropsical
like a ship filling with water, the bacteria ravenous as an empire
called forth, multiplying.
IV. TUSKEGEE
Somehow you do recall
it had a point. Fluid. Yours.
The white doctors
eager to draw blood,
tap the spine.
They said they needed it
just as it was—pristine.
All you remember
are months of headaches and the bloody crusts
that never went away, every summer
the doctors armed with needles.
How your children died at birth
or how they should have.
How much the state reimbursed you
for each black and boneless face.
post-partum
Just a month before she was to have become a mother, a young peasant woman was carried away by a sudden illness to the Land of the Dead, though the day after her burial she was spotted in the market.