Asylum

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.