Mezzanine

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by Zoe Hitzig


  January. Tall, spare, lone

  turbine thrashing by

  the abandoned interstate.

  I play my game.

  I await the next campaign.

  How We Programmed the Apocalypse

  Remember the sonic attack? Kind of like that.

  Simulate the sounds of crickets, then decimate the crickets.

  Sounds of a lover who can see in sixteen colors.

  Sound of un-dread heretofore heard only by the dead.

  Soon the people hear our sound. Each wants her own

  private symphony. In a long queue they gradually accrue.

  From a distance they seem to stretch continuous,

  smoothly defined as a smile line. But up close?

  One sees discontinuities. Up-raised fists, cupping palms.

  Trading sundries. Shouldering past sisters and Sundays.

  Casting around for ways to afford the sound.

  Neighbor came to mean She Who Queued in My Vicinity.

  As the queue shortened everyone could afford it.

  Then everyone was plural: data. Everything

  served and being served on metal servers.

  It was never our intent to punctuate the sentences

  of others. But now it’s late. Too late to unstate our

  importance. And besides, the crickets died for this.

  Pulses quicken, slipping across our screens.

  We play the quieting machines. We pity the soon unseen.

  A thought arrives. Ask forgiveness instead?

  No. Everyone we pity dies. The rest rust in line.

  Silent Auction

  Look what we did to me

  inside the sun

  warm blue hue

  my varnish cracking

  ice sheets

  gliding

  nothing clings to me

  see the trail of hair

  wisping behind me

  we have done this

  I measure constant flux

  + it is not a transit

  I meter constant albedo

  + it is not eclipse

  nothing left when

  we measure the amplitudes

  what is left when

  we circumscribe a wave

  do I salt the sea

  + curl myself into it

  or salt the sea

  with stinging ants

  if only I might bathe again

  (when)

  if only I might eat again

  (when)

  what I mean when

  (when) I say matter is

  I will give this to you

  but you will give it back

  Huttonian Theory of Earth

  When the swallows haul up into sky

  we would correct their color with digital

  projection. We would look into the eye

  of the projector. It will singe our retinas.

  Make lace of them. We swoon

  over the geometry of vision. It is

  the geometry of a postcard plus a point.

  Sleeping above rooftops I hear a truck

  loading / unloading as the dawn still

  takes requests. Its long low lowing

  the desperate voice of granite pushing

  metamorphic schist or the corporate

  announcement that another uncomformity

  has been amassed by the seabed.

  But you know this. You finger the palmlines

  of the seafloor. Tell me does evolution fail

  to track independent truth or must we construct

  finer tools, weightier estimations? Tell me—

  On Styrofoam

  Despite the fruitfly’s humming gusto often

  I believe my waste hazardous, the jaundiced

  innards of an apple now laced with human blight—

  hazard produced as I consume I cannot escape

  the thought. I peel the sticking stigma off

  the table to immure it in the Styrofoam cup

  with traces still of rooibos. I hazard how

  Styrofoam is borax and heat, expansion

  blithe as a solid can be and

  the thermal resistance of the hoof

  of an ox. How thoroughly opposed

  to flesh. Fathom the body in the Bar

  where Ray Krone throws darts. Or Ray McIntire

  when he makes a life raft for

  the U.S. Coast Guard (Styrofoam is

  after all ninety-nine percent air

  enough to save a life). And

  the first inklings of napalm in an adjacent

  cell cavorting with plutonium triggers—

  the Inventors Hall of Fame

  inducts McIntire just four years

  after Arizona inducts Krone into freedom

  again, and as I write

  Styrofoam insulation products

  save billions in energy costs.

  I too am only the expansion

  of polymers when, as the apple

  was once exuberant and whole,

  I remember the time in the park

  after the afternoon bell I charged

  my teeth into my forearm and the force

  hurtled me over myself and I knew new

  power as trace as mark and said

  mom look what sister did to me

  Triple Witching

  That’s not smog sitting on the lake

  but smoke blown south from the fires

  in Saskatchewan. The sky never asks

  our opinion and yet we charge all manner

  of missive through it, casual as the first

  man (surely it was “man”) who cried

  “This is mine” or the man who believed him.

  I do not know whose smoke-curtain

  this is, falling now to subdue,

  pressing down over humming

  flesh and interaction.

  But I think my chest is a pocket of sky—

  slow, heart. Speed, up and up.

  Find. Cadence, frequency at which to

  resist, enclosure. Oppose motion.

  Suspend of ever-maddening.

  Frenzy, maddening for want of

  space, volatility implied by the threat of

  expiration. The nothing-and-every-

  thing-to-lose. As we turn down to sleep

  the nocturnal crowds in bushes and

  trees play from where we have paused.

  A gnat traps himself in my left ear.

  Options—drone, hum, buzz—expire.

  War of the Currents

  Telephone lines gallop outside.

  They trace lines in palms. Surmise

  these poles are our trees now. Palm after palm.

  I’m lucky my

  currents alternate, can be direct,

  conform to National Electrical Safety

  Code, conform the way George Fore-

  man’s indoor/outdoor grill cools

  on a countertop even as the power grid

  ails. The grid is not cerebral.

  In its circuitry is systematic. Does not

  employ given-to-us structures. Deploys

  those agreed-upon—lattice not

  scale-free, lattice not small-

  world, lattice not Erdös-Rényi-random—

  & remember the blackout, remember

  the solar flare, remember forgetting the complex

  conduits, vast, unseen, busy with volts,

  fragile. I can take single or split phase

  supply streams. I can take the pastoral nodes

  & urban junctions & make them less dependable.

  A spatial network. Dependence

  lends trouble to the interdependent.

  If only knotgrass might act

  with quick & unanticipated collapse, lapse

  fragile as our overwhelmed, unwell trelliswork,

  courses invisible. Split phase. Single phase.

  Phase LOCK. Phase shift.

  We are all in, all in to a
chieve our

  economies of scale which achieve

  the opposite of balance, traffic flows toward defeat—

  what is economy but this train on which

  a conductor wakes sleepers before the last stop,

  cues the soprano, mutes the horn

  without pausing to sense we all conduct well, well

  enough that it is tough to engineer

  a quick & anticipated death, death

  by fibrillation by two thousand volts—

  prophase, metaphase, anaphase: continues.

  Phase LOCK. Phase out—

  Last month a utility pole made news in Mariposa County.

  Was charged with manslaughter after

  lighting a wildfire. They called it

  negligence. Call it revolt. Call it warning.

  Generalized Method of Moments

  Find moments like tiny razors.

  Arrange into blades. Harvest them

  as a leisure gardener. First yield, gloved

  and methodical. Impose structure.

  Inspect roots. Inspect stems for infection.

  Or pluck them unhandily. Wings

  off a fruitfly before the dreaded experiment.

  But too often the moments find you.

  Arrive in legislated chaos hurtled

  By a chagrined wind, sandstorm

  of needles— eddy of nettle-hairs . . .

  How to order in the midst

  the mist of the stinging field,

  where memory is a rash in the tall

  grass. Moments as hives. As slices

  of indifference from which to estimate

  some parameter of interest.

  Blinking, eyelids too become blades.

  The scrim of our error matrix

  shudders with imprecision.

  It shakes itself out. We forget.

  Trial for the New Aubade

  Day is brushing the brush off my back. No. Dawn is

  tracing the margin of my being with unpleasant certainty.

  Today is a truck? It shakes this structure in which we sleep.

  Yes. That’s our new definition of dawn. No reason to share

  dawns these days with strangers. And that something so arbitrary

  as Sun played scheduler for so many centuries?—like Feudalism,

  then Welfare State. Like secrets swelling in your absence.

  In my new dawn you are barely a face. Inkblot eyes and mouth

  a simple laceration. You know how easily you appear

  in the corner of my vision to remind me where I am not,

  in the corner of what I am not to remind myself of,

  in the corner of my screen to furl, unfurl, tap, there, there’s

  the slender magnet arresting the iron flecks of my data . . .

  You will betray me. Leave me alone unsure of my own

  periphery. My eyes, these tiny factories of forgiveness,

  at what rate will my optic machinery depreciate—do I worry

  about these decreasing returns to scale? The splat sound

  of the shower water as I wring my hair in my new dawn. My day,

  my data, how much of you do I lose with this dawn?

  1st Trial for the New Aubade

  Does the season match the birdsong,

  did I hear the birdsong over the white noise machine,

  who brought the white noise machine here,

  was it the other, heaving next to me under a shroud,

  for how many seasons has he/she been sleeping here

  next to me, was there a logic of want to begin with

  in a seaside town or a dark box rattling underground,

  did he/she come through a revolving door like the termite

  winding up through the drain of my sink basin,

  was there a seasonal contract or perpetual exchange,

  who installed this sour drain in my middle, is it time

  to adjust my angles, for whom, whom today, tomorrow,

  what is history cloaking, as burlap wraps around wet figs,

  is there a logic of want, when will my season match my song.

  2nd Trial for the New Aubade

  There are hands on my body, how many.

  Do they belong to the other, heaving.

  These hands that want to touch me, my skin.

  A burlap wrap around the roots. A transplanted tree.

  I just remembered how these hands came in here.

  Was it the last blond moon after the last

  full day. I strayed beyond my sliding door

  to switch off the terrace lamp. A figure spilled out

  of shadow. As if night had waited all those

  years. Time is indexed by tones of abandon.

  Whose. On the terrace the logic of want

  placed one by one its hands on my body.

  It invited itself. Now day after day

  my body tenses. The hands never flinch.

  Fragments from the Imagined Epic: The Song of Have Blue

  the hawk moth alone detects Lockheed’s

  Nighthawk % Nighthawk’s faceted wings %

  the energy that might announce his design

  % Nighthawk is stealthy %

  sister was afraid of darkness until godfather

  % put her in boots and hat % rustled

  in the leaves % “See better, night friend” %

  “we too can steal, have inward-canted stabilizers

  to countermeasure us manned demonstrators”

  % on the waistline of a woman on sand in slack

  desert night the hawk moth listens, shifts pin-

  feet on her skin % skin stretched taut across pelvic

  bones % translucent under the moon’s glow

  % desert sways beneath the survivable

  testbed % the woman lusts % sketches circles

  in the sand with the bone that bisects the crest

  of her pelvis % for Nighthawk % for Nighthawk

  snuck into this night his up-swept wing to sigh %

  sister has joined to fight him with him %

  a more honest blue hue to say have blue

  % say that her pelvis too is faceted

  as his wings % sister sighs godfather-blue %

  lusts for Nighthawk’s stolen maiden flight %

  pelvis dips into sand % “you are more beautiful,”

  whispers the hawk moth to Nighthawk %

  “than anything I’ve let myself sing to”

  The War Gone Wrong Room

  More like the maximum-security playground on the street with all the riots.

  More hedgefund-glass enclosures as if the riots were landscape,

  with waterfall. More cross armed supervisors with first-aid kits

  strapped onto ankles, next to pistols. More puzzling over numbers

  like truth : how many watering cans . . . and truth : how long ’til the color

  left her . . . and dare : take the scent of metal off take Alice’s hands off

  the monkey bars . . . More like playgroundless—more tangling in nets

  more ropes for nets to avoid the void below. More no-ground ground.

  More forts, more bows, more sterns. More ornately decorated wheels

  in the helm, please. More play to distract from lack of ground. More so

  now that Alice is no more. Moreover, what of the supervisors?

  More budget cuts. More for your dollar? More for the Dollar. More

  exotic juice in the juiceboxes to trade with the bullies. More juice

  to burn into smoke to soot up the ceiling fan. More keypads to catch

  our twiddling thumbs. More tangling bodies in nets. More nets

  filling with corpses. More decals for ships and chests. More juice

  to bargain for, then burn. More fire blankets on our lungs. More

  casual more indifference. Mere casualties. More Alice can you hear her?

  More distant grows Alice. “More?” she moans, “it just keeps going.”<
br />
  More war gone wrong. More wounds. More soon. More keep going

  don’t stop no. More please no. More I can’t. More can’t breathe.

  Objectivity as Blanket

  Nor the police, hyenas on hearing five confessions, four false and

  one too irresistible. Nor the mental health elephant, tusked by the state.

  Nor the common sense stork twisting at the prosecutor’s feet. Nor the one

  the one juror, uneasy facing eleven pale sheep that bay all day

  all night for conviction. Nor the Governor, sir! Nor the common sense

  stork, now in a knot. Nor the shots. Nor the clause, unbending. Nor

  the clause, bending. Nor, seeing his fitful approach, did one turn back

  to flip the window latch for the lifeform nearly breaking himself on glass.

  Nor the next Governor. Nor the state—carriage horses trotting ever

  steady blinders acute to the eye. Nor the widower how could he, puma

  in pull-focus. Nor the defense counsel, not for lack of it. Nor the stork,

  is she breathing? Is there such a thing as breathing here and does it mean—?

  The polyester the royal blue the blanket on the bed of the mother of two.

  Silent Auction

  Please let me tell you what it is to make market. Paint the sky Purple-K. Hospital gown-blue. Parent’s house violet. Daub above the fiscal river I can see from my office oriel. Where I am writing now. Pretty pricing patterns contain damning dispatches. Think of the market as your rain. It is rain. High frequency rain and there is never a highest bidder. It is bullets. Blown to sky and deflected. High frequency bullets filling the sea with their shells. Pick this one. Pick high frequency. Pick no one.

  You are in bed with your stun gun. We have a market failure. We prepare to cover the sky. In sodium bicarbonate. We already have empire. Let us make market. Here. Where. The other side is shadows. The huddling audience bids against us. Against time. Against blueprint. The negative space is time. It is not enough to press into vellum and displace natural dye. Vellum that came from ancient mammoth? The mammoth ate stellar gas. At noon time. Being too large noon for him is always. Be too large. Amortize the sun.

 

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