Mezzanine

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by Zoe Hitzig


  Pawn Slip

  How hard to price a loan. How simple to tell a story—

  eke out a life in sentences. Themes, motifs, old mares

  in dreams—but a day here is like a day no where. How

  heat here rises, is also white. Hundred thirty degrees

  up there, hundred seventy-five, hundred ninety-two.

  Wardens worry about diabetes type II, hepatitis,

  innocence, all factors which increase incidence of

  heat-related illness. What is earthed in the prison limits?

  Four million pounds of vegetables. Generous lodgings

  for a few thousand brood cows whose young have

  futures more explicitly traded. A match for the signature

  on a pawn slip. A travel clock a silver ring a pocket

  watch. Possession is a pledge and a pledge is proof of

  what might have been but probably wasn’t.

  Which is the wind that nuzzles the wall and enters

  the chamber. A jeweler is an investor long on metals.

  Possession is also a position. Carbon paper prostrate

  against a paper slip. A travel clock a silver ring a pocket

  watch. Possession is a pledge and a pledge is proof

  of what might have been but probably wasn’t.

  Which is a story. Stories do not heed the danger

  in counterfactuals nor recognize their brokering value.

  The state’s compensation sums to eleven thousand per year,

  but if he didn’t prove the value of the collateral

  they’d destroy it.

  The List

  at the Heart Institute

  Who lords this list anyway. Whose lists is

  the lord of this list on. Eighty days of next

  on the list after a lifetime of lists. Of

  strip-mined tar sands + petrified dunes.

  Creasing the terrain of your forehead.

  Behind which blinking synapses wait.

  Restless geothermal features. The city also

  waits. Heaving + short of breath, strapped in

  by busy blood-bridges. Red taillights mirror blue

  headlights. Color-coded weight cresting toward

  some walled-off core. Machine that gives

  + receives. The city (your body) is full of division.

  Welcomes metal + flesh. Vestigial appendages.

  Futuristic ordnance. The hungry + fed mingle

  in aortic alleys. The well + unwell mosh in your

  rib cage. Rib cage as runaway truck ramp. As layby.

  New home to active-duty batteries extracted from

  the broken flashlight. Carrier for ammo + gun

  from the just-dead soldier. Rewired

  stand-in for the melting circuit on the fuse box.

  Snug cavern for the exiled apostle—

  would we take to it as we took to your son

  would you take to it as you took to your wife

  would it take after you like your son takes

  your hand now, fingers contorted around

  your thumb like veins dodging behind

  the vena cava, as the nurse announces the news.

  Pulsing from a heap of crackling synapses

  the small bivalve machine you are waiting for

  unpledges its allegiance to another body veering

  off the curve of homeostatic indifference. The body

  skids into a plane of infinitesimal mirrors. This still-

  splintering stranger is our gift no more lists—

  we will take to it as we took to your son

  you will take to it as you took to your wife

  will it take after you like the other father

  whose son is not tugging the gauze of your wife’s

  moss-green dress as she lifts him onto your hospital bed.

  The other father whose son’s body the slow moss

  arranges to cover. Body in surrender. To surrender

  is to empty oneself of allegiance. So that all sums

  are zero-sum. So that the moss may take its place.

  Proxy Means

  a test. In a morning

  blue suit the Census Taker

  drops his credentials

  and picks them up

  by a lanyard

  gingered in the red dust

  between his shiny black

  shoes.

  The eyes in the village

  hide. The glinting wink

  of the sun is in

  the Census Taker’s shoes.

  The laminated Census

  Taker marches to procure

  evidence. Evidence of

  need. Evidence of

  mistake. This Census

  Taker tells them

  what they have.

  What they need

  to mean and promises

  protection. Proxy means

  need. The Census Taker

  enumerates proxies for

  means. What stove,

  what kind of stove.

  How much kerosene.

  Take your identification

  card. Take care.

  Do they really make TVs

  so big. How much kerosene

  per month. How many deaths

  occurred in your empty

  cupboard. Don’t look

  at the shoe. Who

  after all is living.

  Here.

  Division Day

  I.

  Perhaps a detailed appendix will do.

  On the measurement of birthweight

  in this environment. Triangulate

  the measure across facility records. What

  is record, I ask you. Neonatal

  weight loss is known to be quite severe.

  Who did not lose 10% (of something)

  within 24–48 hours of being born? Is

  there reason to trust maternal recall

  in this setting. Given the centrality

  of this measure please test there is no

  clustering—around round numbers—

  that the number of deaths accords roughly

  with regional averages—that the data

  satisfy Benford’s Law, that they could

  not have been invented in the bedlam

  of birth, of being born. And to record?

  Why the forensic attitude is a question

  I’ve learned to no longer ask. Here, a

  new year, we are on a rural health mission.

  We have helical insignia on our lapels.

  We have a census; we have maps, we have

  museum. These institutions code what we

  owe only incompletely. There may be pockets

  of space that destroy the information falling

  into them. Those would form evidence

  of a similar kind. Evidence of a similar

  paradox, a paradox of information.

  II.

  I am trigger happy as the horizon

  of a black hole. Today I am a fantastically small

  coefficient. Yesterday I was helical as hellfire.

  Always I feel at home in acid rain, it burrows

  into pores to locate the core of me, impurity

  joining the spine with all its familial plasmic

  fluids. One rainy day, you will find me

  naked but for the black shroud of my own

  ambition, folded in a geometry you have

  seen before. As that night, remember when?

  Coming home I couldn’t in my compromise

  stand up to gravity stepping out of the taxi,

  fell, held onto the grate of the sewage drain

  like a handle to wring out my neck and

  look up at you. This is how I will remember

  you you said and you did not mean to say

  something hurtful. We are full of saying,

  coding rhymes, one dog-tag dropping

  into a bin of them, after the division

>   enters the system, entered by whom, by

  UNIQ_ARMY_ID // DOB // HOME-

  TOWN // YRS_SERVED // by near-tragic

  longing for uncompromised completeness.

  When you find me in that naked geometry

  of compromise I will tell you I never lied

  to you, I will tell you I cannot to you or

  in general lie, tell you I cannot even if

  I wanted to lie about all that I have forgotten.

  III.

  Division is a form of forgetting.

  You know Photograph 51 that breathy

  out-of-focus evidence, discovery

  of the geometry of information.

  See the scatter diffracted the strands

  antiparallel the curvature the crucial

  crystallographic patterns of restriction

  restricting parameters—our iron-clad

  cardinality is bound up in this hellfire

  of helices. As I struggle to zip my skirt

  arms contorted, zipper behind me,

  light patterns inching across my wall,

  I am Rosalind Franklin who in

  the same motion discovered a bulge, her

  skirt would not zip, friends asked if she

  could be pregnant. In a way she was—

  raped by x-rays, pregnant and bulging

  with division. Uterus absorbing

  the shock of discovery not as a martyr

  but as a fantastically small coefficient.

  How many times such attacks have

  been leveled against me. You think your

  self so self-contained. Abstemious with

  respect to influence. As if to record

  is to be neutral. When my colleague asks

  how are you doing today what I want to say is

  what Franklin was known to say often:

  I am good, though female.

  IV.

  Division occurs when we exit with or

  without intention one ruthless enclosure

  for another. As when I exit your kitchen

  every Sunday after you have painted

  for several hours a portrait of me reading

  the same page over and over I leave my best

  blouse on the coatrack between sittings—

  black silk. Thick knuckle-sized knots

  for buttons. Is it too warm in here, what tone.

  Your stacks of inverted-color photographs

  of travels, of ephemera, photographs taken

  by one camera through the viewfinder

  of another. That’s Prussian blue below your

  lower lip. If a machine were to photo-shoot

  division day it would also have two lenses

  in inexact relation to one another. I have

  learned to thrive on these inexact relations

  stemming from my own vexed dualism,

  from my understanding that the number

  attached to me at birth was all too trust-

  worthy, from my acknowledgment that

  division occurs on day one for too many,

  from my desire to be washed on that day

  divine day of divisive resolution in acid

  rain, misguided forensics, UNIQ_ID //

  DOB // HOMETOWN, I am

  a fantastically small coefficient but not

  yet small enough, let me be self let me

  be finally fantastically alone.

  V.

  As when the father opens the door

  for the prophet drinks the wine at the empty

  seat and closes the door again.

  The eyes of the family open again.

  Measurement, outcome,

  we have museum. You there. You

  are fidgeting in your seat, burn most

  of your daily caloric intake this way,

  shuffling your proud joints past

  each other. I know, you would dive

  out of your own lithe already-godlike

  body to be that prophet, harbinger

  of never-forgetting, for being him

  you might justify your bearish but

  inevitable bearing on geometry,

  on the hellish helix of history—

  shift, slide, rise, tilt, roll, twist—

  on the field equations that describe

  a tender invitation, the elegant

  curve of the neck of a black hole.

  You remember all the details so that

  you will not become one—shear,

  stretch, buckle, stagger, pitch, tip,

  propeller—when will you give up

  this self-image, self-as-singular, self-

  as-self, same, separate, singularity?

  VI.

  I woke alone in a hotel, where?

  Perhaps where finally is meaningless.

  Why was I not afraid. I am always

  afraid with you. Yesterday I was told

  black holes are not as black. Not as I am

  afraid. With you the sun is fragile

  as the constant. Speed of light.

  Yesterday I was told information

  can escape, can hold shape on exit,

  the sun also a shape inside eyelids.

  The morning in the hotel, woke.

  To evidence. Pewter chargers

  on linen, smoked fish. Morning

  in the hotel. Woke to poached eggs—

  pewter chargers smoked fish wedge

  of lemon—there was someone else

  here. Imagine the coefficient. Still,

  life. Bring me a scale. There was

  someone else here. Still let me be

  coefficient. Fantastically small.

  There is someone else here.

  Fragments from the Imagined Epic: The Island of Stone Money

  ONE

  I exchanged a small short-handled axe for a good white rai, fifty centimeters in diameter.

  I

  need an

  axe

  or

  something

  to axe

  my

  weeds I

  need

  TWO

  For another rai, a little larger, I gave a fifty-pound bag of rice.

  a house. Whose

  house. That house.

  The one with copra

  and rice inside.

  One to grow out

  of. Step out. To hoist

  on my shoulders and

  throw at the men

  in pants. What do

  we have that they need.

  We have stone. We have

  strong straight backs.

  THREE

  I was told that a well-finished rai, about four feet

  in diameter, is the price usually paid either to

  the parents or to the headman of the village as a

  compensation of the theft of a mispil [woman].

  In pants is all he is today. And yesterday. And envious.

  He is envious of the net of interlocking hands that leaves us alone.

  We can be left alone. The net an inverted parachute conveys and bears our

  unswerving value. He is jealous of our system of value. He and his kamerads

  are colorless prisms protruding from the earth, ruts in earth eczemic as the

  Spanish suzerains before them. As the Spanish before them

  they strip-mine the fissures of our seashells. Take

  the shells too. Call them aragonite. I am one

  of many stones that says Bezirksamt. You are

  the one with the vocabulary to say these things. I am the anti-

  pneumatic. The numismatic. Who’s to say numeraire.

  A stone lost at sea is strong as a

  villanelle sung in stone.

  A five days voyage. Longer in storm.

  Come bearing betel nut. Come bearing form.

  For the man at the mine site. Bring your seashell adze.

  Feel the flintstrike of value when you cleave the
cold-clad stone.

  Take coral, a large piece grind circles in stone-center.

  What makes this difficult. The tools are softer than

  stone. Hence labor. Why the hole. For transport. For all

  future loans. Where is the bamboo raft? As sturdy as the last? So many lost at

  sea. We are like joules. If I were you I’d begin. To conduct business in joules. I

  am one of many stones with a black X in paint. I am the one leaning.

  Into the bosom of a house. My owner will earn me back.

  He is smoothing the roads. No, we enjoyed it.

  The way our roads teased our feet.

  The feathers of the blos-bird

  sweeping faces in the gale.

  A five days voyage. Longer in storm.

  Come bearing betel nut. Come bearing form.

  For the man at the mine site. Bring your seashell adze.

  The flintstrike of value when you cleave the cold-clad stone.

  Take coral, a large. Piece grind circles in center.

  Make this difficult. The tools are softer than.

  Labor. Why the hole. For transport. For all future.

  Is the bamboo raft as. Sturdy as the last. So lost at sea.

  We are like joules. Do you conduct business in joules. I do.

  As I am one of many. Stone with a black X in paint.

  I am the one leaning to the bosom of a house.

  My owner will earn me back as.

  The roads teased our feet.

  FOUR

  I am the stone lost at sea, there is a hole

  at my center. / A stone lodged in the fold

  of the sea. / I am still dense with value. Why am

  I missing a center. / What is arrogant. Simply know I

  am. Am smoother and bigger. / The Blarney Stone. Someone is

 

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