Year: 2015

For This Meal We Give Thanks

You never do get used to waking up in the dark. Bleary-eyed, you shower, dress, poke listlessly at a piece of toast slowly going soggy and limp on your plate. The butter is rancid: you gag at the smell when you lift the lid on the plate but can’t muster the energy to throw it out.

It’s a windowless hole you live in, with a flight of narrow stairs leading from the peeling door down to the concrete floor. The whole room floods when the rain comes from the east; you clean and clean but there’s always the faint smell of mildew coming from somewhere.

The rest of the line is mostly all zombies, haggard and colorless in the bleach of the halogen lights, muffled out and alien with face masks and ear guards. You approach soundlessly from behind, exert steady slow pressure to gain attention; nothing fast, nothing startling. Cartoon gravestones posted on the break room walls memorialize fallen workers like HASTE MAKES WASTE and SHOULDA GONE SLOW. You can’t remember the last time you saw the sun, can’t remember what an unfiltered human voice sounds like. Everything is concrete, aluminum, moving lines, sparks.

It’s a nothing night in the middle of November when you find the body. You’re shocked, at first, more by the offensive red of the blood than by anything else. You don’t know the man, though his name tag says he was S. Patrick: it doesn’t mean anything to you. You recognize the marks on his throat, though, and on his wrists and elbows. Sloppy work. You cluck to yourself, and bend down to finish what’s left, shuddering with rare pleasure, before feeding S. Patrick back to the machine.

The next day they’ve reset the accident counter and there’s a mandatory staff meeting. You scan the crowd, looking for a brighter eye, rosier cheeks, a knowing twist to the cheek. It’s been ages since you’ve had a trainee, but everyone is safer when each person follows the rules. This, at least, you’ve taken to heart.

The Devil Take You All

Anyway, here’s what I think happened. Let’s start with the rape. You, lady, were raped in a cave: thus my birth. You left me there to die, which, fair enough. Harsh, but fair. No judgement; in your place I’d probably do the same.

But, okay, so my father the rapist saves me, the baby, and whisks me off. Not to live with him, no, naturally not, if he took in the child of every rape he committed he’d be awash in babies soon enough. But alive, and serving in one of his temples. Not much of a life, but I guess better than the alternative. Again, this is what I figure; it’s happened before.

So fast forward years and you both, husband and wife, come to my temple asking about your barrenness. Now the oracle’s holy, not stupid, and knows the pattern: baby left on the steps, old couple asking questions, there’s some godly irony in there somewhere. She hooks us up, which, how often did I long for parents? Late to the party, but okay.

But she doesn’t tell the whole story, or maybe she’s wrong, and of course neither of you bother to sit down or compare notes, you just rush headlong into the SAME ASSUMPTIONS you always make. Plotting, murder, poison, despair: screw the whole rotten lot of it. I haven’t eaten anything I haven’t made myself since I was ten years old, never drink out of the glass set before me. It’s not the rapist watching over me, just sense: these things have happened before. I don’t know which of you is trying to kill me, and I guess I don’t care. I won’t stick around to find out. Thank you for finding me, you’ll understand if I hope we never meet again.

Better Than Both, He Who Never Saw the Sun

It’s been three weeks since Cohen last left the studio. She’s been too busy, and there’s a chemical shower in the corner, and a sub shop that delivers round the clock, and someone left a cot here ages ago, so. She sleeps on decades of sweat from others too busy to leave, maybe, but who cares?

They took her leg when she was fourteen, dead rotting meat. She screamed when they touched raw flesh: she remembers their eyes, all whites behind red lenses, the long edge of their beaks, the ineradicable reek of burning oil. They let her live, that full of scruples.

This her latest is a self-portrait in plaster, a dragon’s nest of left legs hatched from the egg of her hip. She is smeared white with the making. When it is done — done enough, good enough, close enough — she stretches, yawns, longs for fresh air.

They are waiting for her outside, samaritans, eyes red and blank with the setting sun, beaks sharp with borrowed time. They let her live, that full of scruples.

An Invocation after Jung

for Lashley

Rise up, you electric heat on an October night.
I lean upon the lintel of your entryway.
My hand spreads the blanket and waters the nameless plants for you.

Rise up, my friend, you who are sick with the weight of your soul,
break through the shell.
We who never do have cooked for you.
We who never do have wrapped a gift for you.
An old record and a broken needle await you
Who have etched old songs deep in your wax.

We have found blankets for you, and pillows too.
We will do the dishes tomorrow.
We drove herds of books together for you.
We filled your cup with red wine
(that, at least, has not changed).
We set out cantaloupe and salt on paper plates.

We knock at your too-full apartment and listen at the door.
We are late and growing later,
but will wait, patiently, a little more.

Katrina

Under the water, deep in the muck: they are alive with other life. Worms and fish, corals and jellies, weeds and sponges. Things with many limbs, and none. A creature that turns itself inside out to move: mouth to anus, anus to mouth, now out, now in.

She is named after a hurricane. Her mother, wading through water up to her neck, found a man floating face-down in the water during those first days; dead, she thought, but no, he lived. She turned him over to check on him, and he breathed, blinked, sank into the water until his head was even with hers. Neither of them spoke much in those days, but stuck together until they were out of the water and even afterward. Later, her mother found her tongue again in a desert town, but he never did; always too quiet for comfort.

He dies when Katrina is pushing thirteen. She finds him on the couch after school, dry and brown, face and chest fallen in like an apple core left on a windowsill for a week. Dead, they said, but she has her doubts. After hours she breaks into the morgue and frees his body. Never a big man, he weighs next to nothing now; she can lift him with one hand, carry him without wearying.

It is a long walk to the water, but she owes her father that much, she figures: one long walk back to the sea.