Mosquito (3 page)

Paint a still life of my pillow. Use red. Be messy.
Remember the time you rode to the fields,

 

watched the calf work itself frothy in barbed wire.
Scribble that churning, the emptying of wails.

 

Remember how the dissected cat leaked
its chorus of sweet end? Shade in the hunger—

 

the not keeping anything down. Remember sheets
scabbed with stains. Pull out your hair, rub the fibers in.
Dip your fingers in the toilet and flick. Remember to scrape
a blade to best show what stuck during the night.

These pills are a lover sneering
motherfucker
.

 

Melted lungs, oil smoking from a lathe. Too many,
and moths waterfall from nostrils, nuzzle the body's graffiti.
They are the last gasps of a premature baby.

 

Rattle them off my teeth, let's pass them with our tongues.

I would have handcuffed myself to a bumper, jumped
from a bridge to feel my lungs. But I watched the seasons

 

from a wheelchair. Doctors fed me steroids, stretched
my legs. A nurse scrubbed me clean. Months passed

 

before they wrapped my fingers around a cane.
During winter's first flurry I dropped everything—

 

spun half-drunk away from my mother, cane standing
as if held by the dark sky—and ran like a storm cloud
before falling into the slush. Overturned, my eye patch filled
with snow, lay like a mirror that would never show my face.

I shave my head because my eyes are monks swallowing
their tongues, and only hunching at a table

 

in a bookstore can make me whole.
The Lorax
,
Where the Wild Things Are
, children point openmouthed

 

at scars. They buy with jars of dimes.
Read books where fat words lumber the page

 

like headlights illuminating a pharmaceutical fog.
I hum in my corner, hoping for more time—

 

for them to choke on the gasp of a body kicking
back to life—for a nurse to wicked their tiny muscles

 

raw. Smiles anesthesia-dark, their eyes flash like razors
that let snowflakes slice, cold as surgical steel.

—PAUL GAUGUIN

When I spin fast enough, my socks
fling into the rough and burning world
like gasoline-dipped bees or the dirty tube
socks they are. Which really means I'm lonely
and have a garden of meticulous succulents.
My cactus lips slap fables of sleep
on trees. Pigeons play in my mouth.
The day is all sky and it's not even
January or midnight. Little mouse,
come out come out. If you drink
from my hand the Lord will not lend
me a shovel. Oh furry gray sun,
life is all bloody sheets. Leaf-hearted,
I won't eat eggs or peas, but slam tequila
shots until my eyes are cheeks and wet
as piss buckets. I eat with my hands.
No forks. No spoons. Knives only
for afternoons at the ballet where I stab
myself so I can streak, howl into the apple-
rotting sunlight. Sunlight where the gumball
is the only prayer I need. I race to the lake
where bodies drown in algae and the mind
flexes everything naked. Without coming up,
I swim to the lilacs where homeless snarl
orchestras from garbage cans and weep
grease-eyed when brushed by tan skin.
I use torque like a jellyfish.
I think shark fin and ladle.
When my toes kiss the shore,
it's usually raining. I'm hungry and exhausted.
I crave bacon on my bagel and you
are always smiling when I wet-dog it
to the counter. On that day you watch me
chew, you'll realize I've always lived upstairs,
apartment thumpy with music and flushing toilets.
Shuddering, you'll swoon with the thought
of bacon and when the heart begins to sweat,
thread will pull from your jeans, drawn to my face
passing in the window, where sweetly,
it will rumble into the ideogram for disaster.

You shook, rolled clothes from hips like the sea,
circling arms in a friction I thought would burn
our home and before I could say a little bit of hail,
you were sitting buckass naked on the couch,
where your wetness stuck, cried, like a mouse
in a glue trap and you didn't begin. Not yet.
Instead, beads of sweat ran your body
and we stared in complete silence at the fruit dish:
oranges, apples and plums like the google-eyed audience
of a solar eclipse removing welding glasses,
and even the baby's wails could not pull us
from our meditation and then I saw your birthmark
sitting between your breasts and it is, in fact,
the seventh president. An earring had fallen
and you'd picked it up with your toes where it hung
from that delicate wing of flesh like it had pierced
and I could see the patch of hair you'd missed shaving
glow on your calf like a gold brick in an Iowa cornfield
and drowning in this ecstasy I remembered waking
to song, you sloshing in the tub, water flooding
the tile as you flailed against morning, groaning
lyrics I would swear were Dylan's but just
as your keys caressed the door that afternoon, I heard
that song, and it turns out it is just some guy trying
to sound like Dylan and by the time the fake had finished,
you were half-undressed, trembling, hypnotizing me
with your bones, the sound of rain on the sofa.
Your lips moved, and I stopped you, put a finger
in the air like I had an idea that could save the world
or a secret I swore to tell but instead, unmoving, I sat
like a jackass, finger in the air, and you,
beautifully naked and absolute, smiling
away my incompetence, shaking your head
and biting a plum, juice streaking to your chin,
dripping like steam condensing on the shower mirror.

—
for SY

 

A week & we crawl. We lisp.
Soaked in shine, the crooked
I am fine.
In my head
turns progressions idle.
Steady wick the livid clouds.

 

We print names in blood
on white T-shirts. Scratch
steady to shine. Moonlight
confounds us nasty & the heart
murmurs. Baggies of ash, mothball

 

white. It used to be & it is. Steady
arm, go steady. The beginning begins
& someone cries—you shouldn't know
how. Infinite desolation & shine.
Come steady, let's drive all night.

 

We'll sing the get by & broken
will press from our lips. Dawn
is always a fistfight, don't be afraid.
Purity is butterfly-stomached & pallid.
Purity will never find a place so divine.

Bend closer—taste the thumbprint mirror, lick a bit
of struck-match mercy

 

Shadow-laced & red, light helps splinter the cruelty met with
a flayed body

What named me, the moth pleads, banging jazz
from lightbulbs

 

Whose flash can raw a perfect face?
Meaning is the glistening cobweb
Smooth, a spider's deceptive legs

I need breath thick with fire, syrup spilled from a swollen
heart
I need bites promising grace. Luminous, a tongue that prays
for wounds

Naked shapes devour winter light
They sizzle, salt the topography of despair

 

Stare & the body's brittle math twists into uncertainty
Mime-lips mashing sleet-swept cheeks

I say nothing in defense of the hand

 

But praise drool's fine silk stringing from a thigh

 

The furred wing wrenched off in honey