Mosquito (5 page)

 

One potato, two potato, me potato whore—
And then we bang, and I realize
This whole time, we've had the entire dilemma
Upside down and we must unknot
Our bodies. Already, I feel our bowel-
Heavy needs calcifying into gallstones
For it is the same failure of light
Each noon. The same squirrel, red lighting
At the window. Of course we'll continue
To brand each other with hope
That someone might deliver us a murder
Of stone-stunned crows. That we might hold them
To our ears and hum along with the muted conversation
That is not the sea but the pitchfork
Of our happiness pushing in and out
Of oil-sopped hay. The fire alarm will still sing
And my pacemaker will still shrug—
And like good little kiddies we'll crouch
Below our desks and cover
Each other's groins, confident
That our heartbeats' zings
Are just giggles in the bestiary of our desires.
We'll pinch and grimace our flesh-
Eating pleasures, not wavering
In our mumbled odes to catastrophe
Only a teensy bit afraid to go on

It's old canvas—rotted wood & splinter,
paint shattered like ice. My face is a riot

 

of flake & line. After the accident, the cops
pistol-whipped me empty—I was chipped-

 

teeth, eyes like megaphones. Over me lay
a darker stillness, a sheet of red silk. She took

 

that blood. You can't smell the singed hair.
She made pitch & range with pigment

 

& brushstroke. Face without swelling, eyes
nothing but blue. She squeezed melody

 

from my bruises. Hold the mug shot next
to the frame & I look like I fathered myself.

You want evidence of the street
fight? A gutter-grate bruise & concrete scabs—
here are nails on the tongue,
a mosaic of glass shards on my lips.

 

I am midnight banging against house
fire. A naked woman shaking
with the sweat of need.

 

An ocean of burning diamonds
beneath my roadkill, my hitchhiker
belly fills sweet. I am neon blind & kiss
too black. Dangle stars—

 

let me sleep hoarse-throated in the desert
under a blanket sewn from spiders.
Let me be delicate & invisible.

 

Kick my ribs, tug my hair.
Scream
you're gonna miss me
when I'm gone
. Sing implosion
to this world where nothing is healed.

 

Slap me, I'll be any kind of sinner.

Anesthesia dumb, scalpel-paste
Rawing my tongue, I found
Myself starfished in sky
Spinning days. I stared into my eyelids'

 

Bustling magic, the black
Of my hands. Oh, how darkness
Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs
& the choke of the sea.
This is my everything
—

 

Bright shuddered my cheeks,
Shadows whistled through their teeth.
Hallways thrummed & snorted,
The surgeons in my brain

 

Pissed with no hands.
Each day nurses wore their best
Tinfoil skirts, buried
Their caresses in my side

 

While pillows whispered
In spite of your scars you are tickled
To death of life.
I couldn't understand this
Always being held. Lung-machines
Sang louder. Wave song & useless.
Midnights & swearing. Blue.
Who prayed for me—my thanks

 

But I can't keep anything down.
Who knew it had nothing to do
With the wind by how light
Flickered with falling knives?

All morning I've watched puddles
Strain. Down the street, a hammer's tremolo

 

On steel—the many ways we've failed.
Each time a door opens I hear a child

 

Choking. I wave into mirrors
And there he is—swallowing fistfuls

 

Of pills. In tonight's brambled-dark,
He will kiss the first stranger he sees

 

With an open mouth. Shirt torn,
Desire calligraphied from lips—

 

No matter what we wish, he'll shiver,
It will all jackhammer on—

 

Rivers yearning for the eye-blank sky as it whispers
Its tender needles, its gluttony of clouds.

—
for Nick Flynn

 

Be afraid my blissful numbskulls
You are mine Plead

 

Your
asshole
&
amen
but
Like blackouts I have perfect

 

Timing I cannot suffer for you
Lips glistening with honey

 

Because there is a man
Behind my ribs break dancing

His spin—glide—split
A choir of meat hooks humming

 

Their hi-fi heaven Now can you see
How it will end All of it slick

 

With the breath I lose each night
When they scalpel me open

 

& from the mirrored hive of my throat—
My arrows my Eros my errors

 

Tongue swarming bone-black—
Red-glisten-red—head

Blossoming with bruise

This is chipped-teeth, the kicked-heart,
dried blood on grandfather's blanket.

 

I stretch to not be strangled
by the eleventh breath.

 

The body is a rotting orchard, eyes of cracked wings.

 

In the yard, the neighbor's dog, all red sores
& ribs, face an instrument
of torture, looks to my window,
hollow mouth broken by light.

 

Nothing is permanent.
Nothing lives in this bed.

 

Steam floats from my shoulders like breath.

Naked, I wait to be tuned like a fallen god's
flute. Cadence of a rattling shower
thumping my bruise. The music
of not knowing fills me, the too sweet
meat of an animal not yet dead.

Is there still time for me to stop
shivering under the purple weight
of a plum, palm trembling
beneath the supermarket's brilliance?

 

I wanted to pull it cleanly away,
peel flesh until I found a layer sweet
in pain. My tongue flicked tender corners,
caught rivers of blood in a pool
so deep it could fill lungs.

 

I still walk this poorly lit block
past midnight, vision filled
with bodies split into floods.
On these streets where black eyes expand
like nebulae, I refuse to understand
exploding shadows, how physics
carves gentle lines, a mural's scar.
But somewhere in this gesture
I have come to realize the stupidity
of most of this world's wants.
Recesses of the body caked
with blood, the fine art of stains.

The streetlights will blush when I sing

 

I felt a funeral in my brain
, dragging

 

My car-struck dog until worms spill

 

From his asphalt-shorn heart

 

And I weep—my voice emptying

 

Into the twirling dark like a house fire

For I am busted-lipped and scurvy

 

Thorned skin glowing
Kiss my spokes

 

But always it will be never It will be too late and lustrous

 

Into me lightning everywhere and you lovely

 

And leaching out of our chests All of us

Coming Anvil-tongued We will be

 

Sundered with light

Someone is hanging from an ice pick
Wrestled into my lung
But I haven't had Blue Cross
In so long it might only be my memory
Of a blue jay chasing the others away—
House finch, sparrow and pigeon—
How it sat at the feeder,
Beak-high, without eating for hours.
The entire afternoon I watched, reliving
The smoke-dark morning I shot my best friend,
And how four years later, seniors
In high school, we sat drunk on Pabst,
Squeezing the remaining buckshot from his calf
As a girl we both thought was ours
Watched, a cigarette burning a knuckle
On her hand. The moon was something
I will never remember and plutonium
Was what I thought of the fireflies.
And now, when I leave my porch
The ground will give beneath my feet
On this day wet and comfortable
With warm rain. Most of the apples are mealy
With bruises, but I will sliver them
With my grandfather's pocketknife, eat
Them with peanut butter while sipping green tea.
It would be much easier if I could
Say I have so much of everything I don't
Remember loving anything at all, but really,
What wouldn't I do for twenty bucks?

I cannot help but sing survival by stumbling
Slick-chested along the river, each floating can
Promising an avenue of catfish. Dark

 

Wheat of gilded water—the cure of a mouth
Gasping. & above, the street bridge fills with voice
& the smack of doors slamming. Again & another & so on

 

To infinity. So the tanager on the park bench. So the stoplight
Dizzying red. Cars like old bulls limp around icy corners
& I am simple, knitting myself from this barbed-wire wind

 

It cannot be called “after” because there is still snow
& our eyes are hard & unblinking. I confess this system
Of hazy skylines—fast-moving constellations of shouts

 

Plastic bags are like clouds & you are a necessary-mouthed
Dumpster. The barges clang or an explosion in the sky
It has been a kung-fu winter, months of rat-thick pillows

 

But this midnight the deal is different, huzzah, huzzah—
Your grace is half plague, your hands are full of shaking

When the paramedics kicked his heart
back to life—the blooming light, doctors
cutting away his vocal cords, a lung—
Grandpa heard children tearing
through leaves. I promised not to tell anyone
about the flowerpot filled with ash,
the yellow-walled smell. I caressed his back
with a warm washcloth. Vibrator at his throat,
he buzzed his pleasure. Kneading skin
in silence, I traveled the universe
on his tattoos. Mountains and ships—acres
of faded ink. I rubbed circles, pushed
until his back roared, the ocean of his gravel-
skinned shoulder blade where a woman,
naked and fierce, dangled from an anchor,
winking her secrets: there is never a reason for fear,
simple as the crashing wave—Grandpa's smile
as tumors turned him slowly into night.
How he held the X-ray to the window,
inhaling a cigarette through the hole in his throat
until it blazed, bright as an eye.

—
after Charles Baxter

 

In the dark, I count fingers,
Watch lightning spider
Over the mountain's toothy peaks.

 

All the while, the cupola grows
Cloudy with accidents—
Dark blossoms sticky and wet,

 

Clinging shadowy with reincarnation.
Yesterday eight and, now, eleven
Memories distilled, frayed.

 

The neck-breaking spiral
Of this morning's junco
Landing on a gnarled fence,

 

A surgeon's fingers tapping
His way through afternoon sleep,
Breaking a heart into ballet

 

Or the several postures of pain
A body makes falling unconscious
In the bathroom while violins roar

 

On a television straining with blue
Light. The fatigue of healing
Interrupted by the susurrus

 

Of an empty shower. An ear, blood-
Smeared cheek and bit lip—
A sterile, sweating tiled floor.

On the boulevard, morning's cottonous haze hunches—
Already hot breath & car exhaust among the dahlias.
Stumbling to the trash can, the neighbor's wave unbuckles
The sky. These are the beautiful ways we exist—rain needling
His sweatshirt, light orange-stripping from above. & blocks
Away, to the beer-bottled river where a wading man shouts
To a stray dog. His hands, bleeding & pruned, sweep suck-
Holes for cans—the same man having followed someone
He loves home last night. The same man who stared into a
Half-lit window, drenched in a midnight heat. This insomnia
Is more deafening than the buzz. Cracks moaning when
You walk that same water during winter's deep freeze. More
Important than the head-tilt when watching your pickup
Wrap around a phone pole. Headlights are always
Swerving now. Not yet, they flash, not just yet. Soon there
Will be digging in the lilacs. Boots will pit the thicket. Soon
Will be the simmer, the hollow of failing fruit.

Butcher paper, breasts, fresh snow.
I hacked whole flocks of chicken,
blade orange with rust.

 

We swung slabs of beef
from hooks. Heavy shadows
dripping through freezers, steam.

 

White aprons hungry for blood,
we used our weight to split
ribs, break bones.

 

Moans, the ripping of our saws.
We struggled, pink fingers,
pork against glass.

 

Late into night, I'd lie exhausted.
Weary brain unfolding
like a lotus, intricate map of the heart.