I don’t understand why this is still a problem,” the ACS Director says, point-blank from behind the line of tiny crystal goblets filled with discreet, elegant sips of sherry. The Director’s flight, and that of every sherry-flight at the table, glistens in the muted light of the cabin. He stares on through the front windows of the yacht’s dining room into the night. The city is partially hidden on the horizon, and, up above it all, almost insignificant pin pricks of light lie scattered like fallen sequins.
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories.
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me.
I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring… Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
When I was in the seventh grade I found a scalpel after school. I think it belonged to my mom. There was nowhere else it could have come from. And this scalpel almost glowed. The black, black, veiny marble counter it was sitting on reflected a kind of halo around the silver knife, anything but subtle.
Paper shapes
Real people
Paper shapes
Real people
Most certainly
I’d ride
You can't self regulate
My need
My want
To drive
They come
They go
They said something about me once
I said
Smash
Your ears
In a plate
Of alfredo
Pasta shapes
Real people
Pasta shapes …
Real pasta.
how easy it is to pack our lives into boxes
a few hours at most. sprawling trinkets
amassed over years, witness to innumerable tears,
crammed onto orderly confinement. shut away.
i peel free polychromatic posters; walls bare
but for thumbtack holes. how many wounds
lie under the thin coat of landlord-white,
mnemonic shadows abandoned —
my own. those of fictive predecessors.
can it ever return to primordial barrenness,
once infested with love?
when hinges creak and plumbing shudders
will it be my poltergeistic haunting
or just overactive imagination?
i would like to think that would be enough.
ACHE RAGE AND CRUMBLE
SMELLS OF DEATH AND SAFETY,
SKELETONS WITH FUNNY FACES
COMBUSTION STOPS AND STARTS
NEW THINGS FROM OLD THINGS –
AUTHENTICITY IS ONLY SURVIVAL
UGLIFY YOUR LIFE AND RESTART
FIND BEAUTY IN THE LESS BEAUTIFUL
AND PERHAPS THE LESSER KNOWN
TO FEEL BELONGING IN A PLACE NO ONE BELONGS
MIGHT BE HOME.
A catalog of haunted places on campus: between the rotating shelves in the lowest floor of the library. The study room on the 4th floor of the old Academic Center with the leaky vent. The closet in the bio building, filled with jars of hearts. Someone stole one of the hearts in sophomore year and they never got caught, so now the heart - it was an elk heart - could be anywhere on campus, so really anywhere could be haunted.
Someone saw a ghost in your dorm, four years before you lived there, but they’re still handing down the stories of it. It was dressed in white and bleeding from its fingertips. You passed a dead opossum on your way to French the other day. It didn’t look dead. It looked fine. Just curled up. Just a little grim.
Now, every time you turn your computer off, it feels like a tiny death. Now the clouds feel like ghosts in your throat. Now you keep checking if the pots in the kitchen have rotated overnight. Now you keep wondering if every time you fall asleep it's a death in miniature and you’re haunted by all the yous you’ve been before.
There is a restless feeling in Autumn when everything seems in motion. Even the sky and the trees feel it: one last dance before winter.
When Vanya was 9, a man came to stay with her mother. He had a soft voice and sounded like a gentleman from the old movies, but his eyes were hard. He let her ride on his shoulders and gave her a silvery necklace. He told her her father would gather her up to heaven when she died.
Heaven is dark. She can feel rot pressing against her eyelids, like a brittle honeycomb. She still wears the necklace: a cold cross on her collarbone. She feels languid, skin prickling with cold sweat as she lies in the darkness.
When Vanya was 15, she spent most afternoons out on the practice field. Clouds over the turf dappled the sunlight, and there was sweat, blood, and spirit in the air — in every breath. That’s why she might never have met Claire. But that one day it was rainy, with big wet drops; playful like water balloons. They darkened the sky, and the clouds promised lightning, and the coach was on the phone: maybe with an administrator, or maybe the rain was an excuse to continue some important conversation. By then they were drenched and cold and they heard shivering thunder from beyond the treeline. Regardless of the reason, they wandered inside, phones ringing, calling parents, arranging carpools. The school band was muffledly playing from somewhere farther in. With nothing better to do, Vanya wandered the school, thinking how eerie the halls felt without anyone in them. Rounding a corner, Claire was just, there. Silly bow tie, curly hair, holding oversized trombone. Then again, maybe Claire wasn’t just “there,” after all she had to go up to talk to her so she could scribble her number on a sticky note. Funny, how fuzzy that flashback was: a feeling more than anything.
Vanya doesn’t know if she should pray — do you have to pray in heaven? She feels like her breath is coming through a sieve. Or maybe a funnel? She always got those mixed up. She must have got everything mixed up, to not know what to do in heaven. When you’re mixed up, you can’t even remember if your shoes are tied, or whether you’re supposed to pedal forward or backward and shift up or down gears, or how to breathe. Vanya feels like she needs to pray. She must, the world is squeezing in around her, she can’t breathe, it is cold in the worst, sweatiest way and her skin is clammy with fear and panic. She has to get out.
When Vanya was 16, she had asked Claire out to homecoming. They were at a park, and the summer air felt like honey, sweet and warm. The last lightning bugs were out, and it was hard to tell where the sky started and ended: which stars were dancing out a cosmic rhythm in time to the fear and joy in her heart, and which were dancing on shimmering wings, a dance of love and loneliness, glowing their soul into the darkness.
Heaven is choking: Vanya finally has a handhold on something in the cramped darkness. It is wet and crumbles beneath her grip like bread pudding. It felt like that game everyone plays at birthdays, the one where they spun you round and round and round and round and round, with a paper donkey tail in your hand trying to find a wall to pin it on, trying to find which way is up and which way is down.
When Vanya was 16, her mother stroked her face, adjusted the lace on a long white dress that a quiet man had put her in, and placed a flower in her hand. The man who lived with her mother had draped the necklace with the cross around her neck. Claire was there too, long straight hair tossed in the wind. She played her violin like an angel, like it was the rapture, like heaven. Vanya wanted to cry, but she couldn’t move her face, she tried to applaud, to even look at the beautiful girl. But the sky got farther and farther away as they lowered her into the ground.
Heaven is harder than Vanya expected, she thinks as she tries to crawl her way upwards. She feels like a child again on the playground climbing up some tube. Only thick with dirt and heavy like a blanket. Clumps of soil get in her ears, in her nose, in her mouth, in her eyes. It tastes like the baking soda her mother would shovel into her mouth when she said a Bad Word, dry and powdery like sand. Except darker, meatier, wetter.
Piece by piece the dirt crumbles down. Inch by inch she works her way upward. Finally, she feels her fingers light upon something new; grasping onto it trying to wrap her arms around it. It’s just like a pull-up bar. Coach always said I was good at pull-ups. Hope makes her heart race, a tension worse than the tight pressure of the soil or the box she was in before. Above the thing in the dirt; it must be a root, there is only more dirt. Piece by piece it crumbles down. Inches turn into hours.
First, her ring finger gives way, the nail ripping off down to the cuticle. The pain is sharp and surgical, but there’s no way to comfort the wound, no way to move her arm close to her chest and hold the sting. No one there to kiss it better. When you’re on the field with friends, or enemies, or acquaintances, or anyone; or when you’re asking a cute girl to dance with you, it feels like you can take all the pain the world can give. Vanya felt like a child, buried in darkness bleeding from a dozen tiny blisters and crying quietly.
Inch by inch. I might never make it out, she thinks, and realizes that she no longer cares either way.
When Vanya was 10, her mother got her a wooden stool so she could reach the countertop. She showed her how to make bread, jam, and cake. Sunlight streamed through the window above the oven, a gentle breeze making the flour floating through the air dance in the light. The man laughed when he saw them and told Vanya she was a good little baker, and that one day she would make her husband happy. Vanya put baking soda in the cake instead of baking powder, it tasted flat and soggy. Her mother told her that it didn’t rise. But it didn’t matter, because they laughed and it was sunny and the whole house smelled like sugar. She doesn’t smell anything now.
By the time Vanya breaks the surface, the pain doesn’t matter anymore. Yes, it runs thick like honey over her body, but it is drowned out by a dull hopelessness, a swelling numbness. Walking on hard ground feels like swimming —- feels like flying after hours underground. The night could be beautiful and austere and cold, but she honestly can’t tell. Years ago, when the lights turned off and her mother was asleep, she would like to drift through the halls and make friends with the darkness. Wandering without anywhere to go, maybe for water then back to bed, maybe to stare down a hallway. Once she saw the man who lived in her house kneeling by the foot of his bed, sweating and shaking as he offered a shuddering prayer.
She wanders now, down empty streets. The checkered-tile patchwork of houses quiet in the night. Somewhere ahead she hears noise, people laughing and dancing, music playing and flashing lights. Vanya wants to be furious with envy. Why do they get to dance? She feels a kind of panicked desperation to be with any other people, in the warm light. She tries to gulp back the fear, but only swallows a piece of dirt unlodged from her teeth.
Vanya reaches a stately window, set into red brick gazing into a small gymnasium with pinprick lights dancing on the walls like stars reflected in a cold lake, misty-blue music drifts across the floor, littered with balloons and napkins. And there, in the center of the room is Claire, white sneakers tripping over someone else’s feet, as together dance badly and beautifully. She’s never looked more enamored, childish delight makes her smile look magical. Vanya can’t look anymore, she squeezes her eyes tight as the darkness closes in around her and she presses up against the glass, wishing she could just sink through into the light.
But Vanya is in heaven. And heaven is lonely tonight.
The craters are hardly visible now. The cracked earth of the great divots is covered by a layer of plant life. The tall yellow grass waves in the breeze, a bandage across the land. Ticks jump from stalk to stalk, frolicking in the light. Below the earth, gophers scurry back and forth in their tunnels, embarking on errands and family business. In the dips and holes, ferns create a miniature canopy over a carpet of mosses, further sheltering the scarred ground from the sky above.
The field remembers when harsh shapes of steel and flame streaked the sky, the whistle of their plummeting payloads setting the grass trembling in anticipation. Boots slammed down on the ground, squelching the ferns into the mud as they attempted to run, to escape the inevitable. Shouts filled the air. And then a boom, as the world shook, and the ground was scarred.
But that is done now. The scars are covered, healing bit by bit.
Among the covered craters stands one hill. It is not a particularly large or notable hill. A piece of rusty scrap metal has recently been pulled aside from the little door that it once hid. The door is circular, made of dullish grey metal, and buried up to its center. Behind the inwards-swinging door, old, reinforced brick walls line the inside of the hill, forming a dome beneath the earth. A set of wooden cabinets are built into the wall opposite the door, their once white paint stained to a dark brownish gray. The floor is dirt, dry and hard packed. It conceals cigarette butts once ground under boots, stained paper and wrappers, a dropped pen with ink long dried.
The field remembers when this room was filled with voices of fear. A legless corpse on a stretcher, wailing as if it were still alive. A blinded man trying desperately to open the cabinets. A uniformed figure curled up by the wall, knocking her head slowly and repeatedly into the brick. Knock. Knock. Knock. A scream. Knock. The blind man dropped a glass. Crash. Knock. Knock. A distant explosion.
The sounds are gone now. While they are still remembered, their echoes have faded, even in the earth which holds them longer than most.
No plants grow under the hill, except for in the center of the room, where a single fern patch sprouts under a beam of light that shines through the top of the hill. This beam shines not through a window or from a conveniently placed spotlight, but through a hole, dug into the rain-and-time-weakened ceiling by a group of children trying to bury treasure.
The treasure lies near one of the walls, a cardboard box of stolen jawbreakers only half buried because the ground here is difficult to dig in and the children didn’t have the patience for it. How could they, after all, when they had found such a cool new hideout? The children did not find the remains in the dirt. The children did not hear the sounds that had echoed in the hill. The children saw only what was here now, and what was here now was good. Their shovel is still planted next to the treasure, and sticks of several shapes and sizes have recently made their way into the stash by the cabinets.
It was the sticks that drew the attention of the gophers. A series of tunnels stretching under the field, connecting at three places to the dome, were home to the local gopher family. A mother, father, aunt, grandmother, uncle, and various assorted gopher children all lived together in the tunnels and were rather confused by the new neighbors poking at their tunnels.
The gophers were timid at first, and they avoided the children. The children searched for the gophers but never managed to get close. The gophers stuck to the tunnels, and the children quickly dismissed them and ceased their attempts at stick-powered exploration. As time went on, though, curiosity got the better of both sides, and they sought to make contact. A kid left some apple slices for the gophers. The grandmother gopher brought another kid a worm. And slowly, the factions began to interact and to play.
As there are no children here at the moment, there are no gophers either, except for the uncle scrabbling at the sides of the treasure. But when the children return, there will be a vast sea of curious nibbling faces to greet them.
Throughout these events, the cabinet under the hill has remained locked, both the children and the gophers failing their attempts to open it. Its stained doors remain a mystery to them.
The field remembers when this cabinet was one of instruments of life and death. A syringe rested next to a pistol. Knives and scalpels lined the shelves. Blood shone on the stainless steel and colored the glass trays that held it.
The tools are buried now. Rainwater, moving drip by drip with the force of a flood, seeped into the back of the cabinet and collapsed it. Where once the shelves were, now a new harmonious kingdom has formed. Moss makes its home, forming little cottages and towns for itself within the dirt. Earthworms stay the night at the moss towns, a pitstop on their lifelong journey. Delving down from above to explore this new land, roots take hold, providing a new stability for the earth below and the plants above. If the children and gophers were to ever open the cabinet, they would not be impressed by the new contents, but for the field there is nothing that could make it happier.
The field rests easy below the occasional chattering of the animals and plants, great and small, above and beneath.
“Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events…The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing.”
—Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave
silently it slithers
serpentine
—satanic
leaves
alliteratively a-rustle
it carves a wake- (funerary?)
hence-lifetime
of snapped twigs
& naturally
dreams
a faint gleam
lunar
(thus portentous)
light on its flesh
or through it:
translucent
its latest meals laid bare
it swallows
moon
leaves
trail
translucency
verily, it is an ouroboros:
sisyphean self-digestion:
an act of mythic
collaboration
it shits
them all out
corroded
in consumptive vitriol
essences extracted
for your viewing pleasure
Caleb looked like a ghost, in the light of a computer screen. The click of the computer keys demanded silence, so though a fan spun gently above, its crisp black blades pointlessly recirculating torrid air, it didn’t make a sound. The room was choked in darkness, the edges between objects made meaningless without light. Reaching out, the thin plastic of a water bottle was not as sturdy as the glass cup he’d expected, and it was wrung and crunched in his grasp.
He reached for a notebook, filigree lines and schematics printed on the surface like cracks in clay, but his hand was shaky and instead, he found himself bumping over a sample bottle. It clinked heavily against the table, the viscous liquid inside muting the sound, then spilled out slowly, running like syrup over the papers.
Quietly: “Shit.”
Caleb’s eyes didn’t move from his screen, his face expressionless. He knew he was hungry in the same way he knew that those ruined papers represented months of work, his best idea yet: as a dull contemplation, quickly ignored in favor of more important ideas.
The bolt in the apartment door slid open, cheap tin painted up as silver. Light from a flickering bulb in the hallway threw shadows under piles of clothes, sickly on the crisp linoleum floor, and reflected off the metal seams of towering filters that lay rejected against the sleek black countertop.
Silhouetted in the light, she muttered, “I don’t know why you need samples of this stuff. We have a sink.”
She turned the knob for emphasis, black water running like blood against the basin. He cleared a space on his desk and looked up from the screen. Awkward silence stretched out, only seconds, but in the dim light and the early morning it felt vast.
“Alright, Dad, love you too.” She shrugged as she switched off the faucet.
In the street below, a bottle smashed against a wailing car alarm, and muted by distance someone screamed. They wailed not in defiance or terror, but in pain. Caleb knew that scream — everyone knew that scream. When the water itself is polluted, laced with sickness, and people you know die like flies on the surface of a summer lake, you get used to those cries. He didn’t know what the other sounds were. He didn’t want to know.
It was funny, he mused, the scream jolting him out of his work. No one died of dehydration. Even the most committed, even those who knew that to drink was to die, gave in eventually.
“We’re running out, aren’t we?”
“We have a day. Maybe two.”
Caleb turned back to his work. Water dripped at a snail's pace out of the latest filter. It was a little clearer, wasn’t it? It was harder to work with shaky hands, bleary eyes, and a mouth like parchment, like sand. Neither of them bothered admitting their thirst, but it hung in the air like a stormcloud. Finally, breaking like a dam, desperation rose to the surface.
“I’m going out. There’s gotta be someth—” she started.
“No.” His eyes darted up. He spoke too quickly. “I’m almost done.” She sat down and he seized his moment, rising shakily to slide the tin bolt against further conversation. The outside world was dangerous — the desperate would drink anything, and they were both too thirsty to risk the temptation. And he was so close. He barely thought as he discarded the key down the kitchen sink. It hit the side with a bright clink.
He narrowed his eyes, filtering out thirst, hunger, and numbness from hours of work. His thoughts were muddled, Caleb thought. He needed clarity.
The blackened water that was spilled across the inventor’s desk and splashed over the sink basin had dried, now. The filter was painfully slow. But after this test, he would know that he had succeeded.
The newspapers said you’ll know the end is coming when you stop feeling pain — and slowly dehydration numbed his sore muscles, the ringing in his ears, even his sandpaper tongue. Still, he made the final adjustments on a filter that he no longer had time to test.
Out of the corner of his eye, Caleb saw his daughter stand. She approached the sink. Dehydration slowed his reaction, his eyelids trying to wet his eyes and follow her movement. He reached out, fingers closing around the cold metal. Standing up cost too much time, and too much energy. The room extended, the seams between the tiles faded in the darkness. Each step thundered in his ears, gripped in his hand a holy grail, he tried shouting from dry lungs that he had finished, that the filter was done, that they could save themselves from the cloying sickness flooding the world below, but instead all he could do was rasp, unsure if he had really spoken or just dreamt speech.
Blackness closed around the corners of his vision. He stood too soon, but with each footfall hitting like raindrops, he reached the sink; lunged over empty bottles, clothes, dishes, domestic refuse, blood pounding in his ears. The sharp pain was iron in his veins, blunted only by dehydration. He could feel his stomach flip and surge with bile. Sunlight broke over the rooftops, through the blinds.
His filter clamped onto the pipes beneath the sink, Caleb took a step back, panting, The filter — his greatest invention — gleamed in the dawn. Beneath the apartment, the plumbing groaned and shrieked, pressure building up, but the filter held fast.
They had no more tears left to cry, but if they could, they would both be weeping. The inventor's daughter laughed as she reveled in the simple pleasure of tap water! She reached out to fill a cup.
The faucet sputtered and shook. No water came up. The inventor let himself smile for the first time in days. The key to their door was discarded, the door locked, and all the water filtered out of the pipes.
He would not die a putrid death, infected, poisoned. He could not hear his daughter screaming at him, trying to tear his magnum opus off the pipes. Warm sunlight heated the room, and the fan did nothing but recirculate hot, dry air.
I’m tired of playing a scientist.
The letters of all the questions, the guesses, experiments and conclusions stamp themselves into my brain.
It’s easy, the way my finger flips on the lights, letting the hum into my head as I tend to my beakers, muttering about potential solutions to the problems I can touch.
It’s all I can do to not look down at the ink and graphite smudged against my hand while breathing in the air gone stale with fear and regret.
And I’m tired of masquerading as a mathematician.
The variables in all the equations, the theories, calculations and answers work their way into the inside of my eyelids.
It’s automatic, counting the way I’ve learned to by jumping backwards from the hundreds, my fingers loose and limber from the sting of checking and rechecking what should be correct
It’s all I can muster to get it all right, because to be wrong by a literal fraction would surely mean weeks of embarrassment.
And I hate being a historian.
The books and photographs and movie reels find their way into my heart in the night, arteries clogged with what should be ash, if not dust
It’s tragic, how important the information is in the anecdotes written by various hands, some of them my own.
It’s all I can hope to ensure that the yellowed pages and faded time shape how I see the science, those abundant and precious scenarios, and come up with the formulas for the success that flits between my fingers.
I will never stop.
With love to the scientists, mathematicians, and historians of the world,
The Curator of the Museum
Can I hear you again? I'm missing
your voice… your words are food
for an empty stomach,
a vacuum,
a person — like me.
It’s very likely that I dream too
much, for I never desire
to awaken; the sun may shine
but you gave me light, enough to
warm a fire that can melt a
glaciered heart…
But nowadays I'm burning, and
the clouds can't help but cry —
when these thoughts pollute
their purity and blue fades into gray.
And when it pours, a flood of words
will lift a page from thirst,
and when I read I hear an echo
coming from the depths of my throat.
Once again I hear you, — how odd
it sounds to my ears…for yes, I
must admit that I forgot
the sound of my voice.
Between the stars is time, and within time
you came to love me.
Us youthful few, who amble along aimless
time, shan’t oppose
the prose which writes our rights, while wrongs
be wrought as
songs for the self.
Memories made for a mortal’s dreams;
how fortunate my eyes came to be
-- to see an angel who,
without wings, caused my heart to
carelessly spring.
Though two hands cannot press as one,
my heart has been touched by you.
No longer could meaning itself remain sober;
for between time came tragedy, and within tragedy
your soul sprung away from me.
A’lass she was, and was no more...
What else have I felt? -- if not the desire, to sing as
the choir, of my silent disdain.
I am here, yet still I wait for her to arrive.
Only in a mortal’s dreams...
You are in a hole. There is no way out.
You could try clawing up, if you want.
Perhaps you might tear some dirt loose;
perhaps your nails bleed on cold stone.
You might as well yell your voice ragged,
but you cannot tell if your cries can reach the surface,
shrouded in shadow as it is,
and few ropes could reach this far down anyways.
You would prefer to be in a box,
with no yawning reminder of an elsewhere.
You might content yourself with memories of the sun.
Idiot. What do you know of sunlight?
You are in a hole. You could try to spin stories:
what you will do once freed, what your friends must be up to.
You fail, of course. The words of freedom and friendship
have no point of reference, here in the hole.
The longer you stay here
(What is ‘long?’ You lack minutes or months.)
the less you can recall of words altogether.
Tools of communication are vestigial,
here in the hole. They wither.
Suppose that, through some miracle —
gravity reverses for your sake —
you get out. Congratulations!
You were missed, met with a chorus of
“Where have you been?”
You answer, but it all seems rather silly now.
You are surrounded by loved ones,
not alone, in a hole. The hearth crackles
with welcoming warmth; the clammy hole
now seems very far away indeed.
After a moment of adjustment to the light
you forget that darkness weighs on ineffectual eyes.
You find it difficult to speak about silence.
Let’s say, when you keel over, you go to Heaven. Well done!
Dining on ambrosia, God at your side,
you peer down through the stratosphere at your family.
What the hell are they doing down there?
Your nectar-marinated tongue recoils,
imagining their dirt-born food. Their sublimest tones
grate against your ear, attuned to angelic chorus.
The hole, up here, has slipped your mind altogether.
After a bit God likely bores of you, casts you back to Samsara
As a baby, or a bunny, or a beetle, or a bird,
you are far more concerned with your body
than with the Kingdom of The Lord Your God.
So its echo fades. But on the off chance that you become
a worm, you might writhe your way back to the hole.
Maybe this time it will be a home.
The hole itself would not improve;
you would just have worse taste.
when i died, i tried to take the sky with me
i remember the way it felt, sharp and bright
on the scraped skin of my cheek
but when i tried to grab it, i couldn't reach
tired arms ricocheting
off the copper, stiff in the air
i put my wrists to my ribs, told myself
if i imagined hard enough
i could turn bones into silt
ask the sky to feed them
until petals broke through,
blood-red sprigs molting
to rageful mauve
let them devour, i thought
i would rather be nothing
if i cannot keep the sky—
i do not want the world
to keep my bones
The vines hang however on the trellis
Since no hand arranges them
Their tangle stays unmanaged
And their twigs invade the vegetable garden
And the rags dry with the clothing
And the orchard will not conform to the property line
Four weeks of hard work wasted
Clearing bramble, raking leaves
Hell, take it: I'll sit here
Satisfied, with the stars for company.
