Kirsten Samanich
Black Holes and Air Holes and
Ways They Are the Same
I:
I know nothing of parenting but I suspect it mirrors memorized grocery lists.
The way my father asks me to repeat what brand of cereal or what type of bread because he’s at a loss for paper.
I never want to be difficult, so I tell him
Not wheat. Not bran.
Not nuts.
I do not list the possibilities, only their inverse. Only the absences.
When he’s poured into the aisles he sees scrawled-out indications in his
head and he mistakes my directions.
Buys wheat. Buys bran.
Buys nuts because he thinks the words bouncing haphazard in the tunnels of his ears are what I’ve asked for.
II:
I know nothing of zero gravity.
Of the first time your child tells you that she’s swallowed a fistful of holes.
I know nothing of what it would be like to hear your daughter say that her friend has died.
That her friend has been
Clipped. Crunched.
Scattered.
Loose on blanketed highway,

like the finger painting of an inattentive child.
I know only of being the daughter-- the holed thing.
Of blinking when your mother says what does this have to do with anything.
And can you still empty the dishwasher.
III:
I can recognize the contents of my stomach as they disperse in their attempts at digestion.
I know of becoming a firing squad shooting from the inside out.
Gut and esophagus fighting for target practice.
But I’ve spent years trying to unknow this and to better know that.
And I imagine, at my most unbent
I imagine the options like words, like lists in the ear.
What not to say. An inverse.
Not nuts. Not bran.
Not dishwasher.
IV:
A dead romance language of grappling for inkless pens or of losing sheets of paper in endless crinkled rivers of un-preparation.
V:
Somewhere the wheat loaves constantly re-appearing on shelves.
Holes breaking down in the gut or

bubbling up through the lips.
Somewhere the body’s weight repeatedly undone and given back in a constellated summary of itself.
And somewhere written legibly and uncrossed-out,
I’m sorry. I am here.

self-swailing say restless like it’s a bad thing ingested and i will still want to tattoo whole bodies with tongues. say calm. say forward. say expansion mean
reduction. say health mean stomach. uncoil midday, middle of a crosswalk, purse deserting you like an animal desiring non-domesticity. say exception mean rule . say rule mean exception. be frizz in heat wave. knuckle cheek say gentle. i will still want to crack stratospheres and reverse laundry cycles. everything deserting you now everything rewinding you. practice estuary bleed forest fire.

An Archive of Self-Fulfilling Apologies
His body has never been strictly defined or contoured with sharp edges; he is a thousand overlapped images, an opacity of skyline progressing into translucence, collaged across the sunroofs of my brain. He is ground to pixie dust on a hundred nameless highways. He is abstracted in a crunched bone sculpture. He is hole punched with sleeping pills. He is the number of ways that I can predict the future, as I watch it spider web out beyond me, as I am lying on a bare mattress landscape, studying his vibration and projecting him onto my lips before he even lands there himself.
He is a fully defined figure and an almost complete erasure, and all of the gradients in between and this is what he has chosen to be. A sequence of molecules continuously divide, cinderblocks of carbon un-pasting their own edges, puzzles undoing themselves as if separation was always the route to their solution.
His is a skeleton constructed primarily of roadmaps, and somewhere he sits furiously whiting out the city centers with fingers like heart rates, bending into points before flatlining on the paper. Somewhere he sits with disembodied legs or a free floating skull or an evacuating liver or electrical hands or somewhere he sits just ignoring all our calls, staring numbly at inboxes, at repeatedly filling screens and mistaking them with a version of the ground. In static he sees existence, in evaporation he sees solidification, in departure he sees his own reflected image, singular and fixed.
And in everything I see the spider webs, the final drama of his disappearing acts, projected upon the concrete before he even lands there himself.

our prospective powders
I’ve made a habit of watching bodies contort so that they may better eat themselves whole.
I’ve dormed with miniature mountain ranges of concentrated apology, hardened then flaked, then strewn out on public sinks. I’m a funeral crasher, a wedding reducer. a residue under the nostril but never the nostril. never the mouth. nor the gums.
nor the credit card blades. but I’ve lived in charcoal responses, studies of spine and shrunken cones of light. rods of ebony powder spreading out, releasing into repetitions of your face.
ways of telling you that it is possible to love and hate simultaneously the way that you see the world. ways of telling you that I will not fail to convince you someday, even if we are forty. even if I stain the creases of my knuckles into cartoon hands. I will not fail to show you that your cheeks pool together more shapes then I draw, and gather the room around you into lines somehow both abbreviated and scattered, bold and unseen.
And with repeated hands you touch your face like escape route, while I spread it like landscape.