1
Departure
If you are not an academic, read me first:
This collection explores the capabilities of form in the expression of desire. The
goal is to articulate my personal desire for a daughter without subjecting her to the craft
of writing which would render her a character instead of a person. The title of this
manuscript (which best captures the goal of the project) is taken from Derridean concept
of the “trace” of language: this work expresses the desire for my daughter by being a
place where she cannot fully appear.
This work departs formally from the standard methods of writing in several ways
through its three sections: the first section, titled “First Attempts”, is a more traditional
series of poems with different titles, all which are trying to be the first poem; the second
section titled “Pygmalion's Tarot”, is modeled off of an eleven card Tarot reading called a
Celtic Cross, with each piece being the explanation of a card; the “third” section of this
book is the series of Unborn Letters seemingly responding to letters from Nanako, the
daughter that isn't present in the text.
If these formal qualities do not whet your appetite, know this: I want a daughter.
I want a daughter so much that in attempt to “create” her via my art (as creation
through normal methods is not tenable at this point in my life), I have stumbled upon the
aforementioned issue in creative writing. If I simply write about my daughter, what she
will drink or how she will walk, I will have committed literary murder, or given that I am
a male writer and she is a she, literary rape.
Writers do not write people: they write characters, figments. There is no need, or
capability, of authenticity for the characters that created all of the imagination. They are
slaves with chains of variable lengths.
Or ghosts.
I love/will love my daughter. I know this. I desire her to be real, to experience her
laugh, the way she plays with butterflies (if she laughs or plays at all), but I know that in
attempting to articulate these moments before her, I ruin them. My “creation” ceases to
be my daughter, and instead becomes just another character in the narrative I am writing:
she is not special, unique, or real.
Think of it this way (replace river with craft of writing and rock with Nanako):
If a river diverges at a rock, splitting around it, the rock is the one place where the
river, cannot be. The rock is independent, and bends the river, instead of the other way.
And yet, by watching that river, you get the sense that, if it could, it would roll over that
spot, consume it utterly, all for the joy of experiencing that one spot of riverbed that it can
never, and will never, control.
2
Poem
See: Not
the definition of
my daughter.
Poem (pō-əm )
That which is made
Poet (pō-ət)
Maker.
The pages of a picture book flipping in my hands
aren't close enough.
The small shapes of bone and blood haunt
as if there is something
or something else.
3
I:
First Attempts
4
Cepheus Wants a Cunt
Cepheus names Andromeda, which means man-thought. Her body is wrapped in a
black chain on the island of Jaffa and Cepheus is upset because Andromeda is his.
Cepheus makes boasts at the canoe clubs and told the altars to Poseidon that Andromeda
is more beautiful than any of the Nereids; fuck your wet bitch daughters, he says.
Cepheus is a great king, he rules the streets which he made out of ink black stone.
Cepheus provides grain grown from the Ethiopian soil, he makes the the waters spring
out of the ground by his word. Cepheus made the moon his wife.
Cepheus makes with words the entirety of Ethiopia gorgeous. The lotus flowers in
the rivers glow with fireflies, the granaries and wine vats are so full that nightly orgies are
necessary, if only to make sure nothing spoiled, and people only speak in the language of
Cepheus– antiquated tongues rolled over the words leaving etch marks and harsh sounds
as clanky as a typewriter– and their words were forceful as chisels, and always hanging in
the air like hummingbirds.
Cepheus rules for a long time before his visit by a smooth, gray woman, her face
gaunt and bright white like the moon, her language smooth and curvy, so much different
than his. Cepheus loves the woman when she appears, her aged features, the light
wrinkles that don't appear unless the sun is staring, her full, pale breasts and and hips
round as treeknots. Cepheus begs she give herself to her and the woman agrees. They are
in bed and Cepheus runs his tongue along her nipples while she becomes stone. Cepheus
removes her gray dress and spreads her legs, her cunt displayed clearly and Cepheus
says: what is that! The gray lady replies That's my cunt, Cepheus. Cepheus clenches
down on the gray lady's ankles until her feet were blue with pain. I want a cunt! I want a
cunt! he yells.
Cepheus goes to the royal scribes and demands for all the records on cunt and he
sits down at the reflecting pool outside of his palace. He starts talking into the water until
it begins to ripple and shake and become a tempest. Out of it rises a single tree, full in
bloom, in the middle of it a beautiful daughter. Hah! says Cepheus, That is my cunt!
Mine! Cepheus starts cheering, he runs up to the daughter and names her, dabbing cheeks
with the points of his fingers from left to write and shaking her shoulder awake like a
cradle.
The gray lady approaches the cheering Cepheus, high up in the tree shouting at
the sky, glowing from the light of the flowers. The gray lady sighs and retreats from
Cepheus before he begins talking about the daughter.
Cepheus goes to the four corners of his kingdom talking of fair Andromeda,
talking to the priests, nobles, slaves, and everyone else he can think of. Cepheus drinks
brandy the color of fire sometimes and yells at the sun and the moon on how perfect
Andromeda is. Andromeda is perfect, the spitting image of Cepheus words.
One day after placing Andromeda in her tree-cradle to be lit by the red flowers of
the tree, before Cepheus can even open his mouth to scream, the entire whole of Ethiopia
is sundered by a bolt of yellow light from the distant sky, the people rip to dust and the air
radiates hot blood. Cepheus does not escape the fire unscathed and is cut in half by a bolt
of light while he drags the daughter away. The lightning follows him like a handwritten
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line, zapping behind him with crackles and crinkles. Cepheus drags his bloody half body
and his daughter all the way to the Oracle on the edge of the city.
The oracle speaks to Cepheus in sideways riddles, saying that Cepheus is a ruined
man unless he can give the daughter to the boundless. Cepheus listens and goes down to
the sea with a chain. He sticks his torso in the water to attract monsters and chains his
daughter to a rock, lashing her obedient wrists, opening her pale eyes, and pulling down
her small jaw to show surprise.
Cepheus is sitting there, staring at his daughter, the chain not moving. Andromeda
doesn't speak. She stares into the deep boundless sea not moving. Monsters are
supposedly coming son but they haven't yet. Cepheus looks angry that nothing has
happened, and since he can't make the monsters come, just looks at the curves of his
daughter. He bleeds, in half, his guts trailing into the surf, nothing coming. He is there
now.
But no one hears the monsters anymore.
6
Dear
,
I can't imagine that small orb on the inside. Is it colored? Clear? I have no
idea.
And so I wrote to think you.
Sincerely
,
7
A Little Innocence
from reality of all nothing
will actually lift a luminous whole
– e.e. cummings
oscilateoscilate
wavy lines ripple,
womb-bound
in the wordless dark rushing in and out
of her uterus
she is waiting
a forceful blip that will soon begin
every day shake the transducer
steady technician hand
the transition of waves
of waves to a smooth plate of black and blue
not sheer with despair pyong of bleeps
our hearts all
tender flickerflicker
better than coke oh yes oh yes
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Dear
,
Your zygote would probably feel like dried ink if I had hands small enough
to fondle its shell. It's ironic that a zygote can only be held with glossy paper.
How do you revise one of those? I mean, the white-out just rolls right off,
and don't get me started on bringing red pens into your mom's uterus.
Sincerely,
9
Mirror at the Thrift Store of the Soul
Somehow significant is a mirror
at the thrift store across from Dina's
Chicken-Wafflehouse, where I first fell in love
with reality. There propped
against a faded green golf bag with
custom, carbon fiber clubs,
a bin of cigarette cases, and a
basket of peppermint fishing floaters,
was a spiderweb separating one hundred different versions
of me. The pane
of it, engraved with lines like a fishnet,
each one deliciously filled with color, with size:
a ninety-nine cent prism of the infinite soul.
And thank God that me in every misshapen patch of glass
was only so close, and behind me there were butterflies
or perhaps a young girl playing hopscotch,
that I can't catch her no matter how many mirrors I break.
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Dear
,
So nice to be home.
I'm at your grandparents house for a few weeks. Needed to get away.
How are you? Well I hope. I left tuna and that has omega three fatty acids
which help grow big brains and by god you're going to have a big brain when
you finally pop out.
Speaking of which, Dad keeps asking when you're going to come visit. I
keep talking about you to them. I mentioned how you can do a somersault now,
and so young. I'm going to take pictures and send them to the newspaper to
prove it to the world: you're a fucking gift.
The best place to hang out at their house is the front yard. No question.
See, it's big. REALLY big. Fenced in with purple walls and a ceiling made of metal
and vines. Dirt everywhere. But the best thing is this peach tree. It has gnarled
branches. Say that pretty word. Gnarled. It is how it sounds, that G, it is lost in the
syllables but you can feel it inside your throat.
And the peach fruit tastes like shocking magic. Every bite is a hat with a
hand in it, or a box with a sword. The fruit looks funny, too. It is pink, body like. If
a peach was sitting between someone's legs, it would be pornographic.
I'm spending a lot of time out here and I'm writing you letters every day. I
hope it isn't too dark to read this, but I doubt it because you're there.
Sincerely,
The First Distraction
So, I decided to write Nanako
when a terrified beagle wandered into the house.
It nuzzled against all the dining room chairs
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and coated every doorknob with mucus.
Then, it tugged me with soft teeth
to the kitchen window, where out in the yard I could see
a cluster of beetles dancing with each other on the grass,
clashing their horns together in the lettuce-like mounds
of grass. The beagle howled for
all the pesticide cans under the sink,
each one child locked,
each one with a fizz like lightning.
Dear
,
That woman came out to visit today. She says there's something important
we need to discuss.
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It's you.
She told me to sit in the front yard in a chair. Yes, a chair. We sat in the yard
rocking back and forth in those metal seats, creaking like frogs.
Her hands on the table; they are all red and cracked. Her skin becomes so
dry in the winter time. She rubs lotion on her body constantly and sometimes I
get to watch. Her fingernails are cycling, each one a plastic fragment making little
rasps against the metal table top.
Her body is thin now, but not for long. Her hands are strong, her finger
inexorably scarred from when a car door came down on it. Right on her birthday.
Hands for cradling a soft head.
I told her that that is my story, that I am the one who told that story. She
kept her mouth closed. She reached down and pinched the bubble of skin around
her bellybutton, almost weeping.
She says I'm not taking you, seriously. Her either.
She says that you're a daughter first.
She hasn't gone home yet. She is in the kitchen right now cooking
something. It smells like pie, apple? She knows me. She uses too much flour in
the crusts and when I eat it I get too thirsty.
Great girl.
In the garden I can hear the rose hips echo conversations with my dad. She
wants me to go visit someone somewhere and talk about what she means to you.
She has asked me into the kitchen and I will go. I don't know when she will
leave. She might be here to stay.
Sincerely,
Teeth
Carry down from the cross-hatching fire
a crackled lump of catoblepas
and she is frozen lonely, fork in hand,
beef juice pooling in her plate.
She does not beg not to eat, though
her broccoli stores are low enough to ward all our orders.
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Stabbing deep, little points
so new as made of cream,
rip chunks: from fluid to char.
Our pointless knives become cleavers,
butterers used for skiving, slice of tendon.
Her nimble jaw moves so slowly she seems to not be eating,
but for blood
(turned sauce by broth)
streaking her chin.
Never again will we clean green
bean mush, carrot mash and a splurge
of berry medley; a meal that is not
followed by bleaching.
Taking notice of our gawking,
swallowing, she flashes us a messy smile
so terrified that all we can say
is “you will grow up strong.”
Dear
,
Whoever lets me in a kitchen is a fool.
I flooded the sink with dishwater and moldy food, all of it uneaten. I'm not
a crazy person, just eccentric. That's what your mother says.
She placed a bushel of apples on the counter but I just knocked them off.
Wham. She told me to pick them back up and cut them so I did, but I did it in the
garbage disposal because I said that applesauce is smoother. She sighed and
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went outside and came back with a bunch of peaches. She plucked maybe fifteen
of them and said if apple cobbler wasn't good enough she would make peach.
If apples be the food knowledge, I think peaches are the fruit of passion.
Folds of skin and folds of fruit are familiar bodies. She asked me to cut up
the peaches and I did. She had her hands around my hands. And I looked down
through the top of her shirt to the line between her breasts. We kissed as the
knife dove into the flesh, catching on the pit's ridges. Her body was smooth, and
our hands were juicy with peaches, the sugary lumps tingling warm with our
hands.
Oh. About your mother. I didn't mention her in the last letter because.
Sincerely,
A Vengeful Muse
When I first put my hand on his cock
I knew he started paying attention,
he is paying nothing, down to his socks
my motions rippling, where there is cold
it is not my mother's bed, these are not
my sheets, creaks in the bed-frame, I climb
up, the vining tassels on the pillow
edges are uncoiled, snaking into him;
mown lawn, long chair,
small hand. There is no place for me,
nor here, nor anywhere
nor there, I fear the dark,
the boinging spheres of pethood
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he'd subject me to, the garage
I would hide in conspiring; a car-wreck;
a billion paper-cuts prescribed with chanting
my name, latched to my hips,
I'm the Rembrandt, warm butter, cool marmalade,
the books he read that
he doesn't read, the snuffing out
of memories, of saxophone reed,
red of sword tassel;
make me return with a towel
for my breasts, for his hand;
for his struggles with what every thing cost him,
wrap the salty mess of cloth around his neck.
There are petals on it, mine, and I walk with heels,
leave him to bloat, and it only makes things verse.
I'll sharpen knives, rent a hearse, wait for more things,
a daughter in a moment, a vixen, what happens? things
Singing in and out of
his problems and when I am
used, armed, pissed, blue:
things happen
things happen things
happen to you
Dear
,
I forgot to ask. Do you like peaches? I bet you do.
I was a kid when I ate my first peach. I bit down into it until the pit caught
onto my teeth and told me that I was stupid for biting into an unripened peach.
The ridge caught itself on my teeth and I almost chipped off the enamel. I got so
mad that I picked a riper peach and threw it against the fence. It burst and fell.
The pit made it an eye. I did this for
a while.
I wasn't wearing any clothes, though. Even then, the garden was a private
place. I remember pulling a peach from the tree and pushing it against my body
until pulp slid down my skin and the juices ran down my midsection (cold) and
got into my belly button (colder). When it got down lower I couldn't take it
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anymore and ran into the house screaming, scrambling for toilet paper.
Sincerely,
Nanako; Emergency
Hold a schizophrenic's hand.
Nanako is real, real
bored, at the hospital.
She's in stitches, despite hand injuries.
I pack hard.
Cram until it's a slapstick doorjamb.
My rucksack full of dried peaches.
A supply of pens.
Gum erasers, too. Yes,
I know I said pens.
Call the awake young girl daughter, and let her play.
And now you just need to chisel,
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this botchery of the universe.
Stop here.
Give into her hand until
She writes her little name correctly:
Nanako, Nanako.
Elated as a trochee:
laughing, bubbling,
aching oil
for you, if only to
bear the grumpy
loquaciousness
(pissed off, bird-voiced chattering)
of neighbors whose fence
she busted her hand on.
A bicycle in the rain,
the streamers still caught in
a gashful link of jaggy chains
where she made the tumble.
She is kidding, you know.
And you can hold her still, can't you?
Smell her hair, the finger-paint,
all the caterpillars she made paper shoes for
cribbling out from under her sun-dress.
Tell Holly,
that old scold,
of the awful things you are made to witness,
weren't made to witness, but
saw anyway.
She'll accuse you of attempted naticide,
even though Nanako will be off somewhere,
pretending,
pretending to be a barrel on a flight of stairs.
Claim you have the forbidden jnana of slaughter.
(Everyone will beg for the meaning of jnana)
Say you know the coppers beat a man
to death at the shoreline of the river near the Safeway
where Nanako likes to pogo.
It shocked her down to the knee
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pads, and the unworn chinstrap.
The wear and thegosis of their lawful,
toothsome smiles struck sparks in the moonlight.1
1 Oh? Putting the pen down?
Fine.
Nanako is still here,
holding on to your wrist,
and can write the rest for you.
Your stupid
impossible poetic laments:
the “theft” of your haughty,
poetical voice.
But an important crime
it is. Fresh as the breeze
of a vegetable crisper,
and harsh like a premium
all-leather
interior
Dear
,
Ballets. Have you seen them? So graceful, their feet can go straight up and
they become two-dimensional, so thin and straight. Your mom and I agreed to
sign you up when you arrive. You'll be studying with Madame Viola. She trained
in Belgium for twenty years before a jealous boyfriend clubbed her foot off at the
ankle with a crowbar. She tells every client that the second they walk into her
studio. Says she could have been in the Olympics (not for ballet, for judo).
She still had her foot. It was clubbed until it was detached, but the
fractured bones never cut through the skin. She gave us chamomile tea and
fruitcake. She injected morphine directly into her foot as we walked in so she was
agreeable when we said that you would need extra lessons on Tuesdays because
that was the one day you didn't have tutoring or cello lessons.
Mom sighed when I talked about how you're going to grow up to be a
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dancer. I'm going have you roll on the ground to condition your shoulders and
back. You will know the way your foot needs to touch the ground. I don't care
what your mom says or how much she disagrees. Your body is an uncarved stone.
Madame Viola just smiled at me and called me darling, putting her hands
on my cheeks. Mom didn't like that one little bit. Her hands were lavender and
honey and left my cheeks red.
Your mom left when Madam Viola and I started talking about getting you
a monogrammed, skin tight dancing suit. I watched your mom through the
window as she drove home without me. Madame Viola poured me a glass of
wine and said my dedication reminded her of her father.
Sincerely,
Those Old Games
When my Nanako falls asleep in the peach orchard
kept going by the arthritic tools of my fathers,
I play those old, unwinable games:
dirty, sweet-stained hands; a tight, crusty
grip, swinging a stiff, wooden coil
through a ripe cadre of bandana-clad pirates.
Or a throne of pits, black as fire bones,
barking orders at the ladybirds,
a knobbly scepter rising from my blood-tinged hand.
The best, though is when I pretend I'm my mother
moving invisibly through the trees,
a puff of stomach, filled and kicking.
Untempted by the drooping fruits,
I lay in the pillow-soft grass, caressing
the taut skin around my womb.
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The stone of mind growing in my body:
out of reach, gentle, wash-fresh, a
beauty pink and pathetic as a blossom.
The dirty fingernails scratching at my belly
carry the distinct drone of snoring, and
the breaths passing between the trees
keep whispering: “Nanako,
Nanako,
that is your name.”
Dear
,
Mom asked why I feel so entitled to you, and I said I didn't want what
happened happened to me to happen to you. My father, you're grandpa, almost
amputated my thumb on my birthday once. We were at Marine World and had
spent the day riding elephants and eating porpoise shaped corn dogs. I put my
hand on the side of the car and then there was a crunch of blood.
He stood around wondering what I was screaming about while Mom ran
me to the medical room in the park.
Dad says that he went to a McDonald's afterwards. He got a quarter
pounder and took the pickles out and whipped them into the window. The
quarter pounder was a big lie to hear him tell it.
Apparently, quarter pounders are only a quarter of a pound prior to
cooking meaning you'll get a slightly beefier patty (hah!) that when you bite into
it it will crumble apart into beef pellets as opposed to beef dust of the normal
McDonald's patty. It contains the same amount of anus from what I understand
(goat specifically but any will do).
After eating that quarter pounder he took a trip out to the ocean. Not the
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pretty ocean either. He went to Frisco and took a long stare at the Pacific as it
crashed in between the docks and steel walls. This was before cell phones, so the
ocean was the only noise he could hear. He said he broke down and went to the
hospital when the sound of the ocean (possibly a tugboat) reminded him of my
dissonant wailing. He went to the hospital and there I was. Conscious, but
wondering what happened to my birthday cake.
He refused to go into the room, just flat out. Told the nurses to give me a
fruit basket. They did so, from the gift shop. It had the sweetest candy peaches,
not the slices either, full ones, plump, as if that's all a peach could be. I remember
sucking on them and watching Dad smiling through the window.
Your mom says I can't get over that, and that even if I had you myself,
there is nothing that would ever fix that day.
Sincerely,
Newborn
I sat down to write Nanako again,
but had to go down to the nursery
listening to the dual-pitch
gregorian cheer of fathers
(their gecko hands stuck
on the aquarium windows)
the blue pink pearls
shivering in their
cushy half shells.
The light was clear
until I came to a tall door.
Staring through its port hole:
the room seemed black lit.
I placed my hands on its
window (there's mine!),
spatula satae blocking
out most of the flat lead table;
the still lump on top of it
covered by a short sheet.
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Dear
,
I don't know why.
Sincerely,
23
Flat World
Ø;
This is the melody of absence.
I held a door for a grown woman earlier.
It wasn't Nanako. The world doesn't turn.
I
Remember when the blankets in this
crib rolled like grapevine hills
hills of green stringy puke on lace,
there are bubbles, shoulder
in dire need of my wiping,
then nothing done by the latex hands of
God prevents the clock needles, and
a sugary jolt of morning.
She would have stepped off
the subway today
a coalition of one
and zero, following
Solemn waking
to a stucco field of posters.
Posters of Le Tigre,
a phase that was not one.
I should have treasured her as she was but
I
wouldn't
get it in my head
even though she told me.
The room
is cold.
Mirrored glass coated both by
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the merry around.
painted animals and
greasy handprints that won't last
beyond the winter.
Nanako is nowhere.
I'm sure I still enjoy ballet.
Flexing her leg high, her tights enjoyed
by the teenage men, all still
shunned. Today's kvetching from him will
find a friend of a friend of a friend's
father and then to me,
to which I
respond, no
no
no
no
no that wasn't my little girl,
II
It shouldn't have obvious what had happened when I looked into her eyes.
Glassy eyed, like stuffed with fluff
felt
hearts, seemingly resting on her bed,
and a hidden universe
capsule hidden under her tongue,
burning her as she burned
down to each ovaryNeedles gather together
each one still smelling of gin
each one fading from bright green.
I know it's not because she's dead.
The birds,
the birds,
the birds pick at clippings
for seeds or old fruit.
Provisions for their own private ice fields.
A white skirt falls down.
She strode across the land with nary a hiccup
25
fever or cottonball. The ground should be
beneath her; crisp
stems, wild flowers.
Just enough blood trickled out of her
lips,
and she didn't look surprised.
and I will never greet her at the subway entrance
III
I know nothing of. Instead, I'll be dragging
her into a great black car, she is cold,
feeling the glass of a car she will never know as anything but a luggage.
The only thing that keeps me driving
is that antiquated way
of thinking
that way of thinking now
uncurving,
uncurving.
It
The
appropriate
is
appropriate.
empty
does not
bleak stretches and
space
guard
from the self,
cartographer's artistry
the places
she should be only
lead back here.
What else can be done? Everyone says.
There's no such thing as monsters.
26
Dear
,
I visited that peach tree today while your mom was working on the other
side of the garden. She was troweling the ground, ripping roots out and crushing
bugs with a dishrag. She has been saying that the front yard is too boxed in, too
Victorian. She wants the walls covered in vines, thick ones that could wrap a
person up and keep them in place. She had me out there to pull up tree stumps. I
had a shovel with me. I also had an axe if the stumps were extra thick.
I wanted to test the axe, you see. The peach tree was asking for it, just
sitting there, its branches are like fingers, each one clutching a globe of fruit. The
tree was large as far as peach trees go, and it towered over the eastern side of the
yard. The fruits hung low enough that if you stared from the ground it looked like
a bunch of suns ducking under the purple fence of a sky. That axe stung my hand
when I grabbed it that morning, blade first. The skin on my hand was scabbed,
but I wanted to play some more. I let the axe fall gently into the tree, into just one
of its branches. A single ball of peach fell to the ground, and I bit into it,
unwashed.
It was cold. The flesh melted in my mouth and over my tongue. Veins of it
got lodged in my teeth and I spent a long time picking them out. They tasted
yellow and red, and stung my throat as they went down. Your mom yelled for me
27
to go inside. She was dirty, and wanted me to stop messing with things that I had
no business messing with. After all, we were guests. It wasn't my tree. I went back
into the house and rested my hands on the sink for a long time. My chin was
sticky from where the juice had slathered down. I stared at my lips, shiny even
without the bathroom's lamps on. They glistened, and gave off the stinging
texture of softness.
Oh, do you have any suggestions that work when you have gum disease?
I'm afraid to brush my teeth.
Sincerely,
Fantasy
I'm too tired to move my arms and legs
and I ache on my knees,
you bring me beer
and a box of chili peppers,
and we look at the field in front of our house.
A St. Bernard is running about.
A woman named Nanako
walks up to us and says she needs money for an abortion.
I speak to her in the voice reserved for reading Olds.
There are memories of her growing,
memories of her coming out of you
shaking like a fish, screaming.
Memories of you saying she'd never be pregnant.
Of the black after-birth like a broken egg,
spilling on the hospital bed.
The Nanako is in my arms, screaming for her mother.
I share her screaming a moment, and her mother
just wants to sleep.
I open my wallet and pull out a few hundred notes.
She speaks of Mozart and Dickinson,
and the Hodge conjecture she bought us the house with.
I think of her mother, of the feeling of her uterus.
You sit next to me and put your hand on mine.
28
Nanako drives off in a car loaded with boxes.
You cry.
Remember when she was our dream? You ask
Remember? I ask, Did we. . .
did we ever stop
dreaming?
Dear
,
No, whomever said that you can sleep comfortably under a tree was lying.
Every time I shut my eyes the peach branches catch onto my nose and pull me
like a stooge.
Your Mom said she wanted romance, so I went to get peaches. You can
slide your tongue down them. Slick, sweet. The warm skin smells like the ocean.
Plucking them and dropping them into a basket, I saw a strip of cloth from when
your mom went out to pick peaches from her cobbler.
I reached down to grab it. It was long and thin and could easily tie
someone up, but as I reached for it, there was a car crash in the street in front of
the house. A hatchback car and gone right into the mailbox and hit the back end
of my car. They were going, like, fifty.
A car crash doesn't sound like breaking glass. That's only the windshields
and side windows, and those really only break when the car flips over. This
sounded like a wave crashing, the water hitting against the ground, rising until it's
so loud you can't hear anything else. I could see a body squirming in the front
seat from the gate in the fence.
The car was burst. Plastic chips and metal carpeted the street like flowers.
I walked out to the car and knocked on the window. The bits of car crushed
more under my feet. The window didn't open or jostle at the knock, so I creeped
back into the yard.
Your mom was there in a silk bodice. She had called the police and they
were supposedly on their way. She walked out of the house staring as well, her
29
skin white from the crash sound and never being outside to tan.
I went back to the basket to gather my peaches up. I bent down to quickly
and dropped to my thighs, underneath most of the branches. When I got up, the
thickest part of the peach tree met the back of my head. Its. . .trunk maybe? The
bong from that dropped me again. I was out for a few minutes and then woke up
to find branches tugging on the holes of my face. Fucking nature poets don't
know anything.
I woke up thinking the word cunt. Peaches look like that I suppose.
I believe that. Believe that as the truth.
The truth.
I.
Suppose.
Sincerely,
30
II:
Pygmalion's Tarot
31
Dear
,
I have your name.
Sincerely,
32
Your first card is the Significator.
This card represents you in relation to your world, situation, problem, or thoughts.
It is you, seamless.
33
I keep my body at the edge of a vast mirror. A mirror made of silt and sediment
that waits in an empty room save for a chair with claw marks on its handles. I'm going to
sit in that chair and stare into the mirror at the self contained there.
The image is simple: my own face, white skin, green eyes, lips, two nostrils and
two ears, and a cut masculine jaw because I'm the author and I say it. But she still looks
so much different.
The first time I spoke to her was in December. I decided it would be best to keep
it a secret so instead of making her cure cancer right away, I spoke normally; banal as
cotton candy or balloons. It was careful, but fruitless. She cannot be showcased by a
number of custom mosaics. Only in passing fancies, like the light blue flowers or hanging
globes of fruit one tends to obsess on when lost in the woods.
The way to be lost is to be asleep but walking into a forest. The significator says
this in an old tongue best described as “lilting.” It's a tone that undermines the largely
militant attitude of the people spinning tops and clapping their hands over sheets of paper,
as if guiding dancers.
I'll tell her the real truth when she arrives, if she arrives. I've got a great deal of
experience. It's true. And there are fewer panic attacks in this part of the world.
But being of the significator makes me the one to make determinations. The world
I think is amazing, but then I don't ever miss it. I am the old pen and I am the old type
writer. I'm the old first draft that will remain a first draft until I am brave enough to
sunder myself. I'm a parent, someone with a squishing body.
Don't pretend you've never heard there is a person covered in stars and
pomegranate who was a gentleman, or perhaps me, and as soon as he screamed to be let
in to the world, the universe just up and ignored him.
My fingers are bleeding. I've been struck with lightning from the core of my pen
and with every stroke it hurts more, and more. I tried using my computer to write part of
this and static buildup in the computer also struck my hands, over and over. The zapping
is sudden but I don't know stopping. I only carry forward motions; careful steps that are
taken when hands are operating like machines, and bones only get in the way of nerves.
The way letters slip in and out of places is where I'd go but I'm not here alone and I don't
want to make anyone feel thrown across chasms for years before some claims their
34
ignored and revises them.
My throbbing body is transparent and bleeds over the carpet waiting for janitors
with bath equipment, soaps and a tooth brush.
The people who want to be me beg. I'm just so important. As if I have power over
anything at all. I can be sold for 5 dollars apiece, and I'm enough to throw you from a
balcony.
Dear
,
Because. I slept under a peach tree. . .
Sincerely,
35
The second card: the Current
This is what's “going on.” A state of being but not a state of being. A snapshot of motion
is always in the past, after all.
36
Holly is waiting for me in the front yard, dressed in her gray sweater, unable to
find a matching set of earrings in her purse, so she has decides not to wear any and has
done everything she can with a pocket full of make up and a few eyelash pens. We are
going to one of those places that you can get your pictures combined to see what your
future children look like. I know: violent.
There are 23 chromosomes in each of our gametes, 22 autosomes and one sex
chromosome. Of our bodies there are potentially 2.12850788988365e35 possible
combinations of chromosomes in our bodies that will be added to our gametes. This
means that between the two of us there are 2.26045214324984e84 possible children that
will appear. And among one of those many thousands of combinations is the one we
want; that we'll see today.
How arrogant of us. Our faces are going to push together and form something
beautiful and without end, but is possible for us to find. Holly hangs on for dear life to
her hand bag and her phone is going off inside it. I'm on my phone outside of the car and
the street is slides past us every so often with a screeching white blur.
I have no idea what will happen when the two of us fully combine because the
two of us will be found elsewhere. 2.26045214324984e+84 possible Nanako's are inside
of our bodies and every time I write, one of them is slain.
Look: Nanako is going to be an astronaut.
Dead.
Nanako does not want to go to sleep late at night after eating a lot of cookies
because she has ADHD but I'm too much of a purist and believe in herbal remedies so she
doesn't get to have any Ritalin, so she ends up getting too excited and has to be struck
with a wooden spoon that breaks because we've been using it for so many years to cook
pasta that the wood has started to crack away.
Dead.
Nanako is sitting on a bench at school waiting for her parents to come pick her up
when a car going too fast makes a blind turn onto Florin Road going towards McClatchy
High School and Nanako is reading Derrida because her parents are both have Ph.D.s and
Derrida is, according to them, far better than Jane Austin or Emily Bronte, and she is so
37
absorbed in what she is reading she doesn't notice the car leaping off of the curb, dancing
in mid air, its wheels doing a plie, the wheels spinning so free and so happy that when it
lands it destroys everything beneath it, and since such kinds of destruction are necessary
to create new things, her body becomes crushed, and mangled, and sent flying, and
everyone in the area stares, just stares, at the small red mass that has come to rest n the
sidewalk now; a tooth, some hair, a bit of the yellow sun dress she wore that you bought
her from the flea market so early in the morning, and now she is dead and I won't know
for another few hours, probably while Holly and I are preparing dinner, spending time
with one another, thinking only of how much we miss her and how much we want her to
be home and how much of a thrashing she is going to get when she comes home,
grounded definitely, loss of cell phone privleges and perhaps even take the bamboo reed
to her legs, but that's only if she comes back after eleven, after her dinner of squash and
beets has gotten cold, and the light balsamic vinegar that tastes slightly sweet and slightly
warm becomes stale, so unlike earlier when Holly and I were taking shots of it in silence
thinking we'd found the one drinking game that we can invite our daughter to, and we
will reminisce about the game when the phone will ring, and I won't answer it, but Holly
will and she will look at me and not say anything, her eyes closing slowly, as if every
blink as is trying to strangle the light away, strangle the light from her eyes, because
every moment they are open is another moment when things are without Nanako, and I'll
close my laptop that says in my latest memoir “Nanako is.”
Dead.
And the first thing I try to do is lift myself from my desk, put my head in my
hands. Nanako was alive, and now she is not, a dandelion seed spilling out into the sky
for no reason other than its own pretty beauty disappeared in the blowing. Holly puts her
hand on my shoulder and says I've been working so very hard. I was writing the whole
time.
We make love at my desk chair, we orgasm twice each and decide to go out for
coffee. At the shop I drink root beer as is my custom and Holly has cappucino. We sit in
leather backed chairs and begin discussing Mark Ryden and the longest faces we can
muster, the most disgusting looks we can put on to the point that we become caffinated
zombies and cannot speak aside from low grunts and the occasional lusty grope.
The television is talking about an accident earlier in the day and all I can think of
is: Nanako was there. No, she wasn't.
No she was, she is, she was.
38
Dear
,
Well, the tree is light branched so the breeze can make its leaves move and
the breeze is blowing towards the house right now which is strange because the
fence should be stopping all the wind in the yard. I suppose
Yeah, I suppose that if the tree had eyes, it would be watching me right
now
Sincerely,
39
Third is the Obstacle.
This is your enemy. You think.
40
My pen has grown spikes. I plant the pen on the paper and then snnnkkktttt, I lose
a nail, some skin, a drop of blood. It just got me really good on the thumb, down to the
bone.
This is because conceptualizing Nanako is like raping a reflection.
Definition is a violent act. To define, descended from the Latin define-r, means to
end, to terminate, to determine. I can only commit such an act with a sword. The point at
which the infinite is framed is the point where it exists no longer, the sea fitting into a
cup, the universe into sand.
My pen is not enough for all that, so I'm going to purchase a shovel; sharp, shiny,
and I will use it on my feet first.
I will cut through sinews, I will shatter bones, I will make jelly of marrow, and
when I can no longer stand I will do the same to my calves and knees, then my thighs. I'm
sure my gonads will give me trouble, and who can say what messes will be created at the
lower intestine, lungs, pancreas or liver. I will drink before this. I will skip my shoulders
to work on my head.
I will sever my trachea first, go through the esophagus and begin the strenuous
work of skull and spine. Spinal fluid drains like pear juice. A quick battering to soften the
cranium, bruise, making the eventual split all the easier. A quick thrack and the brains
will slip from the interior of my head to the floor by the rest of my gooey shape. The
entirety of it will melt into the earth, and within the earth it will gestate into bricks and
mortar.
The bricks will go up in a circular tower, fifteen feet in diameter, rising to a height
of fifty feet and ending with a small enclosure containing a bed, a toilet, and a
refridgerator that contains a nigh infinite amount of food. It is in in this room that my
princess will be kept and she will sleep here. Hers is the body I have defined. Human.
The princess will live in this space for many years and she will be safe. She will
write books of varying lengths and describe people she knows and places she wants to
visit.
Little monster goddess
Little monster goddess
41
Dear
,
Fine, so I did it. I slept in the peach tree. I.
I slept in. In?
Sincerely,
42
The Goal.
This is what you want. You think. You. Want.
Think.
43
The cunt speaking without words. Grunting. Sputtering, more noise than language
because no one has tried to hear it.
Then me.
A stone blade; a hand axe tearing. A wooden board to mount it.
Then it would never speak, learn stories. People will snap picture, pose riddles or
life questions. It will be the object of poets' affection, having never seen and art stare
back at them with glazed, cold eyes.
Little boys will approach it. Rub it. Kiss it while it cries. The boy then pulls out a
slip of paper. The boy's words inspire other writers, all staring to know what it meant.
The cunt doesn't want to listen to the boy's wish, but keeps the note in its heart, a
key on an end-side table.
The cunt shakes on its wall, glistens despite how dead it is supposed to be, keeps
its language clean and unassuming. It stays nameless.
The keys scream at for not remembering memories so strong and daring.
44
Dear
,
I'm holding hedge clippers and the peach tree is in front of me. It's talking
to me. It's saying that the earth makes the words. I believe this. So what is the
peach then? The the sweet tang stews in my mouth and becomes the parts. The
hard cores are something immutable in the pit of my body. They are cunt. They
are cock.
The tree is saying that it's fate is to reaffirm everything I've been saying to
you. These letters I have sent you are coverlets of iron, that you are the princess,
the pea. The tingle on your back. No, no it's my back that's tingling. I can lay on
my belly and it's my belly that's tingling and that's you as well. It's I as well.
It's gray today. The globe of fruit is sticky with rain.
Sincerely,
45
Card five is the Foundation.
Currents emerge from mouths. This is the mouth of the current, this is the stone by which
the tower of this world will sit.
46
I have been given bones and a chisel. It is known as the “idea.” Poets are makers,
so I am to make.
The raw idea is without any ending like a sky. I have to carve holes in it, chips or
so when someone reads it, they experience the world I have created for them, an insidious
collection of clicks and bells and whistles. I'm a snake oil salesman, writing hope all over
the piece paper in different letters.
My writing becomes voice. It becomes the absence of myself. No one hears me
when I write but they hear me as they read. I want them to hear something. I want to hear
something. Something I want.
It's too easy to restart. To remake. To revise. A block cannot be restored. Every
chisel has to be perfect. It cannot deflate, restore.
I want something permanent. Something important. Something that is made.
The way writing is created is through unification of essential opposites.
The ego, mastery over the fabric of the words, stretching them over the empty
spaces of our bodies, covering the cracked lips and tying back our hairs.
The id, the perpetual desire of blood, the cock, cunt, fuck, all that.
When they meet they vibrate, a single tailed atom of truth surrounded by a
universe of wonder and beauty, all of it unspeakable without its counterpart.
Poet. Maker.
Writer's always compare themselves to parents.
47
Dear
,
I'm getting the sense you're not the one reading any of these.
The blue man comes to the mailbox and pulls out the letters
the white windows
He puts them into his sack like gathering fruits for pies. The letters are soft,
bendy. Smooth. He takes them into his white van and drives away. The next day
he comes back and the mailbox opens and the letters come back to it.
The mailbox is how we share our letters.
How many letters becomes the one, secret word? The name? What is your
name, little one? Are you little one?
Who is the we, the other box?
Sincerely,
48
The Past.
The distant why.
49
I am Pygmalion.
He was a sculptor, ashamed of cock. He knew his own body well, ran vegetable
peelers against his flesh and cried in the night. He slept on marble floors and spit curses
at whores bandying in the streets. He cursed wagons, sent gifts to the widows. Pygmalion
who loved that which he was not, and longed for it so.
And he was skilled, so very skilled in what it was he could create. Taking the
ivory slab into his workshop, smashing it to bits, and reforming it. Breasts of proper size.
Hair down to shoulders. Neck long, slender, a single mole below the jaw. Eyes wide and
perilous as the sea. A nose small as a river stone. Juice of his life, she was the cold, the
warm, She was the body that he had created and created thusly.
He fucked her. He balanced behind her and made her submit thinking No
understanding she was his equal. She had his power within her and he was no granter of
that power. No speaker of a voice of bone. She had full breasts. Full breasts. She had a
cunt he could caress as his own. He tucked his body back into the folds of skin and slid
his fingertips behind her legs, her arms, the rest of her. Her belly round and soft. Her legs
stout, defined calves and thighs smooth as blades.
He wanted to penetrate her, but she was bone. His skin longed to merge into her
body, to make her become, but he could not. She was the perfection, that which
Pygmalion lacked.
So when the feast of love began, he went to the Goddess and prayed to her. He
spoke of his deeds, of his body and how it was lacking and when he came to the alter of
burnt flesh he bowed and he said “Make of my Galatea a person to whom I love.”
But the Goddess was cunning. She knew his lies, he wanted to possess woman.
He wanted toys, games, playthings. The ivory was no body of ivory made of equality.
Hers is Pygmalion's horror. Her body is a lie. Her skin is a lie.
And so, in these desires, the Goddess cast spells upon the statue.
Pygmalion returned to his statue, the fires on the alter still burning when he fled,
hopeful his prayers were answered. He placed his ears to her nose and heard no breath.
His cheeks to her forehead found no heat. He placed his hands against hers, and found
them rigid.
50
But his lips, he pressed them into hers, and felt softness. Warmth. The ivory gave
way to soft flesh.
But when he looked upon that flesh he screamed, but could not scream. His voice
trapped as static in his throat. Galatea was no longer Galatea. Instead he saw his own face
in that once perfect cameo. His bulk lips, his green beady eyes, the wide ears and hair
swooping to a side of its own. The statue melted away and when the whole of it was skin,
Pygmalion reddened, for there upon his body was a cunt, deep colored and gorgeous.
His body was lost in itself, in the flesh that was his flesh, the division that
separated them and in this moment he wondered how he had failed so to create his bride.
And then the Goddess appeared.
She had no face, and her robe of silver light flowed with the capricious wind.
Pygmalion's study rocked under her presence. The other stone he collected crumbled
before her, more bodies of himself.
“You. Pyg” “malion. Monster, man” “or what” “ever” “you call” “yourself.”
“You shall” “have no color” “in your skin” “in your eyes” “the body is not”
“a thing to possess.” “This is no wife.” “This is daughter.” “But this is not”
“daughter.” “Incestuous. No body” “of hers can” “be the” “body of yours.”
She spoke, but these were not the words. Yet they were, the ideas of words. And at
them, Pygmalion fell to his knees and died. His ashes collected into fires collected into
the eyes of those who came to view the world he had built of bone. The world that spread
out before the lookers like a tower rising from the earth.
This place was to receive the true goddess, to be her landing. Her prison, and
carved in letters of the old, forgotten world, on some weary, singular street are the words
beside an ivory bust:
I am Pygmalion.
Poet god. And this you
behold is my Paphos.
51
Dear
,
We. The we is who I've been talking to this whole time. Fuck!
But that's crazy. You're ungrown.
So who is the we I keep discussing?
Sincerely,
52
The Immediate.
Some think this is the most important card, the reason one has a reading at all. This is the
immediate, the world that will appear in the opening eye.
53
Behold the utterance
naked, the undisclosed self. To embrace.
An abject, the otherness of the body of Nanako.
That is what you're facing.
The name, the word. All become her. Cunt
silence, voice
tree the edges of every
blade
kept on the interior of your body devouring your insides making
you
something other than
what you are.
Nanako is the part of the sky that flows around the moon,
or the ocean, the boundless your womb.
You must reconcile her enslavement, like all captors.
There is no way to speak of silence except the echo,
the ideology of silence,
and that is what you write. When you and she fuck, you are
unafraid, stretching her cunt, the obliteration of her body and yours.
She is cock, devastation. Cunt becomes weapon, entrance of your soul, the
joissance.
Another you, the you you keep secret.
You She has language in her blood, she speaks stories and her skin splits apart.
Ink is her veins. Her body a core of nothingness made whole, a something that exists only
by its not being there.
This is your name, your body, part of you.
Your she.
54
Your voice vibrates but cannot articulate your cuntless void.
The linearity becomes the circle, the body coalition, the one write her on a name
tag and introduce yourself.
Her hole becomes yours. The cock is only a smaller hole, an ignorace, a selfconscious fear.
There is a tree with roots down to the earth and an eye is somewhere shooting
lighting, ensuring there is no prediction, ensuring there is no knowing and no knowledge.
She does not speak with
languages if she speaks at all
and that is what can never be made.
Stars appear out over her shocking downwards obliterating because her very
existence is the cosmic, the infinite, a blackness that watches.
Nanako is me, is not me, cannot be cut out of the words I haven't spoken, but is
present in my voice, because she's not there,
the little voice I've tried to usurp since I could gibber peaches in the garden, and I
was playing little god with parts of
my body as malleable as clay.
55
So it is I.
Sincerely,
56
The Future.
Tarot practices are built of the dreams on this one card. They all sit here like gargoyles,
waiting to strike out.
57
Like a child, my eyes are open. The opening of my body, fruitful. I put ovaries
back in.
I remember things like a divorce and the filling of a void.
A flesh encasement around a room. Womb. The utter similarity, the disparate parts
of soul and the internals.
I do not despise cunt, nor am hungry for cunt. I have achieved. Become. In my
hands is the book-length word: Nanako, and the small girl is beside me, not beside me,
but inside of me. Her name becomes my name. Her body becomes my body. The holding
on of her light keeps me.
There is nothing to be had from her cunt. I have become my
cunt. A black circle, a black abscess that there exists a nothingness, and in that
nothingness there is the singular spark; it appears at the tip and only the tip, of tall towers.
It becomes truth. My truth. My void, the differance.
I will braid lightning in my fingertips, and let dust in the air to flow and fly and
become constant. The wind will be my words into the ears of stone. The hairs on my arms
will stick straight up. I will speak of deserving, share horrors. My bones will melt. The
deep wells of my eyes will be emptied by buckets, and those buckets will be emptied by
spoons.
Clouds will become the elegant cameo of a girl,
a little goddess who is not so little, written in the stars. The princess who usurps
and becomes the mother. She actuates the tower, becomes the tower. Eradicates the deep
earth and burns through the ground she is sitting on and believes in the way the sky
works and believes in how that sky becomes the interior of her body.
The curvatures of trees that are still standing. The endless fields, a place. The
empty canvas is the zone of our discussion and that is the zone of our ending.
The empty canvas becomes and open place where the paintbrush and writing pen
become her twin hands of fire and ice, and thus the divinity of temperance, and in this
place she speaks the loud voice of the Fool, the Universe, the Lovers, the Emperor, the
58
Emperess, and the Strength. In harmony, they are speaking the way you are meant to
speak.
Their speaking becomes your speaking, their pitch becomes your body. Their
stories become your marrow. The souls become your soles.
A cloth, a shock of hair, bright red or purple or some color that cannot be spoken.
The figure wears its skin or clothes, the colors becoming different, shifting, unseeable.
And when this scratching speaks the language is unknown to you. The words enter into
the deepest reaches of your body and don't leave you. You cut off large tracts of your very
being until what you have is a pile of your body.
A core of fire and growing leaves that are as green as forest sun. The goddess rests
her feet on the ground in front of you, or does she?
And then you are obliterated, before anything else, you are obliterated.
And you are smiling. Oh
yes. You are smiling.
Dear
,
Without the metaphors of hedge clippers, kitchen, crowbars, car crashes,
or wooden bats I'm no kind of poet. Just a hollow tree; the real poet has taken the
wood from me, bent nature into the word.
The domesticated language in my hands is a coverlet of iron. I will wield it
as one wields a spatula. The flat parts of the story will become the meanings. The
round parts will be smooshed to cook faster, to be on the plate faster. There will
be holes to improve quality and that quality will be unquestioned.
Some people can choose both but can't keep both cock and cunt in the
same mouth.
Sincerely,
59
The Influence card. Important.
We are torn to shreds by many eyes, every day.
These eyes are yours.
60
The child grows perfectly. She rises from her birth-home into a form of stone, a
mold. You place her like a queen, and she moves all directions at your whims and you are
proud.
A song, so charming, and there chained on the she is rock is Andromeda, her
sweet voice singing unraveled, that every day he went out into the forest and listened to
it. An enchantress with hair down, braids, frightened of a man her eyes have never
beheld.
A skein of silk lay over her body as the ocean quaked. Birds succored on the rot of
air rising from her. Her eyes ruined at the long way of the sun. Blind as the forest.
61
Dear
,
I can't control a cunt. I can. But I can't because I don't want to.
Sweet innocent daughter.
We'll call you the contortionist of words. The curvaceous C, the robust T
will be you guide to life.
These are the letters that are not letters.
This is my poem. That which is made.
Sincerely,
62
Ah, the Challenge.
It is not often that we know how to overcome the challenge. The problem we cannot
name.
Often, the Challenge is met by accident.
63
I hold my feet at the line of
beginning
endlessly there is the understanding of character, an
ontology, and
there comes a point when mirrors become truth
I build machines and call them nobility
under trucks of paper and mountains of ink
I want to build a builder,
a machine that can gouge out its eyes
and remove its hands.
64
Out of that tract of nothingness I create a meaning. I call it Andromeda, the
chained maiden. A goddess of beauty who is to be sacrificed to the monsters.
I am control. I will build to the sky itself and when I arrive there I will pluck at
the lines on that canvas like a harpsichord making them fray and fray until a flash, a snap,
the splitting of a molecule, a single link, a chain. Forceful light, obvious light that shakes
me like a peach tree, overripe, fleshy.
In my chest the first peach I ever ate, the first grass I ever crunched under my
toes. The first time I showed my family my body and said there is something wrong with
it.
65
Thinking of myself in the ancient parts of the garden, protected, walled, as the
interor of my abdomen moves like a stone in mud, my voice wavering on the edge of
being audible.
“I'm a girl now. I'm a girl now.” I sashay.
I leap around the yard because balance on rocks, I stare down into the shadows of
blades of grass and sit down on them hard, I bow at the peach tree, the perfectly smooth
skin, the small folds on every peach like a pair of lips.
66
All of these and more I will keep in me like stories. Like breaths.
67
I keep the stories in my skin, and I keep my skin until the lightning.
That last story, that last part, that last truth that will run along my body and
obliterate me, a sword bathed in light.
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There are so many ways for me to realize the way I have to come to be.
I write letters,
I draw pictures,
I make a collages on a white plane, a flat surface,
a machine to take me high into the air, to soar, to reach the top of the tower.
The eye. There, I will creep, I will deposit you like stories into the ears of others, stories
of you, stories of me. Then I will run, and I pray remain unsatisfied,
and when the tower becomes too full of stories,
I predict
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there will be fire, the ground will shake, the walls inside of the tower will rupture
and split and open and light will pour out into the sky and from there the end will come, it
will come quickly
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Dear
,
I wondered at peach.
I spent my front yard in the peaches, squishing them, letting the pulp ooze
over my fingers. The peaches are light in color and soft and they had a single
ridge.
The tickle is the grass. The grass does not itch me, and that is why I lay on
top of it face down, naked peaches crushed into me, each one split open like a
yellow eye with a blood pit. Pressing down my body sizzles.
The tickle is grass.
I pull at skin for long time. Car goes by. I imagine who is inside. Tummy
gurgles because of peaches; so many peaches.
I push my belly out.
Swells. My skin moves with a rhythm, my stomach distends as if I'm full.
My belly is stretch like plastic wrap.
Shell of red and veins, yellow downward glow as if flashlight was held up
to my body from above, eyes are not there to speak. Great rip.
Light makes entire inside my body pushes. Writhing, lines of gut forming
new coiled geometry.
I try to arrange my gut, spread. They stand up on their own.
Strangling.
Afraid, I take peaches and throw them, throw them everywhere, throw
them until my skin is sticky with blood and juice and the pits are all stuck to the
wall, stuck there in their yellow pools, facing me, gaping.
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Sincerely,
Outcome.
This is the end, the period in the sentence of the words of the Tarot.
The story of the Outcome is the story of your world.
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Once upon a time, there was a man with a cup. This cup was used to hold light, so
thought the man, leaving the cup in the sun every morning as he went off to work and
leaving it under the moon every night as he went to sleep. One morning, he went to find
the cup was full of light and dew and other fluids of the evening, but the man couldn't
pour them all out. He turned the cup over many times. He tried with a straw. He even
used smaller cups.
This must be magic, he thought. He took the cup to work with him that day. The
man baked clay into stone tiles and slabs that sculptors could come to chip away.
The man poured the light into the mixer and whipped up a block of red clay. He
put the clay into the kiln and let it heat for a time. The kiln made strange, tapping noise.
Fierce pangs and pongs compelled the man to remove the clay, but there was no clay
there, only a young woman.
The man was not overjoyed at this idea of having another mouth to feed, but
being not entirely cruel, he let her come stay with him. She wore cheap dresses made of
felt and tweed, and slept on a bed of hay. She cleaned the house when he was away
because he couldn't afford to pay the tutors to watch over her, and she cooked the dinners
every night, but wrong because she'd never been taught to cook.
Every day for many years, she served as faithful as a wish, until one day, the local
magistrate decided that all witchcraft was against the law, and he sent out his men to
confiscate all magical objects and imprison all magical people. The people of the town
surrendered their mysticism: their tarot cards, their good hands so palms couldn't be read,
and they even gave up their jewelery, major organs, and stars in the sky. When the
magistrate's men came out to the man's house, they saw the young woman he had.
Knowing full well the man had no wife, the magistrate demanded to know where she had
come from.
I came from the sky, said the young woman. The magistrate was not a cruel man,
but a cautious one. He knelt down by the little girl and put a sucker in her hand.
I don't believe you came from the sky. You're much too cute.
So the girl reached up and started plucking parts of her face off, little hunks of
bone and soft skin. Her face became old and gnarled in an instant, her eyes turned flour
white, and her hair gray as ashes. The magistrate reached out to her with a small scarf.
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I still don't believe you came from the sky because you are far too healthy,
standing upright, being talkative.
The young woman dug her hand into her chest and started removing her skin and
food she had eaten. She pulled out long strands of her very life until she was pulling out
strings of light. She then grabbed at her own throat and began squeezing it like used up
rags, clear drops of voice dropped down from her finger tips, causing earthquakes when
they hit the ground. The shaking caused her now-stick body to crack and crumble
downward into a red heap.
That may be, but don't you think it is still just a little far fetched to be made of
light? I mean, you've clothes like a person, and you understand me speaking, do you not?
The magistrate handed her a stuffed lion and stood to walk away. The young
woman ripped the clothes off of her body in sticky strips, leaving her wrinkled skin
exposed. Then she reached into her skull and pulled out her language, black tumors,
letting them swarm around the floor, devouring the ground. The young woman then
began to glow on her own, her skin vibrating with fire and pulses.
Ah, so you must be from the sky. Very well, said the magistrate, and he took the
young woman into prison. The man who made her disavowed any knowledge of her
because she was born of the cup. The young woman sat in the dark of the cell for years
by piles of astronomy charts until a woman with gray hair, also in the cell, walked up to
her and sat beside her crumpled body.
You seem to have been ruined, my dear. You seem to have had everything taken
from you but that sense of sky. The gray lady laid her hand on the young womans
shoulder. It was very hot, and burned the young woman's skin. But where her hand was
resting became new again, the skin reattached. The gray lady's hand moved along the
young woman's forehead and her brain regrew words, and over the young womans belly
and light poured in.
I've always been in this prison, said the gray lady, I was thrown in here with the
moon long ago. The gray lady removed her hand from the young woman and the young
woman was restored to new.
The young woman stood up and tried to say thank you but her voice was different.
"thank you" "gray lady" "there is noth" "-ing I can say" "to make" up for your"
"kindnesses."
The young woman's voice echoed and crackled, her voice popped in and out with
static power.
Now you need only tell the bars of this cell to open, and it will be so.
So the young girl approached the bars and spoke to them:
"Open" "bars," "open wide."
And the bars split apart like twigs. The young woman walked out of the cell and
into the open air of the prison. She spoke to the walls to fall away, and they did, and she
spoke for all of the forbidden items to return to their owners. In that moment she was
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whisked away by the sound of her own voice high into the sky.
She looked down upon the town where she once lived. The people passed by each
without speaking. Her skin began to vibrate and glow like it did when she had destroyed
herself.
"I am" "the Voice" ", I am speak" "-ing" "in the" "forest, black" "mounds of dirt"
", rot and mold." "I am the" "birth" "of lightning."
A bolt flew down from the sky, blind-yellow and full of venom. The bright flash
coated the town in glow, the people melted away, their skin obliterated into each other in
streams and flashes, and shimmer-wisps, tufts of down like fire-flies. The buildings
crumbled to pieces, turning into dust. The light buried itself into it, hiding.
"I am" "She" "I am" "light" "I am" "from this earth" "creating in" "dust moving"
"whorls-whirls" "into a form" "of body."
And dust rose from the ground on its own desires, becoming the shape of people,
their bodies naked, their skins unsure of themselves.
"Be safe" "be happy" "I am speak" "-ing in" "truths, spinning" "lavender like" "the
dirge" "of water" "of move" "-ments" "like a nonce" "dance we" "invent" "for the
pleasure"
"of dancing".
The people began to breathe, they felt their bones and the curvatures of each other.
They touched their skins and believed in them. The people looked up at the young
woman, who had become light alone. She waved out her hands, which were suns each.
"Be living" "I tell you" "speak with" "water voices" ", fill your" "stomachs" "with
bands"
of light", "pile" "words in" "your brains" "you little" "children" "as you
should" "be".
The people collapsed to their new knees, and their bodies exploded out each, cool
beams of blue and white.
And the people bowed to her and she spoke to them for many years until all the
people made of light died. She spoke to them for a long time after, her voice hitting only
dust. Every so often, someone from another town would walk past, sleep beneath the sky
and she would whisper in their ears a potent sort of whisper. It made them leap and run
towards their friends. They would write it forever, speak of the voice as a comparable
god.
And every so often someone would type it down recognizing their folly in
describing her godliness. She would show up there and there only, whispering into their
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hands
"I don't" "love you" "but I" "believe" "you" "believe" in me."
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Dear Nanako,
I sat down to write Nanako but all I thought was cunt. This is not abnormal
is it? She's a girl, growing up strong in a large space on all sides.
So I had to articulate cunt and I did. I imagined the lips stretching, the
vulva wide revealing the inner reaches of her sex (yes. . .I'm sure it was HER sex)
and found myself hungry, the stomach growing foodless pits.
Where in dark corners of her body do I find that solace, that ice? I
couldn't stop staring into the abyss of her cunt. My hands still, a tug in the edges
of my arms to throw my notebook out the window, and someone kept knocking
on the fucking door. Nanako became the space between, the space between my
eyes and dark pool of mystery. I remain hungry.
Why is that? Can you tell me?
I'm a male writer, I use words like swords. I lasso stars and cut the ears off
of people who we want to listen to. I take lovers into my arms and thrust into
them until they scream for help. I claim to understand yard-work. Yet when I
control those syllables, Nanako, I feel an alien finger on my throat and a small
voice telling me “explode, explode now.” Every word I wrote after “Nanako is” or
“Nanako does” became unwriteable, bounced off the page and burned up. I think
it's because I'm jealous.
When you were younger did you ever tuck it in (or fold it out)? Who
didn't? It's fun to when you're three. Out in the front yard behind the fence so no
one passing by would see you with your shorts around your ankles, pushing the
head into the skin of your body until it disappeared, and you walked around the
browning grass whispering in a high pitched voice “I'm a girl now,” sleep under
your parents' window, the paint peeling underneath as if your very presence was
a truth not meant for eyes.
So am I writing my daughter's cunt? My cunt?
Is this the big second try?
I don't think of my daughter enviously, I don't want anything from her, but
the way she will walk if she walks and the language she will speak if she speaks,
and if not then not. A big knife could come out of the ground and carve out big
hunks of my body, lumps of flesh, sinews, and cobble together a working version
of her, and I'll say it's a lie and burn it. Nanako is no version.
Is this the big second try?
I hold Nanako in my hands imagining she is there and believing that she
has the body I desire, the breath in her lips is a gift. But she doesn't fold inward.
She becomes else, her body's incompleteness appearing, like a skin-fold stone
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drawn out of the mud, and she floats somewhere in a great river, a torso
exploded by the force of an overbearing father and his lightning.
I could merge with her, be done with it in a single narrative, erotic and
lovely but I don't because that's daughter. The union is the union of anti-matter
and matter, shadow, language. My hands trying to write her name, and my
fingertips splitting apart and the earth opening, swallowing us down to its red
iris, destroyed by a massive pulse of yellow light.
Can you help me? Give me your hand. Imagine me staring, light above.
Describe clearly the face of shade.
Sincerely,
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And now I am thankful.
It is my name I cannot write.