Melcontents

Winter is the worst. The skin of my hands fissures, reddens, widens,

tiny islands disrupt and thicken there, scar tissue, angered by the scratch of bacteria

under fingernails.

Typically, physical erosion proceeds fastest on steeply sloping surfaces like the curve on the back of my thumb, the slope between pinky and ring finger. Human activities worsen the process. How many times have I washed my hands in the past 90 minutes?

Natural arches, the world an open, holy marvel.

My mother starts getting wrinkles, and I ignore it.

How do you begin to explain the bird corpses
just inside the open yawn of the cave?

Old versions of us couldn’t do it,
huddled and hushed
each day a new fallen bundle of feathers collapsed
as if there really was a veil
between here and the place no one gets a return visit from.

I ended that sentence with a preposition,
and, to some, it feels like a small body on their pillow,
a gift from a feline friend, a different vibe completely.

Can you imagine the stretch in space
standing at the mouth, a gasp, unintended,
as, just for a moment, it felt like something tugged
on the front of your shirt and you moved
a fraction closer to Pluto?

A wonder. And no wonder the canny priests
proved their holy ways by finding the right pockets
of air.

See? Hades has blessed me. Follow
my lead. Pay me. Feed me. Love me.
Let me rest my foot upon the neck
of your fear.

Some people also are such caverns.

It’s the space that happens
between a greeting
and a follow-up question
to a conversation you’ve barely heard,

a distance from here
to the kitchen table,

a ghost, drawn in by the smell
of cooking eggs and toast

the burning smell
familiar and also lonely.

It’s the voices upstairs,
just outside the door.

As a scientist, how could you
have experimented on yourself
without expecting side effects?

The invisible woman just doesn’t
want to be an afterthought,
the waft of bacon air
escaping as the door closes.

Again, the apocalypse,
or at least its clouds
arrived early, as they do,
in August.

The winds rush to gather
and gossip with smoke signals,
coating the pinetops like a dirty secret.

Nothing useful, like who fucked
up the campfire or whose corpse
is being smothered by 20-foot flames.

Probably more elegant, like
which patch of moss
is making her debut,
which bird decided that motherhood
is not all it’s cracked up to be,
how many shinies the ravens
have collected in secret
like the conspiracists they are.

In the cracked, dry earth of Southern California
I sprouted roots and branches,
a living, vertical palindrome
that bears yellow fruit.

Only this fruit is more bitter,
no sour pucker but a hiss
and tightening of the jaw.

My arms are laden. Come. Pluck
one and sweeten its flesh
with honey.

You can taste the origins. Notes
of a childhood bully,
hints of a church upbringing.

And the nose, ah, so many buried,
including a father.

Fathers yield the strongest undercurrents, you know,
followed only by current events and missed connections.

burn me
and plant a tree over my ashes,

carbon fuel, the old carcass of an older body
maybe.

How many roots will my fingers be?
Might I finally be tall?

The minutes slow again
as days were when I ran through
the garden and pulled fruit from drooped
branches to eat with my cousins.

The world will blur into distant noise, and I will stretch
into my sleep.

It doesn’t matter how far
I move
the cat food from it’s sacred spot,
the lines of movement
keep on.

Tiny black patterns,
smells, trails
to honey, sinkwater, sweet liquors.

Why can’t we strike a bargain?

I would give a pint
of blood a week to the bitchy
mosquitoes in the park
if I could just exist
without constant welts.

Hell, everyone wants a Dormamu moment.

I’ve already given up pieces to dissect
and discard,
late days,
candies,
kisses,
tales,
scritches.

There’s more.

I’d trade an eye to keep the news
from making it weep,
a tongue to give voice
to live ghosts,
an arm for warmth
to one’s who’ve never been hugged, just because.

I spray vinegar water on the floors,
wipe the asbestos tiles, collect
a massacre of segmented bodies
on a paper towel.

What would it take?
A tablespoon of sugar
a day, a cup of honey a week?

What things can I give you?

It is winter, and we must be brave.

Outside the car windows freeze over

as various piles of blankets roam the city,

some silent, some screaming.

Across the street, the White Bird takes them

and gives them what is possible.

They line up for hours before the gates open,

waiting for treatment that is a charity,

and once it snowed for three days and no one could be there.

The trees are in skeletal sleep, after they burst in color in fall,

perches for crows, seagulls, and tiny hummingbirds hanging on

by the kindness of the neighbor’s sugar water.

There is sun sometimes, but more often there is rain

that falls so much and so fast I forget I need to drink

the water as much as the soft ground here.

I’ve been dehydrated since October.

On lawns and curbs, collections of tents appear

and disappear. A park houses hundreds of ragged

dwellings subject to flooding when the water levels rise.

Every tent in every Costco and REI has one of our names on it,

sewn into the threads,

waiting for the snip of the scissors to release a timeline

where that last check isn’t enough anymore,

and the mouths are hungry,

and the mind is hungry,

and you’re just hungry.

This last year has given birth

to me, into the new year,

not in a weird way.

I have been squeezed.

I have cried

at pure chaotic grief

as I left the safety of last year

into the lonely quality of the next.

People are supposed to shed the dust

and baggage they collected from January to December,

are supposed to feel grateful to have made it to another

New Years’ party

to watch the ball drop,

an uncomfortable metaphor.

If you do not feel hopeful,

you’re doing it wrong.

You failed to sacrifice your bitterness

on the alter of ways you can lose a few pounds,

end that relationship,

start that book you always meant to write.

Not to personify Death, but

Death did visit me this winter, the season in which

the black robes look the newest and the most in place,

and took from me in the old year and the new,

and I forgot how important it was to drink,

play party games,

stay up past my bedtime so my thirty-year-old

body could witness another revolution of the planet.

Someone dropped a pair of sunglasses

into an orangutan enclosure. She cautiously climbed sideways to look at it,

back to the audience, picked them up,

inspected them,

and peered through the dark lenses at a dark enclosure.

She took them off again, just to make sure her world was really bright,

put them back on, and felt special

perhaps.

On a small hill, with her tiny child reaching up

to play with the strange object,                            

she looked out at the world like Audrey Hepburn,

grabbing her child’s grabby hands with her large one

and holding it.

I always thought King Louis was born

of Kipyard’s imperialist mind,

but rather, he was Disney’s,

another kind of white man

who doesn’t understand

that orangutans don’t want to be like us,

they are us, and I’m not

being dramatic.

So many futuristic space shows feature

a human zoo.

Not like traffic or the stock market floor,

but a proper alien-sponsored enclosure for a man

and a woman in their natural environment.

How absurd it would be, the writers thought,

to put an intelligent creature like us behind glass

for the amusement of another species.