#i am chewing glass. i am putting this in a heart-shaped locket and looking at it fondly

[micky-cox]

FORGETTING A FATHER or, I've Lost as Orpheus by Sarah McCann    September 10, A Shatterin In the house, vigilant (a disgusting vigilance, including sleep) I am a kid in a kid’s room. Playing with the wall, I’ve wrapped my fingers into some skull on the far one— a transparent shadow mass, the light rushing around my hands like a bandage. An hour earlier I jailed a night toad, only one inch long, only thirty seconds long, then flicked him off (toads, with their gentle bones and the grace in their double-stretched skin, still are never shes). I flicked him back in the grass. Crumbs of meaty earth in my palms left from the toad’s umbrella toes. I spread the wart-dirt all across my cheeks to blush into ugliness, to become a troll. I remembered, though, that I didn’t want anything to do with being a toad.  The mud ran like lava down the sides of the sink. Dad, you are lying dead in the next room with your dog tags on. My hips could not hold my weight, or the weight of paper, even if I could will myself to stand. Your eyes are the size of your pocketwatch, even closed. I am afraid. I will sleep awake tonight. The first dream was like this: You’ve gone to change your name. The explanation: onomatopoeia and you love me. I think: you’ve just been around too long Chincherinchee. Waratah. Gaga. The next: The ship went down. Candles thicken the unhealthy smell of the room. Dad, you have turned into the one wearing a séance. You forgot to talk to me. I played the knife game today, fingers spread on the glass cover of the coffee table. The problem: my eyes closed too many times. My hand looks chewed, a loose piece of knitting. How is it that, still, we can keep someone dead in the house? A whale on land is not hematite, striped silver, not liquid, not mercury, not a whale. This whale, dragged from the dune and sandy, is no one I know. Grounded completely. He was never that. A heap of rotting hay. I’d burn it tonight if I could. Do you hear that, Dad? Dirty clothes. Fireplace left over from a fallen down house. Ears where lightning struck eyes squirrel hollows nose a shriveled sunless branch no mouth (he was quiet) hands the oyster shell shapes of fungus wing flutters his knees tight gnarled knots in the skin the leaves a halo bothered by wind.                             September 8, Distilled I took the sleeper car to see him the last time. I had been drinking since Mom called. I found this on a club car napkin: The train windows are drunk— lips licked with whiskey, brown-tainted, swallowed in caramel. Pine trees dip through the slurred puddles dragging their lacy feet. When we are quick the trees are whipped into mud. Burial mounds aching, all stuck through with bones, aching in solitary pain— lost hills of death— now run together like ocean waves. Even the creek we travel with begins to look liquid, fast as glass, and slips along shimmering and ridged like a clear earthworm. The man who left this at the bar was wet, from the knees down. I imagined about him: I see a man right now in the middle of a business suit in the middle of a rain finding a seat on the sidewalk then pulling a garbage bag over his head all around him. I immediately think of punishment, lost babies that people throw in dumpsters in plastic. I think to save him. He is just hiding. Again, there are babies in my head. When you can’t see, there is nothing truer, that no one can see you back. The man is simply in a place with not so many colors. It isn’t that he disappeared. That can be blamed on the rest of them. The rain has something to do with this: the black of oil churning in circles separating to turn into everything. Wings of color, all directions. The man looked down to see his grief diving and swimming in smiles. And a car ran over this. When he crossed the street, some splashed on his shoes. He caught a little of the all in his pant cuffs. So he sits. None of this is important though. It matters that he is still there, that I am still with him, though across the road. But in the train. Nearly there. Now I am wishing there is no drink limit: I empty the whisky into the hollow-eyed tire swing.  It drips slowly out, like a sloppy tradition, from a nail-hole in the tread. New whiskey, steeped in old oil and dirt road, rubber.  I sit underneath, mouth open to catch the tired rain.  A golden looking glass down my throat.  Spreading. The train slows in time to my blood. The amazing thing about me is that I am as pale as water in an ash marble fountain. You can see right through my skin. Lacy capillaries twinkling like angels. My dejected, frown of a liver. Downstream, muscles wrapped as Valentine gifts. Ovary arrowheads. Lungs, one broken wagon wheel. My ribs, flirty, and always slightly unzipped, show a winking heart, like a lighthouse. I direct everyone home.                                           September, One Wing The trees—long-lasting fireworks. This branching in everything: streams fall in ribbons, broken around a rock arms to fingers little thoughts, like “Kiss me there” limbs into “and there” to the twig of “one more” lightning Nothing stays one, together. But nothing ever comes unattached. Look at each cold breath growing lie a crystal tree in the air. Every bit of air drawn in is immediately lost in a web of veins tributaries ending in still more gossamer. It is just as possible to branch in a circle as it is to fall together there, but the branching is what lasts.                                           September 12, Grub A lovely dinner— guests easy to please— and not after long we napped in the backyard in the bog. I floated down to dine with nine corpses this evening. We ate the flower’s meat twine-green bones. I prepared this salad: unzipped the muslin dress of lettuce, split and spilled the whole heart of a carrot’s arrow, cut the diamond of an onion chandelier, unplugged a throbbing tomato from its juice. I did more.  My fingers are stained radish. All our life’s work is dying. Look at any face. you will see shriveled kidneys left too long in an oven. at the same time, a bloated liver strung with a flood of poison. knees crumbling in a concrete way from their business in the slums. (I am taking the body apart again) the library of the lungs each book weighed with mold. I tossed a few of my own teeth with salad, for croutons.                                           September 10, The Last of the Season I hate to realize what I’ve been doing since ten.  Raking in the wind. Peeling impaled leaves, leather butterflies, off my rake. It is homemade and wooden. I may as well have a broom. Trucks encourage the wind and, the lonely ones, on the road for weeks, see me, a girl, and yell out. They must miss some one. I think, if Sisyphus and I were the same age, we’d have a good time. I could walk on top of his rock like a log roller, rake in hand, sweeping the wind to get the flyaways. Whoever finished first would buy the end-of-the-day beers.  We could finally sleep. Dad would rather leaves rot in our marsh of a lawn than to rake. His plan was a forest of mushrooms and the under-stone smell that clings to the legs of grey feathery insects.  Our yard was left to its own.  Once, it thought itself into a pond and drowned. I stand between the wind and my lighter and touch each of the eight shriveled fingers. A rake on fire looks like a strange, scared man. I dropped him in the gutter.                                           September 13, Burial To think like a tree, first let yourself into the ground.  Sometimes your roots go down, sometimes you must dig a hole to stand in.  The religion of dirt heads into toes, then rides the sap up the body.  It slows you down like meditation. Tar for blood.  Now, a tree. The touch of onion chiffon on fingers, a wet light bulb, the way a sharp star smells. Onions look like full clouds when the clouds are so large the veins of the sky thicken soon to rush again with rain turning the land rusty. The clouds all day have looked like my dog— not the shape of Aslan, but the pipe smoke quality of him— something you feel like you should be able to hold, but can’t. Each swelling of the skin of the clouds is a single curl of Aslan’s fur. He actually stayed on my bed when I put him there for two minutes with the window’s wind on his nose then ran off to find where the breeze went. I stayed at the window. Some of the grass after the long assembly decided that the air was no good. The rebels (the union) have started growing back into the ground, head-first and loopy like a strange, one-color needlepoint. The trees, when they heard about all this grew mournful.  Again. It’s nothing new.  They cry about having lost everything, and they have. They look like they have. The stage of winter. Teachers say it is the less light that throws people on their knees in the snow. It is really the teacher of the trees, their tragedy.  A little Oedipus, part Hamlet, and always Death of a Salesman.  The no communication that is communication. The trees think they are sad, sure. But they are making people cry. With all this nonsense going on, the tulips have decided to stay in their leafy eggs forever.  A dreamy hibernation that lasts, swirled in satin licks, the insect-black inside. Clouds bandage the bruised sky above my unhappy yard. Aslan has come back his head under my hand for a second. Is it coincidence brains are shaped like clouds? A tree’s tiara?                                           September, Graves: those that are cared for every Saturday, marble rinsed down, dead daisies removed, azaleas trimmed those set in diagonals with rose marble, not ash enumerous those that are warm boiling over with dirt ones that are empty, not drawn yet, but surely will be above the ground below rain-riddled, or roots dusted with lilacs, with the taste of dusk ones sculpted as angels those with candles in wind-proof glass ones for children, with dolls with snow on top sometimes, the ocean forgotten the skin, when one dies alone those that have been robbed, lockets snapped from crackling spine rings slid off white sticks the skin, when one wants to die                                           September 30, How I Made The Day I went diving in a water cave, a dark-lit, placid, ocean grave where sharks were sleeping like dull blades, and kept far from the nightmare waves. Stalagmites crawling with sea lice this well where Mayans sacrificed held gold that seemed to melt like ice when I brought it to the surface for light. Each honeyed tear dripped again to the ground to form a glassy, glowing mound like lave worming, turning sound the cursed gold coiled pools around. I saw this frozen light become a thousand eyelids, then just one. It opened to let out the sun, from under this water the day was spun. A tarry sea was tempered to the water that can teem and chew, a phoenix and a wildfire brew. The ocean from black drowsy gold to blue.                                           After All, Renovations The finish is inching off the floors. Unpainting itself in rays. Unraveling your work. Your fingers were splintered like a cactus.  And now, are sinking into wood, spilling into each bare fiber. There’s your whirlpool thumbprint— no, a mat dark in the plank. Is that your elbow’s scar I’m standing over? My toe closes your eye. No, that’s not right. A tangle of knee?  Dizzy. Turn around, turn it all back to wood. October’s End, All Souls’ Sunset Skeletons clank woodenly in the dark Light through the ribs— wind all over Mexico. a dead red prism.; The blanket on you, Witch costume, ragged at the knees. frozen prism, Stringy hair, echo of fringe. was woven on such a night, A painted girl pulls her hat, turns strings of dusk shy, at a dog. the weft, Later, the real demons, stars strung as shy warp. the children gone. You were born after sunset. Your face is so open, It is right you should be gone eyes closed, and always begs: at the same time. “Just one more sweet. Children are begging pesos I’m in light up to my elbows as ghosts. A small devil but not drowned yet” alights at my elbow. The blanket settles. A skeleton has begun to show through The cloth holds onto your old body, the settling blanket. the wind to the shore.

http://www.mortarmagazine.org/forgetting-a-father