by Saeed Jones
I pressed into you, into you and away
from all the breaking. I didn’t know
your name, so I kissed one
into your mouth. Told myself
I have a body to hold this morning,
then held my own when you
walked out into the sirens.
KINGDOM OF TRICK, KINGDOM OF DRUG
after Lucie Brock-Broido
I.
I lick the sycamore inked onto his sternum.
Hard, sweet ridge of the chest, valley I send sweat into.
With a pen, I bleed mangled birds onto him: robin,
kestrel, sparrow. Pointed tip of his finger
holding them down, he counts. Lest they fly away,
lest they leave him naked and plain. My head against his chest,
robin, kestrel, sparrow, I say, one for each pill.
II.
In bed, we keep combat boots on, scrape our shins
climbing each other—which is to say: I dream I’ve dragged a tree
into bed with me. Bark against my back, roots and clumps of dirt
poking out from beneath the sheets like feet. Each hour,
another season. It pushes cherry blossoms against my closed eyes,
then just as soon burns leaves red like autumn.
III.
Four nights in, I still don’t know his name. And each kiss
is the aftertaste of pills, a white cloud on the tongue. He hates
the names I give him: Tantalus, Orestes, Ganymede. I don’t
need a name he says, sky-high in the shower, the birds leaking
into stains on his stomach. Orange bottle in hand,
I answer Hyacinth and Vicodin. I answer Xanax and Zephyr.
IV.
Before he leaves, I tell him about a girl running
through a grove. She trips, gets up just in time. The ground is so unkind
laughs the god chasing her. But she’s calling out now.
You won’t have me. Like it’s already over, like she knows.
She stands her ground and leaves weave into her hair. Her skin tans,
then cracks open into bark. And in the branches
of her raised arms, birds.
BLUE PRELUDE
Last night, the ceiling above me ached
with dance. Music dripped down the walls
like rain in an old house. My eyes followed
the couple’s steps from one corner
to the other, pictured the press of two chests
against soft breathing, bodies slipping
in and out of candlelight. The hurt
was exquisite. In my empty bed, I dreamed
the record’s needle pointed into my back,
spinning me into no one’s song.
IN NASHVILLE
At the Silver Saloon, you show me
what a white boy in Wrangler Jeans
can do with my moves. The electric
slide grinds with boot-scootin’ boogie.
Two steps to the left, a sunburned woman
outdoes me entirely, throws in some hip
just to call me out. And I feel a bit
betrayed, dancing in this crowd
of snakeskin boots and red, white, and blue
rebel tattoos with the moves I thought
I had some kind of claim to, a way
of mapping out hell with my feet.
4
HIGHWAY 407
Lewisville, TX, August 2011
4 a.m. walks past my wreck
and waiting
I am done.
Your grief will be useful some day, says no one.
Roadside, my ear still tuned
to asphalt, its moon-crater skin,
I wait.
The high grass calls you
out of silence.
A vixen,
apparition
already trotting back:
oh mother
beastly,
I stole the planets,
your wet, black eyes.
I lick the dew-damp dirt
but your feet leave
nothing behind.
I wait
hours into quarters.
Trucks pass,
white noise trailing radios
like limbs
scattered on the road and I am made
of waiting.
My shut eyelids find me
but I know you are not done
with my sleep,
dead woman.
Behind nothing, I wait.
Leave your feet.
I lick the dew-damp dirt,
your wet, black eyes.
Oh mother,
already trotting back,
apparition,
a vixen.
Out of silence,
the high grass calls you.
I wait,
roadside, its moon-crater skin,
my ear still tuned to asphalt.
Your grief will be useful some day, says no one.
MERIDIAN
Cinders drift in
from a fire we can’t see.
A breeze
of sparks, the smell of mesquite
smoked, crackling.
It could be a family grilling
or another acre
gone to hell. In this heat,
third week, one hundred degrees
in the shade.
We’re dry tinder.
Water won’t answer our questions
anymore; turns to mirage
when touched.
Forget clothes. Heat knows
what I want to know: the river
of sweat through the canyon
your back becomes
when my tongue comes
to cool you. Two men
on fours in this razed field, red clay
to roll in.
You are my sky burned
to blazing, the dazzle
before my body’s exhausted
collapse,
fingers singed,
breath,
blue flame.
MERCY
Her ghost slips into the room wearing nothing but the memory
of a song: thin as a note lost in a little girl’s throat,
mercy.
If fog had a sound,
if the moon decided to hold its breath,
if she ever heard the way I cry out in my sleep,
mercy.
She knows I’m not well, sees the dark circling my eyes,
one more inheritance,
mercy.
Her stare traces me
and a hand reaches out but Mama, I don’t know the words.
MISSISSIPPI DROWNING
I’ve lined my throat
with the river bottom’s best
silt,
allowed my fingers to shrivel
and be taken for crawfish.
I’ve laced my eyelashes with algae.
I blink emerald.
I blink sea-glass green.
I am whatever gleams
just under the surface.
Scoop at my sparkle. I’ll give you nothing
but disturbed reflection.
Bring your ear to the water
and I’ll sing you
down into my arms.
Let me show you how
to make your lungs
a home for minnows, how
to let them flicker
like silver
in and out of your mouth
like last words . . .
CASKET SHARP
Your soft cough becomes prognosis. Soon,
cigarette smoke is the inkblot test of lung.
Tell me what you see
and I’ll sleepwalk home
to pick out your first and last charcoal suit,
a jade handkerchief for the pocket atop
your excavated chest.
I see two men, father & son
but
let’s not get ahead of ourselves, goner.
And now?
A dirge parades past the empty house,
black silk parasols in hand.
I see butterflies of smoke and blood.
And in the aisles of a half-lit church, strangers
walk away from you, whispering, “He looks
good, real sharp.” Handsome enough
to bury.
DOMINION
His mouth bleeds when he starts
to sing, but—bless him—he licks
the taste of ruby from his teeth
and sings anyway. Thin blade
of glass lodges in each note,
listen—
he’s trying to be better than the rain.
You shut your eyelids to keep him
from slipping into your father’s
rumpled body; you stare down
the muddy light locked in the ice
of your drink, but damn if he hasn’t
dug up your old man’s throat.
THE FABULIST
He puts my hand against his chest
so his nipple can read the lines on my palm.
He insists in his certain voice
that the beat in his chest isn’t a beat at all
but an echo: the sound of two fearful feet
heading down into some poorly lit cave
made of bats and blood-red gems.
He tells me again. He’s told me before.
The feet walk slower the farther down they go.
No, I say, taking my hand back.
It’s a heart. It’s always been a heart.
I say it once for him, once for myself.
He steps back and looks at me;
he needs to tell me the story again.
ROOM WITHOUT A GHOST
Sheer, breeze-caught curtains aren’t full-bodied,
just billowing. The wind isn’t trying
to touch you. Papers rustled, then scattered around the room
mean nothing. Do not read them
in the wind’s order. Do not fall to your knees,
deciphering the air and its invisible ink, or look up wide-eyed,
expecting. No one is standing there,
backed against the haze.
Not him. Not him.
No one is watching you but you.
DIRGE
With my head half devoured
by fog, I lock myself in your room. Light drums its fingers
against the window, then three bright fingers
finish the dirge on my skin. You are everywhere but where
I need you. Nose pressed to your last pillow, even the memory of your breath,
slipping.
I don’t sleep so much as attempt to erase.
When I wake, beside me on the bed is a Ziploc bag from the hospital. Inside,
your scissor-shredded clothes, a row of your teeth.
Come back now. Come back
and put your hands over my mouth.
AFTER LAST LIGHT
A moonless night cliff-side steals the sea
from us. What was sapphire beyond churlish blue
is just howl now: waves darker than closed eyelids
wreck the rocks we also can’t see. Sunlight forgot
the two of us here. The taste of salt, an ungiven kiss
on our lips. And silence is the rush of blood
in our ears, a violent pause between your question
and what I will not say. I have no answer;
my throat is the ocean now.
HOUR BETWEEN DOG & WOLF
I.
Before the only unbroken mirror, cobalt kimono
undone, embroidered sea at my feet
I’m the self-portrait of my father.
Eyes deep as ravines, night-lined ribcage,
even the rage is his,
this dusk between both of me.
II.
In an hour colored tourmaline, I mistake your guitar
for a body in sleep and smash you into effigy,
splinter your way back into my skin.
My silk-wrapped fists shadowbox your incessant reflection
and break myself back open.
POSTAPOCALYPTIC HEARTBEAT
I.
Drugged, I dreamed you a plume of ash,
great rush of wrecked air
through the towns of my stupor.
And when the ocean in your blood went toxic, I thought fire
was what we needed: serrated light through the skin, grenade
in the chest—pulled linchpin.
I saw us breathing on the other side of after.
But a blackout is not night; orange-bottled dreams are not sleep.
II.
I was a cross-legged boy
in the third lifetime,
empire of blocks in my lap while you walked
through the door of your silence,
hunting knife in one hand, flask in the other.
I waited for you until I forgot to breathe,
my want turning me colors only tongues of amaryllis could answer for.
It owned me, that hunger,
tendriled its way into my name for you.
III.
In a city made of rain
each door, a silence; each lock,
a mouth,
I walked daily through the spit-slick streets, harbingers on my hands in henna:
there will be no after
Black-and-blue-garbed strangers, they called me Cassandra. (I had such a body then.) Umbrellas in hand, they listened while they unlistened.
there will be no after
no.
the world will end
no.
you are the reason it ends
no.
you
no.
IV.
I didn’t exactly mean to survive myself.
Half this life I’ve spent falling out of fourth-story windows.
Pigeons for hair, wind for feet. Sometimes I sing
“Stormy Weather” on the way down. Today, “Strange Fruit.”
Each time, strangers find me
drawing my own chalk outline on the sidewalk, cursing
with a mouth full of iron,
furious at my pulse.
V.
After ruin,
after shards of glass like misplaced stars,
after dredge,
after the black bite of frost:you are the after,
you are the first hour in a life without clocks; the name of whatever
falls from the clouds now is you (it is not rain),
a song in a dead language, an unlit earth, a coast broken—
how was I to know every word was your name?
5
HISTORY, ACCORDING TO BOY
1
Boy is not one of the Boys, but Boy is observant.
At the edge of the basketball court in the park, by the locker on the far, far end of the locker room, by the punch bowl at homecoming, by the punch bowl at prom, nothing gets past Boy.
If you cut open Boy’s head, at least fifty notebooks would fall out, each full of what Boy has written down with his eyes.
The Boys throw their words like sharp stones, and Boy takes note. Other notes: nipples pressed against sweat-slick t-shirts during games of catch, bulges in basketball shorts and sweatpants, hands that are not his hands slipping below the waists of the Girls during slow dances.
2
Some of Boy’s notes are dreams.
These notes are recorded on the undersides of Boy’s eyelids. After tonight’s homecoming dance, Boy dreams he has the body of a girl,
a song only he can hear.
3
A war burns at the edge of the map Boy lives on.
On clear days, Boy can see smoke rising in the distance like an old god. Boy makes note of battles the smoke reminds him of: Gettysburg, Wounded Knee, Atlanta.
The Boys enlist. The Boys start weari
ng boots and camouflage hunting clothes to school. In the hallways, they shoot each other with guns only they can see.
They die bright, fantastic deaths every chance they get.
In English, D (one of the Boys) sprays the classroom with pretend bullets. The Boys clutch their chests and fall this way and that way.
D doesn’t think to shoot Boy.
Below his desk where no one can see, Boy presses his palm against a pretend bullet wound in his thigh to stop the bleeding.
Boy thinks D is going to be a beautiful dead soldier one day.
4
Boy lives in a house made of guns.
At night, Boy’s father and mother sleep curled around each other like snakes. The pistols and rifles on the wall above their bed twinkle like dark stars whenever a car’s headlights shine into the room’s one window.
Boy knows these things because Boy cracks open their bedroom door and takes note of how they hold each other in their sleep.
Another note: They sleep like they are rehearsing for a play about sleeping.
5
Boy’s father takes him to the shooting range every Saturday.
Boy enjoys these trips as much as Boy’s father does. It is their one good thing.
Their very first visit, when Boy was twelve, Boy’s father stood behind him, traced his arms along Boy’s arms, and gave advice about how to hit the black paper body a few yards ahead.
