St. Trigger

by Aaron Coleman

windows left open

  to dying daylight. Humid light. Foolish light.

  11 floors up. Weeping. Trust. Trust

  this. We still don’t. Give

  a secret to a being. Each

  collapsed. Complete. Fever made of touch.

  *

  God’s Island

  Then a man is a place;

  a room cluttered full of walls

  within walls, wants within

  wants, windows within

  windows, mirrors and more

  mirrors long and home

  enough with hidden sharpness

  to catch and reflect each

  and every act without seeing,

  without making even

  the slightest shattering sound.

  On Forgiveness

  I am a half question seeping into cracked ice

  leaning over the bar’s worn wood. Fear

  weighted with ache, anxious in the fleshed

  angles of two faces. Slurred symmetry in me

  and my old man’s shadow when he cackles.

  Saliva and vodka flick embers working

  fire into my skin. No one else sees the sway

  and lean in his bulk, the terror coarse

  in his veins. His loose hands touch slick,

  wet glass; a promise of sharpness. Don’t

  murmur I love you, this time. Don’t

  come close. Give me the keys and shut

  the fuck up if I swerve in the dark

  summer heat by the swamp

  land you taught me to own.

  Through

  through (→) prep. 1. In one side and out the opposite or another side of: As in, after days of wandering, they finally carved a path through the deep woods; the littlest of them all couldn’t help but stare at how the standing water had soaked through his socks. When he opened his mouth to speak, the bigger ones looked right through him and continued forward toward the cave’s mouth. 2. Among or between; in the midst of: She watched him gently as he fell through his mind. They chose silence because the sound of their fear travelled so clumsily through darkness. 3. By way of: Through sex, they spilled loss and time. Through sex, they learned to desire their most intimate disguises. 4. a. By the means or agency of: She learned how to distinguish between different kinds of smiles through her trips to the general store with her mother, grandmother, and later on through her daughter. b. Into and out of the handling, care, processing, modification, or consideration of: They shuffled his application through the unemployment office at the same speed he went through each job. His stint on the steamboat casino was his favorite; he remembered the first moment the chips no longer felt like money, the way colors began to blur, passing through his hands like the gray chaos of river water. 5. Here and there in; around: He was sure there was something else speaking through his veins besides blood. As they walked through the antebellum home, he couldn’t believe the way the smells forced their way through his clothes, his skin, his nostrils; the staining scent of cigar, the musk of sweat and shame, the lingering hints of salt pork, sweet corn, and gun powder. 6. From the beginning to the end of: Through it all, he had known deep down that he had never wanted to be there. He didn’t know why he stayed through the rumblings and through the shatter; why didn’t he just say he had to go? He lay there through the night, eyes open, mouth closed. 7. At or to the end of; done or finished with, especially successfully: They were relieved to be through each phase of pain. They were through with every claim except exhaustion. 8. Up to and including: They went through the first eleven pages of the manifest without finding his name and he watched the man’s eyes as he scanned through the last one. She had gone through all her options; there appeared to be no way out. 9. Past and without stopping for: For years, they touched and moved smoothly through only the bodies they didn’t love; together they devised a plan and plot to get through the smaller deaths and desires. 10. Because of; on account of: She thought she could manage to survive through silence. He was sure that he could survive long enough through some combination of his grip and his feet.

  after A. Van Jordan

  Between

  bliss and fear. I learn the waves before

  the tides. Toes skimming the bottom,

  what I do remember is

  her farther out, in

  the bigger waves and her body held

  beyond, above my head in the swell—

  the inrushing water, for a moment

  a silhouette, a threat, dissolving, nearly

  bodiless, riding, rising—turquoise light,

  that is what the guilt is like.

  Wherein I am

  mostly in my palms

  shoved deep in pockets full of red

  dirt and tattered psalms pressed into skin

  inside a threaded edge

  around my waist

  stricken

  strained

  *

  a greased piston

  of a vehicle passing

  the asphalt beneath

  the driver’s hand

  slipping

  from the wheel

  succumbing to sleep

  *

  confined to a theater fearing

  bullets on repeat

  watching every motion

  picture I was supposed to watch

  only years too late

  with acetate film meant to protect

  my pupils

  translucent

  dripping

  anxious blue

  *

  beetle-backed

  exo-

  and gossamer-winged

  spreading

  open until too far

  until torn down the middle

  until clouded

  viscera splaying

  exposed

  *

  moonlight extended

  over an open

  field in southern Illinois

  its southing

  I am also

  the corn sheathed

  nearby

  its husk

  shimmering in white light

  St. Seduction

  Eros eating my eyes, full-mouth rosy

  smile ever so slightly righteous—

  drooling. I do with my myths what they do

  with me. I do not believe. I choose to eat

  my way through dark bridges. I swallow

  idle gods. Yours? Whose? They dance

  they sex they hand they look they gut

  whatever whoever: all and only

  to distort the way I stilt and syncopate

  through time’s violence. Distinguish me

  from night that lives inside you.

  The myth: of me. The want to want

  to be. Wanted. Sacred. Silent. Magnetic—how

  so hollowed by light. Maze of

  body. Wracked with pulse and touch. Curve

  and arc and eye. Again. Quick. Smile.

  The guilt of whom I—we—you aren’t

  throbbing. I spy the wild bedrooms in bodies

  porous with instinct. Smell. Orgiastic loss

  grasps—conspires. The ache

  of expiration—exploration. Look. At me

  through them in us, restless foot dangling

  off the curb over the puddle into the glance

  of the other—there—upside down inside

  you falling. Up. Rushing where with whom and why

  ecstatic and hazed delicious light caught

  lost falling. Loot loot—Look through

  into— my face is not a door my face

  is not a door my face my— as if the truth were

  most important. And it, I, too, seduce

  the same way warm sea rises higher

  by the hour. I do not believe

  in righteousness. Such lonely power.

  On Surrender

  The soft dark rope of prayer and dream,

  its weight, what I pull, and am pulled by

  into night. Crude apparat
us. I walked into what seemed

  to be a wake in the ordering line

  of a 24-hour McDonald’s downtown. I was camouflage

  contraband, everything I looked at looked back

  black and white. From my peripheral, I witnessed

  my counterfeit life: the only police

  officer I’ve ever trusted, an ex-lover,

  a savior, a martyr, a brother, all there

  waiting: worldless, anxious, hungry – so many leaned

  their shadows on each other. Someone I knew once

  spoke aloud to no one: Who broke me open?

  The nightwind and what it carried made it hard

  to know. Time was a threat we noticed so

  I gave in to slow sex that felt like a memory,

  got zip-tied by that police officer, then haphazardly

  released. I never got my food.

  White people

  I vaguely recognized talked shit about Detroit

  comfortable between the cramped

  bathroom’s piss and stone and I felt

  myself swell to defend a city within

  whose limits I’ve never lived. I’m ashamed

  I don’t trust anger. I’m ashamed I don’t trust

  the idea of home. Outside, I saw the war

  again. I wanted

  to sit on the floor, sit until I was served, and eat, but I knew

  nothing, no one, would come. Until too late, our bodies

  couldn’t grasp the incoming weary glory of the out-of-date

  military drones, gunning at us, until they were less

  than the height of an abandoned tenement above

  the ground tattered with violence, spitting up

  crumbles. Before anything else: the numbness

  of this danger, this power. We pushed

  each other into the parking lot’s narrow

  sorrow and threw hand-size chunks of rock

  into the sky, and hated the way the child-like

  among us paused in awe of the destruction.

  You are less if you miss, we’d say. Keep fucking throwing.

  Each one of us, on our own, gave up. I went back

  inside to find someone I still love. The two of us rushed

  to stash our bodies together in condiment cupboards

  beneath the cash register. We made ourselves pray

  but my knees wouldn’t bend enough

  to close the little door, so I left her there. Went back again

  and pressed my hand on the glass

  exit, took in the sudden emptiness, and felt the toll

  stir my body, full, and hopeless.

  Seed Beneath The Dark

  The fretwork breaks. The sanctuary abandoned, burns

  up through the ends of stars. I name each blamed

  forest Today and Why and Year and Gone. Trust

  the wolf, the owl, the crag, the lip of rock above

  the vulture that murmurs look. I counted. I took.

  I wove myself in with the leaves. My fortune refused

  to surprise me. Thought, then forgetfulness – what if

  I believe fear is its own low country? I know

  an hour behind an hour and the tower inside

  an elegy. I am anybody helpless, listless, near

  as whisper, as prayer. There is a quiet inside every

  valley and door. I build hundreds of my own angels

  and dare the cold to mold me daily into a bridge

  between what I have forgotten and what I owe.

  Elegy for Apogee

  Drowning? Consider this: What is desire? Who or what devours

  what or whom? How close is absurdity, is irrelevance, is danger?

  In denial? In the divine? In dilated eyes? In sunken hands

  scrubbing pans in the kitchen that cooks hunger beneath fish-

  greased dish water? What is that tremble in the feet and the mouth

  of the fly romancing the crumbs on the brim of the sink

  from the night before? Do we have to eat everything? Do we have

  to chew endlessly and never burn our tongues or choke

  gobbling soup or razor-thin hidden bones? This deliciousness

  still too hot? Too piercing to the throat? Can you choke her

  if she asks you to squeeze hard no harder no keep going but don’t

  enjoy it too much? Do we have to lust for nights fucking fucking

  otherness until we hear the clink of new armor gleaming

  sweat-polished and mooned by breath turned noise? Can we lie

  there in our sex exhausted and still swallow and still remain

  touched, halved, inside, conscious of conscience? Whose

  conscience? Whose collateral? Whose collapse? Whose end? Who’s

  dark as the id? Breed the id? Eat the id? Be exotic to myself? Enjoy

  the translation of my body in whose mouth? Who can work

  with hurt and urge and rage like words, like puzzles,

  like bodies, like whose? Bring out which tantalizing bodies

  from the stockroom and wild reserve of my own? Pile platters high

  with meat and cheese cultured and aged in the skin of a what? Cut

  it how? Watch for what to gush? Spread it how? How much of this

  mind is mine? Where is my canary? Who has the brand new onesize-

  fits-all jumpsuit and boots, the helmet with its dim light barely

  carrying? And what should we do with the soot seeping into the

  porous pornography of my taboo-being giving up? Who owns

  the other wild canaries kidnapped from their islands for cages

  of coal-fraught mines? Who can explain what happened? Dondé

  estaban? Y dondé estoy? Como vas ahora negrito? Negrita? Como

  andas adentro conquistador sin doors? What did you ever love

  enough to try to take, to force open, to touch, conquistador?

  Disfrutas de deseo tanto como dices? Do you hate as much as you

  say you hate? What about the tired yellow disappearing from all

  these delicate feathers? How long do we have to wait

  to coat our quills with kindling before we explode? Forget

  my ancestral antique cave? Forget my myths? Forget my holes?

  What about the spilling-in cold? Where’s the hair? Where’s the bulk?

  Who’s been shorn? I am on display as owned bones in what

  museum-made-home? What want won’t leave me alone?

  Why and how do bodies fuck and war, pattern and rattle

  the windows in the ecstatic upper rooms of the special collections

  gallery? Who can say they love the ache of their anger?

  Who can really say they trust anger the way they trust want? Who

  doesn’t ask? Who’s anxious? Who’s anchored to the brutal arc

  inside of eyes? To drunk fumbling hands atop the antique dining

  room table? To the loll of heirloom lace? To felt green worn

  corners on whose pool table? To the sacrosanct crawl

  space? To the naked hangers clattering in whose closet?

  To the craters of the body’s moonscape movie set backed

  by big-time producers of what reeling nostalgia? To which actors

  delivering breakthrough after breakthrough performance after

  performance? To which decrepit theater of my body, collapsed

  and taken back by the roots and vines of trees,

  an abandoned stage dim and splintered with what kind of want?

  [American Dream] See

  two black people [what] in an alley naked

  [am i] having sex frantic in a cop car

  with the cop lights chaotic [silent?] circling

  across the walls [what]. See two black

  people in an alley naked having

  sex in a cop car cop lights writ frantic [am i]

  across the walls [gone]. The sirens fracture

  shadows, whir, ne
ar – unsilent [?] – drawn.

  St. Trigger

  I’m idolized I’m backhanded eye

  taboo backward

  who holds you in myself

  close like fire I’m split heat spilt

  I’m no thing from human ripped

  new but void and nova loosed

  to you I’m wire I’m scar

  soaked cloaked I’m contrived

  in anti-antidote wind antennae

  hole in hope looped— meant to be

  I’m end of obsolescent sex slewed transmitted

  pressed marked man music—

  beneath ruthless

  I’m a ready finger I’m admission and

  a ready thumb— ambitious suspicion

  I’m hum derision

  unclocked time and tick and boom

  I’m lobbed brick doubled hymn

  look daemoned delicious decision

  spewed into Pantocrator devoured

  the truth I’m symptom attended

  I’m sum man-i-fold masque religioned

  I’m debt of angels fate-taken

  made afraid face-stricken

  I’m learned ache ace I’m what happens

  burn and want divided born

  and doubt adept ashamed I’m rabid

  I’ve had it aped—