alessandra lynch
Ward off bangs & blows, quiet the grass in its ransacked field. Seek hard things to keep the body safe. Seek stone. If stone's a murderous clank, circle the pitted world. Quiet the owl in its damaged wood. Feign being air—maneuver between star & dirt. Reel hard from your wound. Err as bang & blow, find safety in the wind. Flick on snow for light. Sit still with falling things & soft bits like rain.
Something wrong. The alphabet frozen in its theater. You disappeared,
returned with tiny pliers, a glittering screw, and removed the blue hood
of the typewriter, jostled the keys. You removed a few tight springs, a latch, a thin ring, your hands
darkening with ink as you worked, unasked,
unsummoned, while I watched the bits
of my world—jangling, disoriented, mouthing tinselly syllables—pile up around you.
Fox in the woods today, an emblem of female. Bee flew past a puddle—in her wake, doves shot between branches. I kept glimpsing my sisters—bluestar with curtailed stem, mouth of pond unraveling, cattails in wild corners.
This was my only weather—following the unseen, sniffing for evidence that it had been.
Memory took off its hat, set down its cane, melted into the undone side of the bed.
No room for me in that house—too many birds, too few ideas.
The yard's frothy-mouthed forsythia
I needed to gag. No air in the color blue, no air.
Autumn's strewn bodies instructive and beautiful but hard to look at.
Maybe I needed focus. Pull the cord tight, loosen the wire. Let the bells tell it right.
There was the hole in the wall, my hurt fist, my frantic plastering. Something else staggering through the door.
When the body revoked itself and slimmed to bone and light, it became the very mouth of longing and so no longer longed. It drifted through circumscribed worlds without hunting, only haunting. It was beautiful this way—like trees in rain, or a train in snow, moving motionless, the voice of voicelessness. It could have lived forever, gliding, a circuitry of light, flecked and sparking, wiring the world it had abandoned.
It was an impossible house with difficult doors. Halls veered through empty. Even the semblance of the self was lost, even the mothering of self and of semblance—lost.
There were stirrings in the next room. At first I thought death—low burr, rustle, a hopeful noise—. No,
it was the amalgam of emptiness, piles of light on the sill, amber dust sifting through. The nothing of the thing.