Invitations

Invitations

They were trying to save her and she was having none of it. One light bulb died, only to be replaced by her slim fingers. Didn’t she know? When her head ached for hours and spider webs of searing white saturated her vision. Didn’t she know it was their doing? She wasn’t made to handle the three of them, trio of lights, nestled just above her sleeping head, congratulating themselves now on her making it through the day, plotting how she would survive the next with all of them powered at full tilt, all of their glass bulb bellies aflicker with electricity. And sometimes their whispering woke her and she lay for minutes in bed, her sheets curled around her like an ocean, her hair a wave’s spray arcing across her deflated pillowcase. Her chest would rise, would fall, her eyes, those weak, betraying eyes, were wet daubs in the darkness, sitting pools of deep water, jelly-like and moist as they acquainted themselves with the dark. They failed her each and every day and only at night could convince themselves it was not their own doing, that it was not the retina or the cords of nerves or mucus but something other outside that was broken, flagging. And then they’d get all slick and slippery, sliding out with their lie and glistening with it. Slowly though, slowly, she was losing things. She was losing sight.

One day she unscrewed all but one light bulb. Later she replaced that with a weaker kind. Outside the sunsets and sunrises, the Sunday flowers and long fingered clouds began to slip, to thin. She sat on her bed once and stared and stared and stared, memorizing the lines and colors of her favorite painting, even now somewhat deadened, its elegance slimmed, diluted by what already her eyes failed to show her. And then it was the mirror, it was her face, her hair, the shape and curve of her ribs into her hips, her breast to her shoulder, the fragile clavicle to the tender base of her throat. She cut her fingers at dinnertime, her blood and moans mingled amongst the carrots and cauliflower. And she couldn’t make out the red-coral-rose of it against the cutting board. And then the house was black, was gray, was unlit and empty. She sat in chairs with blankets and let her hair down, her resigned eyes making out nothing more than the blurred shapes of the basic things. That’s how and where they found her, sitting at her big kitchen table in the twilight, staring at nothingness straight through her eyes. And when she felt arms around her shoulders she cried, tears stinging her eyes and smelling of old things, of dust and betrayal. Outside and inside, all that remained to her was shadow and shadow’s shadow and the dullest and darkest of shades.

And they were trying to save her and she was having none of it. In her sockets, her eyes lay like stones, heavy and cold and dead.

Then, though she saw nothing of it, a slice of sunshine pushed through the window panes, striking first her hand before blushing against her face. Her expression for a moment flickered. Because the feeling of heat across her skin was exquisite, was like the brightest, most colorful of days. She turned into it, turned her cheek against the air and shuddered as it radiated through her flesh.

And they were trying to save her but in all the wrong ways. It wasn’t the lessening of light she needed, but the explosion of it, the diffusion, the devouring tongues of heat, of something like life, soaking into her bones as though she too were a tree straining its leaves towards the sun. And though her eyes lay like stones, she found nothing so hard in herself, nothing so unrelenting as to deny the unspoken invitation of the sun: to spread out her skin and live under the weighted light.

Absolution

Absolution

You want me to tell you

I love you,

but I’ve given up lying for Lent,

so for forty-six days and forty-six nights

you’ll wonder why the words have gotten stuck in my throat,

and I’ll kiss your neck with my mute lips

and pray to God for forgiveness

I Make Fruit Salads

I Make Fruit Salads

And lunch went something like this:

chaos sandwiched in-between circular discs of pineapple

and my peas were not cooperating

as the pulpy pit of the mango self-divided

decimating the cool-skinned plum

before bruising the insides of my mouth cavity.

But the juice, viscous can only capture

half of the pleasure if you don’t take a moment to imagine

the sensory delights I derived, fingers

curving fat parentheses from the white-

haired pedazos of my thick-skinned clementine.

Do I begin to tell you of my love

of cucumbers? The curling sound they made

between my incisors, the hot lightning crack

of condensed water grasping momentarily

outwards, before they departed throat-wards—

sacrificial chariots to the cords of my stomach.

Most of all, I eyed the pear nestled

amongst your long fingers, a stranger against

your slight hand, an ellipsis slowly

to your quiet motioning—and I wondered,

do you know that my eyes are hungry on you,

for that luscious piece of fruit?

Such an idea.

Leftovers

Leftovers

Lazarus picked at his arm until it hurt and then Jude came and struck him, tying the bandages back up again while his head spun and multiplied the world. All around was the smell of slow death, of rot and decay and loosening bodies. On a crowded mattress, a child wept and none moved to comfort or quiet. Lazarus, his one good eye swiveling about green and alive, tried to understand that he was going to die in this stinking construct, suffocation filling the air, crawling down this throat, making his fingers itch.

He started in on his wound again, shredding flimsy gauze with his cracked nails until it was lying open before him. He didn’t trust a thing he couldn’t see and somehow looking down into his own puckered flesh gave him a real sense of the thing and how it must feel to die, if this is what that was. And looking into himself, Lazarus thought for perhaps the first time in his life that he was beautiful. Working away in his forearm he could make out tightly woven veins as they embraced grooved muscle and were anchored by knotty cartilage. Peering inward he saw the diseased cells sliding up and about the bend of his wrist, pulling and sucking and sipping, drawing out each last tender bit of life.

And then he knew he was dying, his beautiful machinery cast open for a world that could offer only infection, only rust. Inside he knew he was butterfly parts, little entities flapping with shuddering delicacy, wings brushing wings brushing wings, until the whole system rose and fell like the faintest of breath. His body was only a cavern to be hidden in, a structure grown to weather the world and wither until that day, that long last day, when what was built up within was ready for flight.

He tried to tell Jude at first. His lover only cried and cried and cried, large sickly tears enlarging the pinprick holes of his tear ducts until they threatened to swallow his face whole. Lazarus told him again and again and again, until one day the ducts did eat him all up, and from then Jude became not-Jude, became Jude altered. This other Jude only looked at Lazarus with those devoured down eyes and did not cry anymore, not when his whole body was crying all the time, just with an absence of tears.

               

Lazarus could feel the twisting welling up inside, knew the moment of finality was upon him. He would have liked, perhaps, for Jude to have been there. But then, Jude had never known anything about insect-life. Jude would not appreciate the unraveling of the cocoon for the marvel of the newly born; he was too concerned with the shell, not enough with the thing moving on about inside.

Lazarus laid himself down one last time, breathed out until he could feel it, the motion of hundreds of thousands of tiny little bodies circling within, crawling forwards, their soft sticky legs finding purchase in his lungs, clouding his mouth, beating up against his temples. He breathed out until he saw with his one good eye the brilliant tip of a filmy wing brushing up passed his cheek. Then it all stopped, and his eye became less alive and whatever was inside him, if ever there was a thing buried, rushed his boundaries, spilled out and never bothered to look back at the body it had left. His chest compressed downward, and in the morning Jude found him and stared at him until he wasn’t sure if what he saw before him was anything at all or just whatever had been left over.

Fruta perdida

Fruta perdida

The old woman in Cuernavaca was glad her husband had died

and we laughed,

eyes wide on each other, mouths revealing set after set of exact-o edged teeth,

hot and honeysuckle words wrapping up, binding down our cool Iowa tongues

as her fast spit syllables tried to divine

¿tienes un novio?

I walk into the mornings and awaken as Yolanda peels me apart in her kitchen,

I taste papaya, swallow up mango, chew down peaches, wash away the taste of humid Spanish

in little jamaica waves,

I learn she is never done with me,

a plate of jitomates, juice of the cucumber,

aguacate and her words all eaten and disappearing

until I can feel them moving just below my skin

I kissed him first because I could

and he tasted like manufactured apples,

fake apples and syrup

we stayed that way until the female security guard found us under un árbol,

and I could only think that at least I wasn’t wrapped around him,

like a kid straining for higher branches

There was an announcement next morning before classes,

and through bites of my apple I wiped the sweat from above my lips,

He didn’t look at me, prefiguración if there ever was any,

and I was laughing somewhere inside at my response,

my last profesor had wanted to know if I had ever been in love, after all

I tasted all of it, the thinly sliced fruit disrupting the clean lines of Yolanda's white plates

before I picked them up, held the sensitive piel between my fingers, devoured wholes hungrily—

Just as soon, he ate himself up and became too full to have room left over for me,

the other girl was shorter, anyway

We left Mexico, land of the whitewashed tree,

and of the things I forgot, I was most sad about my sweat,

my phone, and my illusions about the flavors of fruit

Months on months looking like mouths on mouths, and now it is later and I start my mañanas

with apples and pears,

mostly misshapen, mostly bruised,

and I’m always tired with them in my mouth, not swollen with moist Mexican air,

but holding up form and solid,

reminding me of other tongues and a question I still won’t answer

I like to tease out the thought that perhaps one day dining services will come upon

a shipment fresh from Mexico, plátanos, strawberries and clementines,

and at breakfast I will spoon onto my plate beautiful golden slivers of pineapple,

except this time, el sabor will be real,

and my taste will come back from that hot and honey city where it got lost in the first place