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Cobain, Sarajevo
In 1992 the acids were rising, the pits
of earth freshly dug, everyone waiting
to be sniped. Children with open throats
bent to drink from faucets, voices
exploding into mist, the rage aimed
at all things tender and learning to touch,
all things born and reaching toward
the gleam. The world brings us
into certain orbits: Cobain, Sarajevo—
they intersect in the bloodsong of 1992,
the song that rips the stitches,
that worries the wounds until they bloom again,
fresh and red as paper cuts
opening like small mouths.
fragment found in dream
God of my childhood, whispering in the speakeasy of the sky, what are you saying?
Draw closer my child, the air is trembling. The air is braided with mystery.
Nicotine
The sleep restrictions had begun to tweak his sense of color. The sky was bile, the river flowing steel. At dawn the sun was nicotine.
In the Time of Pay Phones
In the time of pay phones we believed that the night had a voice, that you could feed a quarter into a slot and dial and somewhere, under a shiver of light, someone would pick up and press her mouth against the receiver and say yes. We were starved for darkness, hungry for something more miserable and enduring than ourselves.
We were from planned communities, streets named Navajo and Avocado after the tribes we had murdered, vegetables meant to rot. We were terrified of our houses, the flex and tremble of their beams, the wood’s deep sigh in the death it gave us. Our mothers’ eyes glistened liquid black like the eyes of stuffed and mounted deer. They always seemed to be remembering something, poised in kitchens and doorways and gardens, the tips of their cigarettes burning small holes in the night.
I would sometimes stand, late at night, under a twitching halo of light, like the patron saint of isolation, and drop a quarter clattering down the slot, and wait, and listen. The phone was housed in a box of metal or sometimes plexiglass, and onto the booth people scrawled their deepest angers with keys and pens and knives, things like dick and cunt and motherfucker, which is to say, I am lonely and hurt and afraid, and this phone booth is the receptable, a thing onto which I will carve a small totem of pain for you to see because my girlfriend didn’t pick up when I called, or my father said sorry, no, goodbye, or because there was no one at all left to call.
The time of pay phones was also the time of answering machines, small boxes that housed our voices, that spoke to others in our absence. Some nights a person I didn’t want to talk to would call and speak into the box, say I’m sorry or where have you been or just why, and I would lie in the throbbing darkness and listen to the voices speaking into the machine that would beep and cut them off and leave me alone finally, alone, free from the voices.
Automatic Messages
Can I part these curtains of breath
to find you sleeping blue in your veins,
eyes inked with night?
I carve you from wood and
place you in the drawer of rings
where you sleep like milk.
For in the error of the flesh
time is inscribed and
the body is a book of wounds.
Subtracted from the bed
we lose the light and
return to clay.
You are the last sick story
written in my cells, how there
is life beyond these tears.
To step into someone else’s story
and accept their ink as your own,
this is the second life of fiction.
gravity
Berlin
On the wall a Christ with its lips stitched shut. They spoke German in the darkness, televisions storming. A hollow in the floor where they kept the text: What are these wounds called eyes, these scars we speak through? He lit a candle and it shivered. Somewhere a crowd had gathered. He remembered what his father once said: when you see danger move towards it.
Istanbul
Mornings were the worst, the consciousness. Streets as vicious as childhood. Sometimes he thought of America, someone always scoring a touchdown, guessing the answer. People were living longer, the heart outlasting desire. Stray cats slunk from the shadows, eyes puckered and oozing. He reached out to touch one and it shot into darkness.
Saint Petersburg
Once he found himself lying awake like an old-time flying machine, throbbing in his body, writing in the secret journal of the night. Dear Night, he wrote, let there be a place where women walk like tigers, where their eyes are steel and ice, where their spiked heels wound the ground they walk on.
Helsinki
The people were smooth and clean as hospitals. He found a buried church, a girl playing cello. Her long arms moved over the throat like something wounded trying to fly. On a napkin he wrote, I’m never more alone than when I’m with you.
Barcelona
He met a woman at a bar. It smelled like America, salt and fat and perspiration. There were wolves on television. Everyone was watching the kill, blood in their teeth. At night the whores made kissing sounds outside his window. Someone said in English, see you on the other side.
Prague
He thought, I want to go into the forest with a few good friends and I want us to get lost, and together I want to read the position of the sun, the moss on the trees, and find our way to safety.
Los Angeles
He found himself crying for no reason. A baby touching its face, a Nature Channel special on the pilgrimage of salmon. Once he stopped at a yellow light while the other cars continued, moving through the red into the future.
San Diego
The airport was bright lights and voices, like surgery. People were waiting to be called, to be strapped in. Soon his body would enter the sky and then he would be in another place.
Lena Underground
Once a month she visits her father, riding the escalator’s grinding stairs deep underground to board the metro, screaming steel to the edge of the city. Nevsky, Sennaya, Moskovskiye, Kupchino. Each stop a crumbled monument to Soviet glory, stained by tobacco and manifestos and human oils. Scarred tableauxs of workers wreathed in wheat, defiant soldiers raising red fists. The doors of the metro wheeze open like frames for this museum of human suffering. The eyes of the other riders are snowtranced and empty as saucers. Babushkas, workers, soldiers, children, crashing through the darkness.
The Resonance of Objects
He loved all things rusted and scarred, time inscribed into matter. The resonance of objects. Things hummed with their history. A stairwell contained the mysteries of hands whose oils abraded the wrought iron rails into a fine green patina. A mahogony desk held the scars of boys bored by algebra in a classroom now long gone. The worn velvet of a grandmother’s dress possessed secret moments known only to the young skin in the heartwood of her youth. Time scribbles its diaries on our walls.
Dispatches 