The day I cut the chicken’s head off the sky shone like a busted knee slick with blood. It was late September, and the rot of leaves was just beginning to spread its musk to the end of the tiny hairs in my nose; I was sneezing and rubbing my eyes of an itch that would never leave.

The chicken was dying too slowly. It was a terrible thing to watch. She had, two days earlier, been attacked through the fence by some sharp-clawed creature. Her side was bare, feathers spread around the scene of the crime, and her raw flesh was fresh with blood that never seemed to clot. When we realized the other chickens were feeding on her flesh, intoxicated by the smell of the blood of their own, we separated her from the brood. We fed her by hand, brought her water. She brightened at first, and blood stopped seeping through her pores. But, in spite of our efforts on the third day her neck fell to the ground. The others sensed her weakening and broke through the barrier of old hay bales. When we saw her next, her side was stripped and the ribbons of skin dragged in the dirt.

Why we had a brood of chickens in the middle of Simsbury, in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, was not a question any of us could answer. It was his doing, his project, his play. It was another thing that bore the mark of the man who left the family to sink in the mud, beneath bleeding skies. But, we tended the chickens, collected the eggs, weeded the gardens, harvested the vegetables like dutiful farm hands. We didn’t know how to stop. Although we did what we needed, we did nothing more. The gardens were unruly, the grass thatched and disheveled. It was with little emotion that we discussed the fate of the tortured chicken the afternoon we learned she wouldn’t heal.

The chickens used to have names. In the time when I was young enough to be acutely embarrassed by the unusual cackling hens in my backyard, when I was glad I knew no boys other than the boring neighborhood specimen because it would have mortified me to have to explain the chicken coup, the smell of sun-warmed chicken shit, even the taste of fresh organic eggs, when I was young enough to still play alone in the woods, but old enough to read and understand books I had to hide from my parents, there was a chicken named Martha. Martha was in love with my father and followed him around dutifully. She was named after my mother, who was committed to latter, but wasn’t clear about her position on the former. When my father weeded the garden, Martha was behind him pulling worms from the black dirt. When he chopped firewood, she perched on the fence and watched, one eye fixed on him. When my father climbed a ladder to fix the roof on the shed, she taught herself to do the same, half hopping, half flying, her claws scratching each rung. Martha died in the mouth of a fox in early winter. We buried her body on the edge of the woods, just to the right of the path that I was never allowed to follow to its end.

These many years later, we women alone were faced with another dying chicken, the first situation of its kind since he left. We discussed our options that late smmer afternoon amongst buzzing flies and blood-hungry screeching hens. The dying chicken panted and flapped her wing slightly on the side of her body that wasn’t destroyed.



My father had taken every sharp and functional killing implement. What was left was a dull axe that wouldn’t have easily worked its way through a tender steak. I picked it up. The weight of it was much greater than it should have been. I felt like I was wrestling it from him, taking back something I never wanted in the first place, ripping from his hands a thing that had been forced upon me.

I gripped the handle of the axe and rejected the impulse to feel his hurt. I twisted my hand along the splintered wood and savored the pain because it was my own. I tightened the muscles in my hands, forearms, biceps, chest and stomach, and forced the offering of guilt away. I would no longer care for that which hurt me. I would no longer carry the weight of his failure, no longer make excuses to him for him. The first blow fell hard. The limp chicken, struggling softly at my feet, avoided the rust-flecked axe and I nearly caught my own foot. I twisted myself away, dancing with the axe, as only a woman’s body can, and repositioned it over my head, poised to deal the deathblow. I let it fall again. This time it sunk into the flesh, though not through. I wrestled the blade from the soft earth that so willingly accepted the blow, and let it fall again, faster now, finding the rhythm. The bird couldn’t scream, but flapped her good wing. I lifted the axe two more times. Her head rolled away, her body moved in the dirt, confused and searching. I dropped the axe and jumped away from the writhing creature and dull weapon. The sun was sinking. The unkempt gardens glowed red. My sister held me as we watched the wing tremble its last tremble. My mother put her arms lightly around us both, and, under the blood sky, we laughed for what felt like the first time.

Gathering stones and sand, we built up the chicken fence on all sides and went in the house to make dinner, or take a shower, or cry tears that belonged to no one but us. The sun rose clear the next morning, as if nothing had happened under that red sky the day before. The axe, still rusty and dull, lies clean in the shed. The dying chicken’s body has long since become the dirt that holds a vibrant bed of weeds just outside of the garden.

Dear one,

Everywhere I go you are not. Everywhere you aren’t, I look for you. Today I saw your picture and the smile, in the sun, in an orange grove, made my heart pulse so violently, it skipped from my chest to my throat to my brain, beating me senseless. Your eyes were vacant. Tonight the radio plays only songs we used to sing and everyone has your name. Somehow, when I look in the mirror, I can’t see how I feel, except when I’m not expecting to catch my own reflection. The contour of pain is almost decipherable, like the meniscus of moon in earth’s shadow, like your smile is an approximation of happiness.

1.
You, like tinsel hung from the crescent moon, are too shining to be true

Your eyes with their ancient sadness

Your lips that make shapes when you laugh

Your face and the perfect faces you wear

Your mind with its cities and ports

Your brick-worn hands that pull at my thin skin when we touch, which we don’t, anymore


2.
I am a long run down the seamed stocking of a pin-up girl

And you, you, you are the man for whom that girl wears those stockings


I am the high-heeled shoes she wears
You are the height she is trying to reach

I am the tangle of hair that brushes her white throat, which pulses for your lips,
you are the reason for her faster beat



3.
In addition to scintillating, you are hard
Hard like obsidian and titanium

Hard like learning to speak Tuyuca

Hard like the ground beneath my feet on a day in early spring when the certainty of the sky above rests heavy on the world

Hard like grain alcohol

And I am soft, soft like the gum squeezed into the crevices of asphalt until it is no longer visible

4.
And she, the girl I can never actually be, walks with her long legs and her high heels and her flowing hair and her short skirt and her red lips and her stockings with the seams, across you to you, and grinds me further into, until I am lost

She is a dream

You are the dreamer

I am the flaws that wake you up

Progression

Progression

-
You were a nice dream someone
was dreaming over a nightmare-

a shaky projection of a daisy over
flesh eating worms feeding on politicians
in bruise colored suits under a burning sky.


-

How you came to me is something unknown,
a close second to the various stories of creation.
Someone shook a world, (I imagine it looked
like a snow globe in the huge hands
of whatever it is we call the thing
that moves situations to action and order)
and uprooted our separate positions,
jostling us together like air particles
in the swollen dome of a hot air balloon,
in the combustion that powers jet turbines.

You were the dream over the dream
and also the waking into.
(here is where words fail. To say love
would be tautological and only an inch deep.
What I woke to was otherness.)

-

You are the many rules of possession,
the unfurling lines of progress,
and the elastic clauses in constitutional precepts,
the angles of the body twisted into the contortions of love,
the impossibility of flight.


-

we are
petals in a pile
beneath the stripped center,
pollen dusted fat stamen,
the color of earwax,
and the uncertain smell
How quickly it rots,
beneath the burning sky,
the melting ice,
the acid rain.

Kiss me while we still have teeth.
Fuck me while we still have muscle
to stretch over our naked, crooked bones.

Rainier Maria Rilke Speaks to the Purported End

Wrap yourself in solar winds if this terrible end
of plasma spewed trajectored out past and into,
magnetics dancing like lovers
coronal expulsion refracted back, comes.

Is the borealis lake in the sky, a place we knew once,
coming back to hold us in cupped hands like hairless,
trembling mice?

Let it be an end of light, of color, of beauty terrible
and near like a breath suspended over your ear,
a feeling of heat but not close enough to hear the words.

Don’t be scared of the crackings
and rumors of earthquakes,
it’s only her loud whispering,
a dirt and clay lullaby.
It’s only the creaking
of all the floorboards everywhere
settling in for the night.

When you,

if you,

lose me,

Bury yourself in the blankets
we moved beneath.
follow the scent
look for me past the constellations
as they rearrange and begin
an ancient circling of joy
(no amount of slicing polarities
can silence the song that brings
all to movement, to stillness of water
to field of lilies, to sky of sparrow)
and I’ll find you in sleep.

And if you feel scared,
if shadows take shapes
you recognize too easily
remember the voice
of that song.

Enter it.
Be


Four Minute Warning

We discussed the falseness of desire
the sluggish receding of the moon,
and which lasts longer in memory:
the metallic taste of blood
or the blow,
which is a better answer:
the silence after a blizzard,
or the arcing curve of the chicken
and the wind ripple that fills the crescent.

In the deep of my belly there is a world
I will never know. I swallow,
as you lean back and close your eyes
a sigh escaping as supplication, it
rises on wings to a spackled ceiling
with sparkles blown in.

These stars will never fall,
these children
will never
break our hearts.

What comes this way
is the feeling
of seed pushing
through ash.

The Things on Which We Rest Our Weight

The couch in my mother’s house is coming apart from its center. An overstuffed thing, the middle has broken through the frayed lines of color. This is not the couch of my childhood, which was more tattered and had a gray fabric that looked like the kind of cracker that crumbles in your mouth and chokes you with its dryness. This is the couch of the last house in which my parents lived as people married to each other - the house I spent the summer of my 17th year in, stripping, painting, sheetrocking the walls. I learned to hold the long sanding pole in such a way that with one intentional stroke I could level the tiny mountains that bubbled up under the layers. I learned the complexity of white, the silk of dust, and the illusion of perfection. I wore, on the bridge of my nose, the little red indent of a facemask, and I watched the muscles form under the pink skin of my arms. Now, this couch, (pastel colored southwestern print) a floor model purchased at a discount, that vaguely reflects the color scheme of the house, is loosing its inside. I look away, embarrassed.

Water at night easily looks opaque and eternal. That it is not does not comfort me much. My body is held from the unnamed depths by just the rough slimed wood of this dock, a peninsula that moves under me as I shift under moving stars. Everything is a rotation, or more exactly, a vibration. The sound of the redundant lake waves hums under the undulations of your voice. The frequencies: now in, now out, of phase. Every other word ends too soon or slips into the water. You are telling a story about time, and I have fallen out of it, and keep falling for the rest of the night.

It wasn’t that it was any kind of surprise when, in June, they announced the end. He did the talking; she looked strained and irritated and hard. I have since come to know the solidness of her face that day as numbness; when she thawed, it was a messy, soft thing. Looking to the walls on which I had worked and on whose support I relied when I climbed out of the window on the second floor to sunbathe topless on the roof, I said whatever it is you say in that situation when you are grown up enough to no longer live at home, but small enough inside to still need the sureness of your illusions. I said things like “I understand”, and then went into the woods and lay down, feeling the hardness of a ground that, many layers deep, still waited for the warmth of summer.

Deeply tired, we expect some reciprocity in the silence we give as a gift to those we love, and use as a weapon against those we fear. When - after years of layers smoothed over these now immaculately flat and hard walls - this is exactly what we get, we find the doorframe on which we lean, (having just come in, kicking off shoes, taking in the picture of a place we’ve created and called home), is made of water, and we are falling, in or out, or more specifically, through.

We Could Live Beyond This World

We could live beyond this world


I climbed right through the window and slid down the storm doors after I heard the static of the shower running. The night was warm, an embrace I guess you could say, and I felt as if I might vomit. I remember a few things; my white terrycloth pajama pants collecting the moon along its seams, the fear as I approached the heavy black of the playground, and the pulsing question that ticked itself through my veins, would you be there? You moved from the center of dark to the curve of light from a lamppost, a sort of birth. I met you at the spirit gate and found your new arms. After the kissing came the choking. I remember the look in your eyes: glass, a stuffed and mounted head. What a pretty death you were under the albino clouds. When you declared that the world was fucked, fucked in the way that a Parthenon with crumbling columns is, and that innocence was the last wisp of smoke from a dead cigarette, I opened my eyes a little wider to let in more light. It was no coincidence that I was the first to see the fawn shakily approach with long legs and deep, animate, pupils.

The second time, I was driving at night. Newness in every motion of my hands, my right foot, I was pulled tight between my inexperience and my fear of failure - a perfect metaphor for things I didn’t yet know about myself. When the car driving toward me flashed conspiratorially, I slowed by at least 10 mph and crawled through the dark blue of 9:30 pm, searching anxiously every shadow. Around a curve, I slowed suspiciously – they always tuck themselves into curves and pockets - and before me suddenly, no crown vic, but four brown beauties floating across the macadam. Thinking of you and the infinite wisdom of fate, I felt somehow that my driving was not my own, but the smile line on the face of someone whose eye is the moon, whose chin the valley I drive into, whose cheek the curve of road above which four early spring deer hover like smoke from a spark just sprung.

This past January the darkness of night was heavier than usual. Needing, at dusk we went in search of the abandoned highways. You coaxed me over the cold chain link wall after kissing me through the diamond of air. I scrambled up and perched on the top, a huge clumsy cat without animal sense, and fell messily into your tested arms that had left their boyhood somewhere in the world. What we found was forgotten pavement stretching into the pink of receding sun and overpasses with intersecting animal tracks and hints of graffiti pressing through the snow. We followed an entrance ramp to nowhere and stopped short as a movement ahead cracked through the emptiness. Rolling our feet silently against the gray pavement through the overgrown woods, we saw them. A cloud of smoke this time, weaving through the skinny teenage trees, moving over the crystallized snow. We followed them to the fence, where, instead of dissipating, as one might have expected of spirit animals, they knew the one broken place where the fence bowed and met the ground. When I found their eyes, the gaze was dark water. Stillness crumbled as we ran forward, animal joy of body, and first you and then I, we followed them over the broken fence. They scattered, along with the light, the latter a gradual end, the former an abrupt evaporation into the womb of the wood.

The world is only fucked in the way that any finite thing that wants to be forever is. What doesn’t claw at eternity with the urgency of city skylines, knows life.

The Funeral

Father announced casually, as he moved from the side of the open hole over which hovered the casket in which lay my dead grandmother, that his winter coat had been pilfered.

“You see this coat?” he pinched the long blue fabric from his chest. “Where do you suppose I got it?”

We, the bereaved, were silent. I, for one, was not entirely sure where one would purchase a long winter coat of the variety that a catholic priest would wear. It is possible that others knew and were silenced by gaping grave, the piles of flowers, or the particularly arresting way the lilac casket gleamed in the bland noon light of mid December.

“A thrift store?” offered my aunt helpfully after some thought.

“No” said the priest with the authority of a man who had just, as far as I can tell from my thin knowledge of catholic tradition, performed a significant role in helping my dead grandmother over the threshold of the finite and into the eternal. “I took it home last night from the wake after discovering that my good coat had been taken”. The emphasis on the word good was pointed. “There must have been some mix up” he offered generously, so as not to imply that our mourning family, or my dead grandmother, kept company with questionable characters. “but this isn’t even a coat I could trade in for anything”.

And that was the last we heard of Father. With a smile and some chuckles, he disappeared into the thin winter light to attend a Christmas brunch complete with Santa clause and crucifixes.

She died on a Thursday. We buried her on a Monday.

Among traditions of my family, arriving everywhere late is chief and runs deep in our veins. Naturally, this tradition cannot be altered by death or a funeral.

The morning of the funeral, we were even later than usual. We all suspected that our difficulty getting out the door was in some way related to my mother. In order to understand her behavior, one must first know that she is not catholic, and had, possibly, never been to a catholic funeral mass. Also, her husband of 23 years, who had recently become her ex-husband of about one year, and whom she had not seen in a year and a half, had called her an old hag with all the conviction of a revivalist preacher in his voice the last time they did meet. It was his mother who lay in the casket, and he had made the long trip back to us to bury her. To say my mother was nervous to see him would be something like calling the Weathermen conscientious objectors.

By the time we managed to drag her out of the house and pack ourselves into the car we were so late that it would have been laughable, had it not been such a grave matter to begin with. We got to the funeral home and sheepishly entered the hushed room where the open casket waited - our heads down, our eyes averted - and quietly sat amongst the punctual others.


We waited, uncomfortably staring, shamed pale Irish Protestants amongst ruddy, solid, French Canadian Catholics. “Now that we are gathered” spoke the older funeral home woman - who can really only be described as a picture of herself, as if someone had painted a portrait of a real person, immortalizing and perhaps embellishing the perfectly static tidiness of the pose, and she had climbed from that picture to move about in real life, every hair in place, every thread of her sanctimony righteously stitched into her dark grey dress suit, a military woman, unwaveringly the same, always. “We will say a final prayer” I was surprised at how corporal, how compulsory this prayer was, but bowed my head reverently. As soon as the amens were murmured and the various Catholics crossed themselves, she issued her next command. “Now the back row” (this was us) “will pay their last respects”. I tried to look solemn as we fell over ourselves to get to the open casket. We half knelt and half leaned against Mimi’s little metallic purple bullet of a casket, looking into her made up face. She looked small, but pretty, and far more like herself than the last time I saw her, ravaged by dementia. Death had restored her to herself. It wasn’t as if her soul lingered, but rather that death left us with the gift of sight. To see her in this taxidermy stillness and see something closer to her than the melting mess of flesh and fluid I had seen last, was something like closure.