For every reaction an equal
opposite contraction
Don’t pretend you’re not
a part of this
You called me here
to burn
You called and I came
willingly
lit
like a birthday wish
Your auric
little miracle
Your magic machine
I clapped my hands ignited
every color until the trick
backfired /
until
one dense atom
spun in my core a thin
spider
of iron
and so began the collapse /
compacting mass / the glorious
punch
of gravity
Your word was my death
sutured within me
MAYBE
Who is the You in your poems, he asks, because it is capitalized. Do I have to know? I haven’t been to Mass since Death (capital d) entered the narrative and sent my heart palpitating with rage at nothing in particular, because who can be blamed for unexplained cancer? You need to figure it out, he says, as in dissect the pronoun. In middle school, my classmate refused to dissect a grasshopper, the exoskeleton limp on its aluminum tray. She came to class the next day with a grasshopper formed from clay, each appendage painted in immaculate rainbow colors. It glowed on the teacher’s desk, hovered above the lesson plan on its stand, a vibrant idol outsizing all the dead ones put together. I suppose that was her point. Now my point. Am I avoiding the question? Our universe may be one of many in the Multiverse (capital m)—may be as in maybe, as in somewhere on the spectrum between yes and no, one of several enigmatic answers the Magic 8 Ball we had as kids offered from its dark indigo fluid, a tiny triangular phrase bumping the window in its belly. One day ours stopped answering—something about the buoyancy, or maybe one of us just shook it too hard.
NEUROSURGERY
I’ve imagined it many times and still it jars
like a fist to the jaw. There will be music
despite everything, you quoted, and yes, my pulse
quickens, even now, at Zoë Keating’s electric
cello, enough to need tissues.
I imagine it so often, it’s as if I saw
the surgeon, swathed like a priest, drive the saw
into your skull. Like popping the seal of a mason jar,
he unhinges blood and bone, exposes the grey tissue
of his trade. The nurse presses play on our music
as instructed (cue the cello); nerves bathe in electric
oceans; the pulse
of cello strings drop like plumb lines through the pulsing
Z of the heart monitor. I believe you hear it. But that saw
haunts me—some real Frankenstein shit. Where’s the electric
bolt of lightning, you’d joke, but I can’t laugh. The jarring
raze of its serrations cleaves the music,
cleaves my tissue-
thin bravery. I have learned time is a flexible tissue
and the muscled pulse
of your neurons strums its own shining music:
our first kiss on a darkened street; the seesawing
oars of kayaks on the bay; whiskey sipped from jam jars
on the Fourth of July; fireworks glowing electric
as you rise between thighs, electrified—
years of time folded tightly in a cortex maze of tissue
where somewhere, my body wanders through synapses that jar
and flicker like Vegas highways, pulsations
of neon in contiguous, cursive constellations. Tell me sawing
stars from the sky is impossible, that music
can’t be severed from melody, the cellist from the musical
oscillations of her instrument, the wild electron
from the nucleus it loves. Say there is not a saw
for every bond. Say that our minds are not lanterns of tissue
paper, easily torn. Your pulse
holds you together a while—a fragile jar
of stars humming their music in the dark tissue
of space, an electric dance of neurons. Like hope, they pulse.
O trade me a saw for a spoon, that I may scrape the sides of that jar.
EVE SPLITS THE APPLE
We were given so much—the entire field
unbroken by boundary. The colors—
you should have seen them: black sheen
of the beetle, indigo silk of the river rippling under
the tiger’s flat tongue. What I’m trying to say
is I knew nothing of law
even as I spotted its blushing throb
fastened high, like the sun to the sky.
Or maybe that I loved its red
as I loved the pulse inside
his chest, my ear pressed to his flesh on nights
we held each other on banana leaves, his body
moving over me, moving against the rheumy
field of stars. I loved its orb, its warmth,
and its waxy shine—even as I tore it from the limb
that bore it, split the sphere
on a stone, half its sugared meat
for each of us. I didn’t know you can break
against laws. He smiled when he saw
what I’d brought, brushed my hair behind
my shoulder as he took my gift.
Even before he bit, I foresaw his jaw
fall from his white skull; the doe
slit open by the puma, her lustrous muscles
flayed against the grass;
saw the leaves departing,
scarlet, from maple trees—then
an ashen fence of rain, a flood. Even before
he swallowed. Before the sword of light
severed what lay behind.
BROADEN THE SUBJECT
In kindergarten the teacher asked, What kind of things are red? and arms rocketed toward the ceiling with apples firetrucks roses. I raised my hand and said, Anything can be red, like a sweater or a crayon, and Mrs. Curley’s face fell and she said, No, things that are always red. But my favorite apple is yellow, I thought, the same frustration as when my friend tells me to broaden my focus, to think about moving on to another metaphor, and maybe I am a bull anchored to what hurts, charging sentences at what I cannot understand: a cluster of small hands firing into the air like flags, symbols of how the world ought to be. I ought to let it go—maybe. I return to red red red because I cannot let it go or turn my head the way most people focus on the positive—flower not blood, pomegranate not wound. Maybe I am the narrow hot line at the edge of the visible spectrum, inching toward invisible, bordering on irrelevant. Understand: anything can be red, usually when someone or something splits open.
II
LAW OF THE CONSERVATION OF MASS
i. Big Bang
Maybe there was a word—
a short, single syllable that fell
like a long-traveled drop
of rain and shuddered
a seed of light
into a flock of starlings,
wildfires of wings.
How long till matter
clotted like drops of mercury
into planets and moons and stars,
into a pulse
and a brain that believed?
ii. Trinity Test Site
The bright plume
that blossomed from the ground
