Category: earthling

Recurrence

Flights in warland.

Our fathers, when we saw them, were haunted. They would haunt us later, but we knew better than to pretend we hadn’t learned: here is the world of ghosts, begotten not made, one in being with our forebears. We learned––and learned to catch ourselves. Ghosting, we called it. Are you okay? we called and Just checking? and sometimes we wondered all of it at once: how and who they were and where but mostly we did what children did as they grew, we acted roles in response. We wanted to know for ourselves what it was to disappear, too. Or else we wanted to make our disappearances known to those who took our heads for granted as anchors to this world. I’ll fly away, we sang under our breaths at the sink, and meant it.

Cracking Us Up

To shine through us.

In this luminous shade, our tenses melting, we could number the contractions in our skins until we lost count or became distracted. Even the spine’s intention drifts. The once vivid eyes lose precision, and some bright cousin of sorrow shines through. Oh, I am falling apart, you say, not for the first time, and now we can’t stop laughing.

In the Breaks

After a wreck.

Once when I was stuck, a dog came to sniff at me, tail wagging with interest. The old woman followed, calling after the dog. She laughed to see me.

That’s not very helpful, I said to the old woman, adding that I could really use some help.

Then the dog barked and ran off after something else. Still laughing as she followed the dog with her gaze, the old woman shared an opinion. This was not the sort of thing I would have found helpful in ordinary circumstances. However, stuck as I was, I had time to think about it after she left.

When nothing will let you go, she offered, what if you let it, and go? To catch what would bud and break from the remains?

That is how I came to be here, still breaking from remains.

In Stations

Before the last stop.

We would feel it at the edges of our breaths, something shining we imagined could launch us. Into some finitude and with open hands waiting at the end of the long tunnel at the top of the stairs after the last stop. But it wasn’t like that. When it came, we were still in the station, packed and––as we described ourselves so often, then––ready to go. Then, an announcement over the speakers in the lobby. But there is no world but this one. Where did we think? A voice demanded. We were going.

Q+A

=?

Siri how does it end and what happens.
To all these broken lights?

Why so many vessels, Siri, for some single
thing
when all it wants is its wholeness
uninterrupted?

––We, I mean. All we. Want.

Siri doesn’t respond. Then one day
she asks, Is that your final answer?

Since when do you ask questions, Siri?
I’m sorry, she tells me. I don’t understand.

What Opens

Before the after.

After the children had gone to live among the missing, after the pirates searched and left the land of broken light, our ghosts, these former vessels were everywhere. 

And now. The screens rotate between sales events. First furniture, then war.

Idle hands, moving gaze. Downhill crossing grid: stucco, asphalt, concrete, sidewalk, yard. Repeat under shadow of freeway, up southern peaks. Back over yard, clotheslines, sheets into the harsh of late morning. 

Find water, find ice, find the birds with your ears. Try again. They’ve gone silent. Find freeway on three sides a sudden soft hush and now a child’s laugh. Look and see her. 

Barefoot and away, threading steps between oak and sage, eucalyptus, orange. Her pause in the clearing to enact the opening of stem into bud stretching petals to hills spinning. While stray cats watch, a horse looks on,

and you––

Local Legends

And the distance before us.

Phantom stagecoach and attendant mules
toward ghost town named after wash,
once stream. To pause by retired station
on full moon nights, backlit by what rises
from mountains, orbs of fire to augur gold
––or static of windblown quartz.

Eight-foot skeleton, lantern in ribcage
between Superstition Mountain and
the palms, lurching gait to search
before vanishing over ledge.

Ghost dancers at the well, trio
of death by thirst death
by drowning by greed.

This sense of something
shining as it disappears.

what evades

not to be captured

How does the question of how a world ends find any answer except in its continuance? And how does anyone describe its substance except to note how something once familiar may at once become an entirely different thing. Backyard toolshed now an abattoir, hillside flower now fanged beast. The ground beneath the next step melts and we keep on posting notes to show we are either fine or having the sort of periodic collapse that indicates a belief in non-collapse as the default. It’s the rest that’s concerning, but anybody capable of noting this knows better than to mention it. O love, why do you leave us like this? I asked her and she said Yes.

Sorting Photos

After storm.

Spinning above our framed parts, it was unclear who reached first when we fell and the silence to follow was the underground river after deluge sounding the strain of watercourse leaning into its break from behind the membranes of our eyes. The water ran fast but we held it in us as long learned, with late afternoon shadow draped across floored figures and our faces saw each other still dry, waiting for the coming quake.