1464 c/o Jason Lee Norman

A Perfect Circle

Now that I am dead, my god will fight your god. I hope that I will remember this moment, right before our gods fight each other. I hope I remember which one to cheer for when they begin to wrestle, Greco-Roman style, on the collection of blue gym mats that appears in front of my dead body. My god is wearing a red wrestling suit and your god is wearing a navy blue wrestling suit. They both have gold trim. Your god has a scar over his left eye. It looks like he has three eyebrows. I think that there is a rule in effect that says the first god to pin the other god three times will be the winner and the winner will get to take me wherever they please. The winner can even use my soul as an ashtray if he wants to.
       When my god is in a headlock I begin to worry. I sweat from my feet. Your god’s bicep muscles bulge underneath my god’s chin and I prepare myself for an afterlife without socks. Heaven will be a movie theatre filled with chatty women in cowboy hats. If your god succeeds with his sleeper hold I may be reduced to a singularity or have to spend eternity in an empty swimming pool.
       My god puts a full nelson on your god and I begin to feel something resembling a heartbeat. My god and I will go to the edge of the universe and I will sit in a chair. If he can just get this figure four leg lock in place then heaven will be a quiet study with plenty of ink in the wells and the texts will smell of cherry wood. Your god taps three times on the mat just as they find me in my bed, a wool cap on my head to keep away the chill.

1463 c/o Molly Gaudry

Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear?

POVERTY
Your finger is the branch from which I hang myself with a blade of grass so sharp sliced skin exposing my Adam’s apple whistles as I breathe, and the ends of your hair feel like feathers on my shoulders when you release me and I fall and you bend over me and whisper in a voice that sounds like a pork chop in a pan and I look at you and see your earrings dangling like light bulbs in a basement and you smell like chewed tinfoil and taste, your lips on mine, like rising bread.



TROUBLE
I hear water bubble soft as tea leaves scattered on my lashes. François Villon, you poet! François de Montcorbier, you thief! François Des Loges, you vagabond! Don’t you leave me here in Paris. If you don’t cut me down I’ll hang myself. Do you remember the photograph I took? The one that caused our fight? I am not sorry. Google image Obamaboobs and it won’t be there anymore, I swear. If you’d asked me to take it down, I wouldn’t have. I did because you never asked.



TRIAL
Pogoshipo Sunny noonah collie pornee ya, my little brother said, the perfect accent of youth…in the next room my sister played the piano and the heels of her palms broke those keys like the tusk of a matriarch snapping lengthwise beneath the full weight of the dead calf whose skeleton emerges from his shadow like a melody raging above the sounds of Mother in the kitchen.



EXILE
I pick you up by your knees and ride your neck to the pond beneath your hand and atop a lily pad we burp like tired toads and dance a sad song. Tadpole was a good girl, you’ll eulogize after I’m found and closed-casket waked. You will go home and tend the groves the way you always have and this is okay, selfish saint.



MISERY
I will not remember you where I’m going but I will take you with me like that poem in my heart. I will carry you in my heart. Rip me apart. I will remember you. Where I am going, I will forget you. I will never forget you.



DEATH
Sarang hae yo. This is the branch from which I hang, the blade of grass that licks behind my ear and shouts, “Po po hae jo.”



HANGING
I will elephant be your tusk and you will tadpole be my lips and we will basement bulbs and rise like lashes breaded beneath a tin foil tent beneath a lily pad noose beneath a pork chop pond beneath clouds of tea leaves beneath a photograph in the sky that never existed and never made us fight and never featherbrushed Mother in a piano where toads will grove this heart from which I whistle eulogies for the Adam’s apple whisper of our past.

1462 c/o Crispin Best

The Night Attack

Guess what.
I will attack in the night.
I will kill 23,884 of your men, not including the ones burned in their houses.
This is how I will declare war.

Nice to meet you.

I will poison streams and create marshes.
It will be hilarious.
Me and my Gypsies will kill you.

I will send lepers to hang around your army,
Friendly syphilitic children,
Lonely ones with plague.

You'll like them, they're nice.

Don’t worry.
I won’t transform myself into a wolf or anything fancy.
I will be happy to kill you in a normal way.

For example,
I will kill you with a cannon.
It will be a tiny cannon, though, in my hand.

Hello.

You can keep your whores.
The women in my army fight.
The women in my army are going to kill you.

Congratulations.

I will come in the night.
I will arrive at your camp dressed like one of yours.
I will hurt your women like a husband and leave.

After that, the next time I come I will kill you.
I will come and I will find your tent and kill you.

I will take your corpse
And skewer it on the highest stake
As a sign of my affection.


Or else I'll come in the night
Surrounded by gypsies
And get confused
And go to the wrong tent
And kill someone else
Someone else completely

Thousands and thousands and thousands of someone else.

1461 c/o Jason Lee Norman

Kite

I wasn't born a genius. I've read about baby geniuses. Babies who, between suckling the teat and taking a nap are toying with algorithms, or playing Love Me Do on their toy pianos, or taking the spittle from the corners of their mouths on the tips of their fingers and holding it up to the light and saying, hmmmm, this is interesting, I think I shall compose a sonnet about the way the light hits my spittle, a sonnet about translucence, about transcendence. When I was a baby I was not a genius, I was in love.



                         I remember very little about my childhood and very little about my parents for that matter. My name came from my father and my curly hair came from my mother. We lived in the country; my father owned a store I believe. I never bothered to learn much or pay much attention to the lives of my parents. I was concerned, even at a young age, with other matters. They gave me life, this is no small gift, they kept me fed and clothed, these are important things too and I am sure that in the next life they will be rewarded for treating me so kindly. The histories of these two people, my mother and father, were never important to me because when you are in love there is nobody else in the world.



                         One afternoon, my mother had me out in the yard while she was hanging laundry on the line. The sun was shining and the cotton sheets in my crib were soft and warm. I remember that there was a slight breeze and sometimes I would bury my head under the warm sheets where the wind couldn't get me, and other times I was looking at my fingers. I was studying them. The kite came to me while I was studying my fingers. She was red, like an apple, and her tails were golden yellow. She came to me and tickled my hair, she whispered in my ears. My tiny hands held her by the edges and she kissed my lips.

This was the moment I decided to fly.