A cantaloupe on the countertop
like an endangered bird’s last egg I take its shape so heavy in my palm, its rough skin. I crack it open, scoop out its seeds with a spoon, throw them out.
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In the funeral home crowd, among the purple irises,
My grandpa’s ashes rest within a book-shaped urn. Beginning to lift the cover, as if to view an open casket, “Is it not respect,” I ask, “to behold his body burned?” My grandpa’s girlfriend gasps, offended I would ask it. End my grief: this man I love would have me see him as he is. Cassandra, vindicated, stands.
The greenscreen in the studio, quite lifeless over her shoulder, flashes for viewers at home with emergency alerts, twisting spirals of digitized clouds looming on two-second loops across a Midwest map. She projects her wild gaze into the camera, lets her inner eye ping its doppler radar into every coming storm. No need now for pleas or desperate gestures: just the balm of her word, believed as gospel truth. Scientific fact. She sweeps her sure hand east to west, then pauses somewhere south of Bixby, miming the movement of a low-pressure system with a series of vague and reassuring counterclockwise circles. She is barometer, thermometer, anemometer, the electric air hissing like Apollo’s snakes its secrets in her ears. No gods or men would dare to spit their curses in her mouth. 1. Find a pair of binoculars and stare directly into the sun.
2. Allow yourself to become its reservoir of hydrogen fusing itself into light and heat and helium. Be its radiance, its loneliness. 3. Count to 4.6 billion without blinking and consider the way your retinas are pilgrims cantillating holy writ. 4. Gather up the shimmering patches of blindness in your eyes and crush them into words like purple chalk between your fingers. 5. Break into the darkroom of the university art department photo lab. 6. Coat your face and tongue with the word-dust, breathe it in, and plunge your head into the chemical bath. 7. Mumble the words until the liquid surface roils with light. 8. The way you emerge gasping and incandescent is the poem. I’ve been meaning to frame
this photo I took of you from before the promise of jobs and kids and mortgages lulled us into routine clarity, that day we drove reckless, south to the border, the coast: dense summer fog, land and sea and sky all smudged and swooning. At Neahkanie lookout, we emerged from it briefly and glimpsed for miles the 101 purling away through clouds below near Manzanita we threw open car doors and rushed blind to the shore, left the hazards blinking, bleeding red into the mist, sea-breath, water-aynd ghostly and gossamer held us chrysalised, you looking back at me over your shoulder, low-tide, your sweater coral orange in the fading light. There’s a thumb-sized sliver
missing from my mother’s skull where the surgeon drilled into the crust to relieve the pressure: volcanic, blinding, it stole her sleep, vertigoed her on the bathroom floor, and made her say, “How could you love me like this?” I was seventeen and half-aware of how I broke away so slowly, afraid to face her in her pain. You’re seven months and unaware of why my mother skates her fingertips across the surface of your scalp, traces the edges of shifting plates, rests for a moment on that gap still so soft and open. |
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