Space Struck Read online

  is not that these women swallowed light. It’s that,

  when their skin dissolved and their jaws fell off,

  the Radium Corporation claimed they all died

  from syphilis. It’s that you’re telling me about

  the dull slivers of dead saints, while these

  women are glowing beneath our feet.

  WHEN I TELL MY BELOVED

  I MISS THE SUN,

  he knows what I really mean. He paints my name

  across the floral bedsheet and ties the bottom corners

  to my ankles. Then he paints another

  for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,

  saying, Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your

  shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels

  of your shopping cart. It’s all very polite.

  Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take

  them to the Laundromat—the one with

  the 1996 Olympics–themed pinball machine—

  and watch our shadows warm

  against each other. We bring the shadow game home

  and (this is my favorite part) when we

  stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled

  my beloved grips his own wrist,

  certain it’s mine, and kisses it.

  WHEN THEY

  FIND THE ARK

  Fox News buys exclusive broadcasting rights.

  My mother is sobbing, pressing her nails

  into my palm. She asks, Is this live, is this live?

  When the men break their way into the ship, I swear

  I can smell a mixture of figs and lupines.

  The men don’t need light. The ark is bright-

  pulsing. Its floors are hay-dappled and wet-warped.

  Its stables—wide and filled with women.

  Women whipping around on all fours, their

  heads pulled back, their mouths a frothed blur.

  Women sleeping straight-backed against

  wood beams, women speaking in trilling

  chirps. My mother says, This can’t be the ark. Where

  are the bones? The men? The men find

  one woman alone in her stable, curled

  around an overturned bowl. The men lift her up.

  They lift the bowl, which gushes dust and

  dust. The women stop moving as the ark

  fills, but the men want to save it, they don’t want

  to see it dust-drowned. They throw the bowl

  out of the ark. Our TV goes black.

  Outside, Lake Michigan is slopping up a thick

  gray paste, coating the stones. Inside,

  my mother replays the moments

  before the cameras stopped. As the clouds press

  against our roof, she asks, Don’t you think

  the women running look a little like me?

  I LOVE THOSE WHO CAN WALK SLOW

  OVER GLASS AND STILL KEEP

  all their blood inside. I want to lick their smooth arches.

  My beloved says he could walk over glass too—

  It’s all about weight displacement. He ruins

  every illusion by staring at his own hands. I

  ruin every illusion by threading it to hunger.

  When Eric the Great was twelve, he ran away

  to earn money for his family. He returned

  to his mother, his pockets filled with coins,

  and said, Shake me, I’m magic. So often our bodies

  betray us. Just look at our feet, how they point

  to what we desire. I don’t notice mine until I’m

  headed out the door—I get that from my parents.

  My father, overgrown boy with a tight smile,

  was always late, stopping to confirm his face

  in every window’s reflection. My mother was

  a phone call saying Go on and eat without me.

  The wind in this city is the cruelest, the kind

  that searches for soft spots. Pulsing tender skulls.

  I only know mirrors are silver because I’ve

  seen one scuffed. All my spoons are weak-necked,

  but I was wrong when I said the most desperate

  sound was silverware clattering from a fast-pulled

  drawer. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the built from

  the grown. Sometimes it’s our fault. The serinette

  was invented to teach canaries how to sing correctly.

  When my beloved tells me I’m correct to love him, I

  realize the sound isn’t metal at all. It’s not the coins rattling

  on concrete, but the fingers scraping to pick them up.

  As an adult, Eric the Great changed his name to Houdini

  to honor Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who would open his palms

  to the audience and say, Nothing here now—neither anything,

  nor anybody, before pulling his wife from the ether.

  MY DEAR WOLFISH DREAMBOAT,

  STAND STILL

  I don’t want to alarm you,

  but I’m pretty sure there are men

  living on the surface of your eyes.

  I can see them pairing up. Little

  umlauts—fighting, maybe, or else

  dancing. Do you think they know

  life as you know it—as an arcade

  where every good game is broken

  and no one tells you, so you waste

  token after token? Or would they

  have more sense than that? I bet

  these men love it most when you

  get tired because they get tired,

  too. When you press your palms

  against your eyes, do they see

  the sparks of light and create new

  names for stars? Give them more.

  Give them a moon—here, balance

  this egg on your nose. Oh darling,

  now they’re building a telescope!

  Do you think they can see me?

  Clearly? Does it hurt?

  II

  THE TERRE HAUTE PLANETARIUM

  REJECTED MY PROPOSAL

  for more tactile audience participation.

  And sure, their decision makes sense

  if you consider the fact that no one likes

  being pelted by meteorites, if you consider

  the fact that I’m a miserable excuse for a planet.

  Wildly rectangular orbit. I move

  through life like I’m trying to

  avoid a stranger’s vacation photo.

  Still, what do astronomers know

  about public appeal? When naming

  the color of our universe, they

  had the chance to vote for either

  Primordial Clam Chowder or

  Cosmic Latte and they chose the latter.

  Lately, I’ve been feeling betrayed by names:

  the king cobra isn’t a cobra, the electric

  eel isn’t an eel, and it turns out my anger

  was fear all along.

  I fear that I won’t be respected until

  I can sharp-whistle. I fear that I’ll

  come out the other side of rapture

  with nothing but a taste for rapture,

  no better than the plowboy prophet

  who feared his words becoming

  more dangerous than his hands.

  Now, with my planetary hopes dashed,

  I’m revising my lecture on futile repetition.

  Imagine a line of identical circus clowns

  frantically passing a pail of water from

  the fire hydrant to their burning tent.

  Now imagine a hole in the bottom

  of that pail. Why would you imagine

  such a thing? That tent was their home.

  See, I’m afraid I’m not used to this

  much control. I’m a miserable excuse

  for a weapon. All stopped up with dread,

 
; useless. I’m like a snake who, having

  swallowed its fill of goose eggs, can

  no longer escape through the gaps in the cage.

  If I say, Trust me, you probably shouldn’t.

  Even I don’t trust myself enough

  to end on my own words. But trust me,

  there are others who are powerfully worse,

  who mold command into ammo, answers

  into amnesia. I come from the same place

  as everyone else, the place where

  people take and the taking becomes

  its own person. Where everyone hurts

  and gets hurt, and the hurt can be heard

  asking the same question—Why isn’t anybody

  stopping this? And the powerfully worse take

  a vote, they elect their answer carefully:

  Stopping what?

  ON DISTANCE

  It’s nothing. The sun, with its plasma plumes

  and arching heat, is five million miles closer

  to Earth than it was in July, and we are still

  alive. Today, I need you to stop thinking

  about such small numbers. Throw out your

  ruler. Your retractable yellow tape. Send that

  blue egg back up to its nest unbroken. There

  is no way to tell how far it fell, so it never

  fell at all. No more contests. Make the dirt

  spit its watermelon seeds back between

  children’s teeth. Take the trophy buck

  from your father’s house. He won’t be

  angry. I promise he won’t come looking

  for it. Are you willing? What I mean is,

  in California, a city celebrates the life

  of a firehouse light that’s been burning

  for over a century. The citizens throw

  parades, they take photos, and they share

  this light live through websites. What I mean

  is, this one light can reach as many people

  as the sun, and you only have to reach me.

  GOD STOPS BY

  to show me how healthy He’s been. He’s

  sleeping more. He built his own gym.

  Mostly muscle now, He gives me the fat

  off his steak. I eat because He offers, not

  because I need—it’s hard to feel hungry

  when everything in this world tastes small

  and wrong, like rubber grapes or sun-boiled

  eggs. When I was small, I was certain

  that what was holy was mine—I caught

  moths in the garden, pressed their wings

  between my thickest book, and waited

  for new moths to sprout up and out

  of the pages. I ask God if He considers me

  a cracked seed of grace. He says,

  Yes, dear. I understand. It would be exhausting

  to lead a life with careful consideration

  for all things—stepping over anthills, saving

  lizards from pools. I mean, if I was God enough

  to be idolized, every statue would be a golden

  depiction of me riding a goose-drawn chariot,

  absentmindedly resting my shepherd’s scythe

  an inch away from their curved white

  throats. Before God leaves, He clears the table,

  pats my head, and presses two messages into

  my palms. In my left, You are the bridge.

  In my right, You are the dust.

  WHERE I’M FROM, EVERY HOUSE IS A

  HOUSE WITH AN OBSTRUCTED VIEW

  of the ocean. Oh, we are boring and superstitious

  in my city. We believe tides are caused by millions of oysters

  gasping in unison. Our rooms are eggshell white,

  and our eggshells are poked through with silver spoons

  to let the demons out. Yes, we fall in love,

  but our love isn’t golden so much as it is Midas lite—hard

  and cheap—everything it touches turns green. We run

  out of swoon quickly and respect the loveless, who are paid

  to stand naked in department store windows, eating

  homemade granola and sketching caricatures of anyone

  who stops to stare. Yesterday, I gawked at a man

  who wore a yellow knit cap on his penis. I was impressed

  by how acutely aware he made me of my forehead,

  which took up more than half of the portrait. I tipped him

  generously with one hand and gave myself bangs

  with the other. As a child, I was just as impatient and always

  justly punished. When I tore the buds open in my

  garden, I lost my garden. When I threw rocks into tree

  branches to shake fruits loose, gravity was ruthless.

  My new bangs do a marvelous job hiding those scars, but I

  still miss the flowers. Where I’m from, we are practical

  and ready to grow our mistakes. We whisper our heaviest

  confessions into seed packets and launch them toward

  the nearest planet, where they’ll take root in neat rows—flower,

  fruit, flower, fruit. This is how we build our new home.

  How we make ourselves light enough for spaceflight. When

  I arrive it will be easy to find which garden is mine.

  YOU BE YOU, AND

  I’LL BE BUSY

  chewing five sticks of Juicy Fruit,

  turning my jaw into a clicking, pain-

  pricked mess and reaching for

  another pack because hard work

  is defined by a body’s wreckage, and I

  want you to know I’m hard at work

  writing my presidential acceptance

  speech: A dartboard in every garage!

  A prison sentence for anyone caught

  explaining magic. You be me, and I’ll

  be the man leaning against your fence,

  expecting compliments on my new

  haircut. Now, be you and take

  this personality quiz. Do you scrape

  your fork against your teeth? Results

  are in: you’re the kind of person

  who has to stop doing that. You be

  you, and I’ll be racing across the yard,

  trying to catch robins to prove how

  tender I am with tender things. I’ll be

  Glenn Gould, hunched and humming

  at your piano until it suddenly springs

  a leak—the notes too full to hold

  themselves together. I’ll be me again

  when I open the windows to keep

  our apartment from flooding. Don’t

  be the woman on the sidewalk below,

  drenched and furious. Instead, take