Amanda King
You kiss the woman
You kiss the woman with her head all cratered in
don’t worry, she says, I’m waning but catch me next week
you picture her waxed legs, round flesh, the reflection
of your lust all bright white and hot thrust back at you
as if she were radiating desire
of her own
as if she wanted you the way you want you
full ray, a fire spread, everything burning
everything eaten, everything drunk up
nothing left but the photon and rock
back and forth
no
and
yes.
don’t worry, she says, I’m waning but catch me next week
you picture her waxed legs, round flesh, the reflection
of your lust all bright white and hot thrust back at you
as if she were radiating desire
of her own
as if she wanted you the way you want you
full ray, a fire spread, everything burning
everything eaten, everything drunk up
nothing left but the photon and rock
back and forth
no
and
yes.
Unexplained Phenomena: August 12, 2002 at 3:04 a.m., when all the residents of downtown Corpus Christi left their beds
When the witching hour passes over their faces, they wake just long enough to grasp its coattail. With the sleepy hands of infants, clutching and insistent, they curl the darkness over finger and thumb and are pulled down across the floor, boneless and sliding. They bump and scrape across concrete, and come to rest in the square patches of their front yards. The night crouches, catlike, on the lawn. The snap of cold air unseals their eyes and everyone twists their heads, scalps prickling in the grass. Hey, what are we doing here, a woman in a sagging nightgown asks, pressing upwards on her elbows. But to others it makes perfect sense. Whatever have we been doing in our beds, tucked in our small square rooms, sleeping fitfully? Why aren’t we here in the damp grass, staring up at the sky? It’s the great cosmic Time Out, and everyone is present, even Dan, owner of the scummy pool and twine of cats that yowl endlessly and keep the neighborhood thick in fleas. Janice of the rock garden shifts uncomfortably, around her head a crown of thorns, water hardy and in bloom. Porch lights dim. A distant refinery flickers and falls into darkness. Overhead, the sky seems to wobble and sink. The pale twinkling lights they call stars are gone, nothing winking dimply across the tired old blanket of sky. The blanket lowers, and light explodes in furious balls of gas, too close, too hot. The earth is swept up, a pebble to which the residents of downtown Corpus Christi cling, and desperately cry. Their minds are swung through space in a heedless arc, the breadth, too broad, the depth, impossible. They see their own place in the cluster of endless galaxies, riding the outskirts of a tailfeather of some vast and glowing beast. They’re in the backwater of an endless, flowing expanse, a vacuum without boundary, without end. There are no human words yet to describe the smallness of their own lives. A lone voice gibbers in terror. A chorus of fear joins in a howl. But the gaseous explosive lights are now pulling away, and the feeling of infinitesimal smallness is fading. Spread eagle next to her parents a twelve year old girl recites the formula for the speed of light, over and over again: "3.0 times ten to the 8th." A pause. "3.0 times ten to the 8th." The residents tongue their mouths in search of a symbol that will do, a steep-sided shape or number to represent this experience, to bear witness to the existence of the void: space outside of mind. Light outside of light. The twelve-year old girl’s mother reaches for her daughter’s hand: she doesn’t comprehend anything, but there’s awe, and awe, and awe. Light dawns, blushing in the east. Slowly they rise, and talk of tea.
Language Barrier
My mother had a special skill for giving perfectly reasonable things the most ridiculous nickname possible, and she did it in such a way that those around her couldn’t help but use the nicknames, too. She liked only five different foods: strawberries, boiled chicken, carrots with brown sugar, and mushrooms in a meaty gravy, each with its own special name. My school friends loved my mother, a fact that made me jealous and indifferent in turns. She was always willing to drive us around town although she was rarely able to do so. "Oh this janky thing!" she’d cry, turning the key in our 1992 plum-sided Mercury Villager. "Call Jenny-penny, tell her we’ll be late to pick her up. Oh, what a hunk of junk." She’d instruct me to make the calls while she chain smoked Marlboro Lights, one to my father, the next to a neighbor mechanic. I’d talk but too slowly and she’d shout over me into the speaker. "What’s that? You’re out of town? Oh, fuddle. This fudging van won’t start, I think it’s the big box. The battery. Piddle paddle. Who can I call?" We had two cats, Samoa and Wingtip, but they became Samalam and Birdie. Samalam got hit by a car and crawled beneath our neighbor’s pier-and-beam to die, but it took the whole neighborhood crawling around on their bellies under bushes, calling "Sam! Sama-sama-samalam!" My mother stood in the midst of the chaos in her floor-length mumu with the sequin collar saying, "Ring the ding-a-ling! She comes for the bell. Samalam! Grab me another box of cigs, sugar-booger. I’ve sweat right through my shirt. Ring the ding." As teenagers her nicknames melted my sisters and me into a puddle of embarrassment when, out to lunch she’d ask the waitress for a "poon" with which to eat her mushrooms in brown gravy. In 2007 when she killed herself we couldn’t rid ourselves of the image of her fumbling with my father’s shotgun, loading the bullets backwards, dropping them on the carpet and getting cigarette ash all over her skirt. "Oh fiddle faddle," she would have said. "What a janky thing."
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