tsunami as misguided kwannon her hypervigilance such that everything becomes a piercing a harrowing she can’t turn off her superpower a wound a lightning rod / and sponge / speaking the language of wounds to wounds like echolocation that dopplers the contours of another’s sorrow against her own ricocheted song or touch subtle as the naked push broom of a star-nosed mole’s tentacles nuzzling the bruised flesh of worms or a nose for muscling out fresh blood old ghosts / the sweet fat of lost dreams like a winter-lean bear come spring or feathery antennae’s raw quiver pinched to ash by the hot sparks of disconsolate pheromones her nervous system a glitter of neurotransmitters on fire an electric-chaired switchboard short circuited / fuse blown she’s the exposed nerve: exuviated snake / hulled bean husked cicada / chaffed seed peeled grape / shucked clam she’s the conduit / aperture / cracked [...]
Cynthia Atkins
People I’d Like to Meet Ken Singleton & Emerson Boozer. Wait, I already met Ken Singleton & Emerson Boozer signing autographs at some kind of auto show when I was a kid. Haixia Zheng, Otis Birdsong, World B. Free. Nancy Kerrigan & Tonya Harding. Surya Bonaly. The Flash. Lucille Ball. Rosemarie Waldrop. A helicopter. A litter of kittens. A pair of mittens. A bolt of lightning. Ellen Page, Kesha. Martellus Bennett. Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, & the Blue Marvel. A raindrop. A footprint. 2,000 years. An image of an image of Billie Holiday. Yayoi Kusama, Robert Smithson, Jenny Holzer. (I already met Henry Rollins & Mike Watt & Vincent Price in bookstores.) Jane Freilicher. James Schuyler. A dozen roses or slices of bread. The He & She from the That’s What They Said jokes. The They & Them from They’re Making Me Do Things statements. Kathleen Hanna. Ian Curtis. Yolandi [...]
The Human Zoo Soon I appear through the fog, my face presses against the cage. There is a scrim of dark edging the metal. You are there, pushing life toward my mouth with your fingers. Now I reach without biting. In the dark my own hands grasp how small & tame I am. You say, stay wild with your eyes & ideas. But imagine if my hand could not find your hand. Through the skin of what has survived. If I come up for air but then slip again beneath the current, remember how I glittered, with water pouring from every pore. You would walk down into our earth & watch me race behind the captive green glass. I leave you the gills of my faith, the jaw of my empathy. The flowers will remember my rain & my murmurs. How absurd I am. Even the thunderheads will remember a [...]