[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Tripney.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

It feels as if they have been in here for hours. Outside, it’s hot, an aggressive midday heat, but the stone is cool, the respite welcome, even if these corridors, these shaded cloisters, seem to wind on endlessly. They pass by one murky shuttered chapel after another. The tour guide, with her long, long list of dates and names, has a waterfall of a voice. Elisa’s parents make sounds of intellectual digestion; they um and hmm and ah. Occasionally they hunker down and earnestly point things out. Little details which they hope might excite her. They renew their earlier promise of ice cream. They urge her to stay close.

Elisa quickens her pace and thickens her smile. She ceases to heel-drag across the flagstones. After a while she finds herself drawn to the frescoed faces on the walls, with their flat eyes and their gazes eternally fixed; they seem to peer directly at her and so she stares back, intently, breath held. There have always been children here, the guide explains, orphans, the abandoned, those in need of protection. This was a place of safety, shelter. Her parents um and hmm again and Elisa places a hand on the worn, warm wood of the door frame and wonders what other fingers have traced these same smooth places.

She is still idling by the door when her parents round a corner and start to climb the stairs. Watching their twin pink backpacks bobbing away from her, Elisa is obliged to scurry. Her sandals make a brash slapping noise on the marble steps and the tour guide fixes her with a sharp, official eye before the flow of words begin again.

The convent’s upper level is even cooler and quieter and the fizz of the outside world seems even further away. Her parents are inspecting an engraving, their heads bowed, their bodies arcing towards one another; they consult the crinkled pamphlet they hold in their hands and attempt a few questions in their halting Spanish. The guide brightens, beams, and straightens her blazer before launching into a fresh explanation. Elisa’s parents continue to nod keenly, though she notices a kind of slackening in the muscles around her mother’s mouth as the verbal tide continues.

Then. Something. A breeze. A kind of calling. The sun, pouring in from a high window, is raw and bright, and Elisa, blinking, moves slowly away from her parents. The light pools on the back wall, illuminating a recessed space, a strange kind of cupboard. As she gets nearer Elisa realises that it is in fact a tiny chapel, built at eye-height with everything in miniature, the statues and frescoes, the detailing, all scaled down for small hands and small souls. There were children here. At its centre sits a wax-white figure, with its arms flung wide and its ravaged torso contorted, wracked: a not-quite-inch-high Christ with marzipan skin. There is something incredibly touchable about him. She struggles with the urge to pluck him from his cross, to cup him, buff him like a coin; to press his tiny body to her lips. Behind her, the tour guide’s voice flickers and down-shifts but does not pause. Elisa is exquisitely aware of her own breathing. The sun seems to pluck at the back of her neck. The chapel’s ancient filigree gate, a spider web of gilded threads, stands open, inviting. She raises a hand, reaches in, not to prod, not really, just to brush its skin with hers. She touches her fingertip to the top of its head, registers the texture, the fine-work of the hair, watches as the figure first wobbles and then tumbles from its perch. This does not alarm her. Halting his fall, she lifts him up to catch the light. The white face warms.

The tour guide has stopped talking and is now making a kind of urgent squawking sound. Elisa is aware of a quickening behind her while her parents’ humming has taken on a frantic quality. Her fingers, wrapped around the tiny body, remain dry. She studies the two painted eyes; the irises are almost shocking, whiter even than the skin.

Her name is called, first calmly then less so. Elisa clutches the figure in her fist, reluctant to part from it. There were children here once, kneeling where she now stood, the sun stroking their necks as they prayed.  The little Christ sits in her hand, spiny like a sea-creature; from the look of him she had thought he would be more pliable. The tour guide is moving towards her now, her heels clipping across the stone floor, her voice firm but restrained. Elisa’s father makes a sound that is part-cough, part-command. The tiny face peers out at her still, its chin resting on her finger, and within her hand she feels something – an arm most likely – crack, give.

Her next move seems clear, almost foregone. She pets the head one last time and pops the whole thing in her mouth. He tastes of dust and age, with a trace of something sweet. He splays on her tongue for a second, contained within her mouth. She enjoys the shape of him there, the angles and edges, the ridge of his spine. With an effort of will she swallows. It is not easy; it takes more than one attempt. Only then does she turn to face them.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Smeltz.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Tonight I’m too stupid to write a poem.
Who knows what poetry is.
I know:
My voice is too pronounced.
My pronoun I is a needless gnome.
I fall asleep in the spelling quiz
and sink to the shipwrecks in fathoms below.
On the Titanic mosses grow.
The moon has been renounced
and burning tigers pounce
right off the Golden Gate.
Your poetry must obfuscate
or end up middlebrow.
Madonna says take a bow.

Madonna says stop
and strike a pose.
Michael says don’t stop
‘til you get enough.
In developing nations I adopt
my very own vogue.
Let’s drop
the corset and the bullshit. I lop
off the ear of a Roman soldier. He’s tough,
but doesn’t call my bluff.
Jesus, however, is perfectly clear.
Knock it off, Amanda dear!
Sorry! I call.
I’m not sorry at all.

Sorry for the sentiment
oozing from my gums.
So spring’s return is little matter.
Hyacinth is trite.
New York grows great peppermint;
bartenders muddle it in rum.
I try to gather
the glassware they shatter.
Tonight I’m too stupid to fight
any angels. I’m erudite,
but I don’t want to wrestle.
Tonight I cook meth with a mortar and pestle.
I’m cleaning up glass with an oily broom.
Titanic chains creak in deep-sea gloom.

Into deep-sea the submarine sinks.
Beneath the sharks,
far past the coral.
Where fish with teeth and lightbulbs wait.
Tigers leap like lemmings off the brink.
Lights snuff out in this dark
water. But I mean no moral.
I mean no quarrel.
I watch for jumpers at the Golden Gate.
It’s not too late;
come down from there.
I have hyacinth to laurel your hair –
She yells, We’re just quarks in quantum slaughter!
I’m no longer anyone’s daughter!

Daughters of the revolution camp out in the square.
Into the desert plaza scarabs
crawl at request of Sunni kings.
Kings fidget. Kings preen. They oil
their wings. The Gulf corsairs
make music on strings. The United Arab
Emirates sends in tanks and brings
in troops. It’s boiling
in the Gulf, but Dubai’s royal
for vacation. I’m loyal
to the Palm Islands myself.
They’re built out of a coastal shelf.
You can swim in a sea of margaritas.
Madonna coos isla bonita.

Bonita Applebum, god bless you girl,
bowlegged. What a strong-ass walk.
Kindly fuck off. If I am blessed
it’s not in the ass.
If anything it’s that I’ve snuck past whirl-
pool and demon, rock
in straits. With only one arrest
to my name! But have I stressed
that females are the ship-eating caste?
Homer wrote Scylla and Charybdis dames. At last
the west is crystal clear.
The blood-orange tiger flaunts its rear.
In the jungle they’re judging who’s best dressed.
An Amazon lops off her breast.

About breasts the west has plenty to say.
This poem is the tits.
This poem’s Marilyn Monroe.
This poem is a hunting pack after virgin boobs.
Callooh! Callay!
Crawfish and grits!
White pin-up girls for Cleaver on death row.
What jury of peers? This is fathoms below.
Down here I’m in a pensive mood.
In diving bells, there’s little food.
And there I go spouting on I again.
The fish down here make lousy friends,
despite their little luminescence.
Their jagged teeth are deep-sea lessons.

Miles down in deep-sea, the Pacific plate
moves. One inch alters.
Maybe two.
Such quiet.
Up from the ocean floor the hate
roars. 10,000 go missing in the water.
Japan is screaming. What to do.
Twenty bucks to the Red Cross. What else is new.
Tonight I’m too stupid to start a riot.
Bartenders offer booze. I’m inclined to buy it.
We’re cleaning up gas in a nuclear room.
Fukushima leaks a nuclear gloom
all over Miyagi. It’s death to oysters.
For twenty miles out, people are cloistered.

Nuns in cloisters pace the halls.
Nuns in Lazio make ancient wine.
How else to keep out the twenty-foot waves?
How else to not drown in the eyes of God?
Shut the A/C vents in your walls.
Don’t touch that laundry on the line.
Tokyo officials relay how to behave
in radioactivity. The nave
of the nuns gives a nod
to Mary. Virgin broads
aren’t half as scary
as Greek monsters, tentacled, hairy.
Please stay inside, per government request.
Radioactivity will eat your breasts.

This poem is radioactive.
This poem wears orange peels
in its hair and drapes onion skins
around its shoulders. Tear gas
is repelled by citric acid.
This poem is a free Shiite beneath a boot-heel.
This poem in my mouth is gin
and ague and sin.
Before the last
rooster crow I’ll deny my master.
This poem three times before dawn.
Turn me on.
My bed glows in the dark.
It radioacts beneath the sharks.

A shark smells my blood.
A paper cut
on the poem leaves DNA.
I came all the way from a single cell
organism to doughnut
around parking lots, uppercut
pals. I dismay
my instructors. I decay
into carbon. I tap on hell’s
door and ask Lucifer’s pardon. In hell
I house-sit when the devil’s out.
The devil pouts,
You seem to like that religious stuff.
Like it? Don’t stop til you get enough.

Don’t stop this poem.
With its hyacinth hair.
Spring through the window and ash
in the air after buildings collapse.
Where the buffalo roam.
Oh give me a bear
where the bull markets crash.
This poem of panache
is a gateau topped with too much ganache.
Jesus claps
me on the back.
Hey look. If you come around,
bolster your brothers. From the ground
I look up. I’m a white tiger rug.
I’ll be worn on the head of imperial thugs.

The imperial head
appears on TV.
The emperor never
descends from his cloud.
But now that his cirrus-bed
glows in the dark, he’s pleased
to come down. The weather
is right. Feather-
light snow. The proud
head takes a bow.
A fracture
cracks the red circle. A rapture
steals the faithful away.
This hunting poem. Callooh! Callay!

Madonna says take a bow.
I bow. I’m not sorry at all.
Titanic chains creak in deep-sea gloom.
On a broom I’m no longer a daughter.
Madonna coos for the crowd,
an Amazon having a ball.
Her jagged teeth are deep-sea lessons.
Madonna in the cloisters. Go to confession
or radioactivity will eat your breasts.
It radioacts beneath the sharks.
Like it? Don’t stop til you get enough.
We’ll be worn on the head of imperial thugs.
This hunting poem. Callooh! Callay!
This tiger poem getting away.

The Curse

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Richardson.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

I pray this thorn pushes through me
into you. I ask poison to press
upon your palms and knees. I hope for
your permanent brown. Let the universe
feed you stones until your garden grows
sick with weeds.

The Cursed

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I awoke with snow in my mouth, diamond
snakeskin between my legs. A small sooty
shadow fell on my cheek I tried to wipe it
but bone-hands held it over my head. I
felt as small as a cherry pit, my insides turning
like a rotten melon. I searched the skies for
a sign but my senses grew gray-blue like the
silver of a newborn kitten’s eyeball; glass-veined
and useless. I listened for the voice of my lover,
my mother, but all I heard were worms eating
their way through the crust of this dirty earth.

Circle of Salt – October 28

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If you are my bright protector. If water can ever meet wood. If a coastal forest. If I lived there. If I made a trail of salt to follow. If it did not dead-end. If the windows of your house opened on a bay. If its legs did not gain ground so quickly. If I knew the words to make it stop and face me. If there were words. If I did not find, after a long line of years, that the salt was my own, that it streamed behind me as though burst from a sack. If trails did not loop back to their beginnings. If lines could be broken. If the woods were full of words. If I sat another day in the wind on my rotten balcony, watching the lines of breakers chase the waves away. If I sat another day. If I sat another day.

Circle of Salt – November 11

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If the gray bone of the beach did not tease the sea. If salt did not form crystals. If a body was not made of water. If it had not left behind traces of itself, a white web through the house. If a storm. If a staircase. If plants could twist their feet between the cracks in my sidewalk. If the wave had not salted the earth. If water contained only itself. If it left a dead line behind. If I could not be planted. If my feet crumbled into the waves and left for distant lands. If solution. If I dissolved and evaporated, crusted a green leaf in the canopy. If in transit. If I spied from my nest a pair of dancing feet. If I captured them and boiled them down to suck out their marrow. If sweat were evidence of skin. If moisture. If solution.

Circle of Salt – November 25

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If I sat a spell. If I could remove my feet from their casings. If I could strip them down, saplings. If a forest grew of my body. If I let my feet loose, wound them up and set them going in a cheerful circle. If uprooted. If a house could be uprooted. If cement did not clog the foundations. If I had not, in my anger, set cement throughout the house, made it heavy, a paperweight. If tractable. If tenable. If a tent city. If the water table rose and this paper house drifted away. If a tent flap. If a house flapped. If a house with feet and a beaked nose walked past. If a house could wander. If I could ever leave the rooms of my youth, could ever find new feet for walking. If I could rend myself. If I could rent myself. If intruder. If in truth, I was telling a lie. If I lay there. If my body could lay down its bones anywhere else. If, once the corner stones had been laid, once my sunburned skin had shed into the chinks of the sea wall, once salt had reeked its way under my nails. If sand did not harden like cement around my buried feet.

To the Woman in the Woods – December 20

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This is the science of beaches: that they are between the land and the sea. That out on the water you may sink, and lying on the beach you may sink into the sand. That a hole, as it is dug, will fill. The beach extends under the water, holds the water up, and becomes the tongue of the ocean floor. Spreads under the sidewalk in front of my house and creeps up the steps to sleep in my bed. You may live on top of or under the sand, where there is always more space to bury. There you may build a city. Or there you may lose a city. There you may find curtains of seaweed, or houses on stilts. They do not balance, do not walk. The smooth bones of empty houses wash up there and wash away, and you may crush them beneath your feet, and they will become part of the surface you walk on.

To the Woman in the Woods – January 2

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I dreamed that I woke up and found you standing on the beach. A storm was coming in purple and you watched it. Your back to me, your matted hair stuffed with sand. Then I knew it was a dream. You were caked in it, as though buried and unburied. As though an animal, rolled in some strange smell. I said, I am where. You said the liminal. You drew a line in the sand, and four lines branching out a claw. You marked the spot. Behind us the houses and before us the sea, and between us the sand. The bones. The footprints into the water I had not yet made. I asked you to turn around and you did, your face empty as a keyhole, toothed and missing.

Joshua’s dead girlfriend has been sending him postcards. He puts them up on the wall above his bed, even though his mother asked him not to tape up posters because they would strip paint off the wall.

Boyfriend, she wrote on the first one, I wish you were here. All my love, Alice. It was stamped from somewhere in Purgatory, which confused him, because the front of the card was a photograph of Cleveland, Ohio. It was probably a dead person joke, he thought. He’d never been to Ohio.

The second postcard was of Death Valley National park, and that was a joke he did get. He tried to remember what her laugh had sounded like. She had only been dead two weeks then, but some good things were already starting to fade.

Joshua thought the strangest part about the whole postcard thing was that Alice never wrote him anything when she was alive. Once she and her family went to Daytona Beach for a whole two weeks, and she didn’t send a postcard, even though Joshua sent her three from his family ski vacation.

The next postcard was a Georgia O’Keefe print, a painting of a deer’s skull against a brilliant blue desert sky. Josh, she wrote, even though she knew he preferred to be called Joshua. Are you still failing Chemistry? Please don’t let Tiffany Delaney sit in my old desk. xo, Alice. 

He had let Tiffany sit in her old desk, the desk that Alice had carved their names into with her pocketknife. What was he going to say about it? Everyone knew Alice wasn’t coming back, and Tiffany’s blond curls smelled like honeysuckle. He asked her about it once before class, and she said it was organic shampoo, the kind her mother used.

Tiffany’s mother was the guidance counselor, a woman who wore pantsuits, but the smell of the shampoo made him think of Mrs. Delaney in a whole different way, so he made an appointment to see her. The visit had nothing to do with Alice, but of course that’s what they ended up talking about anyway.

“Joshua,” Mrs. Delaney said, in her honeysuckle voice. “I’ve been hoping to see you.”

When he told her about the postcards, she reached across the desk to grab his hand.

Alice’s next postcard, Greetings from the Memphis Zoo, told Joshua to Say hello to your mother, asking sweetly: How is she? He was surprised at this; Alice was rarely polite. Besides, Alice and his mother had only met twice, once at the house and once at Alice’s funeral. His mom said she’d looked pretty both times. Alice did look pretty in the casket, looked like she was only sleeping in the crushed purple velvet. Joshua was amazed at what a good job they did reattaching her head, but no one else at the service mentioned it.

Alice had died on a school trip to the amusement park, on their third time around on the Texas Tornado rollercoaster. She stood up during the ride, even though the roller coaster operator had specifically asked her not to. Joshua noticed she hadn’t properly secured her safety bar, he even asked her about it, but she said it was fine, it wasn’t an upside-down coaster, she’d done it before with her Dad.  So Alice was hooping and hollering like the ride was the best thing she’d ever done and Joshua was just about to stand up too, when the coaster went around a corner, and next thing Joshua knew Alice was sitting back down in her seat, without her head.

Joshua told the wall of taped-up postcards that my mother says hello back, and that she’s doing okay. She doesn’t make me eat broccoli anymore, he continued. She wants to get us a dog. She never asks me about you.

That last bit wasn’t entirely true, because whenever Mom asked Joshua anything, she was asking about Alice. When she asked him if he wanted a German shepherd or a Pomeranian, she was really asking how much Joshua missed Alice. Joshua said maybe we could get a white poodle, because he liked the way their slobber stained their dog-beards. Joshua’s mom didn’t seem to know what he meant by that. A teacup Chihuahua, she asked, or a Bernese Mountain dog?

Other people asked about Alice without asking about Alice too. The track coach said Joshua didn’t have to come to practice every day and he’d still give him a varsity letter. His Chemistry teacher said he wasn’t failing anymore, even though the only thing that had changed in the class was that Tiffany now sat in front of him, where Alice used to be. Joshua still liked the way Tiffany’s hair smelled, and it reminded him to make more appointments at the guidance office. Joshua thanked Alice in his head for these things, and she sent him a blank postcard of two prairie dogs grooming one another.

Alice’s still-alive boyfriend has been sending her postcards. She doesn’t know where he gets her addresses; she’s not even sure where she is most days. Joshua always liked postcards. When he went on a ski vacation, he sent Alice one card for every night he was gone. She recycled them, but she regrets it now. She has softened up a bit since death.

Dear Alice, the first one said, in Joshua’s careful penmanship. I bicycled past your house. Your tulips are out, and your dad threw a beer bottle at me. -J.

They were daffodils, she growled, angry that he got to see their orange and white heads. When she died they were only sprouts, little fingers of green poking out of the ground. It is not surprising to Alice that her father is drinking again, or that he thinks her boyfriend is some sort of feral cat that he can throw bottles at.

Thank you for the postcard, she wanted to write to Joshua, if she only had a pen. The Afterlife is fine. My grandmother is here, the one with the glass eye, you remember, she died a few years ago? The eye falls out all the time, because her eye sockets have drooped even more since she’s started decomposing. She whines like a Basset Hound when I put it back in.

Joshua has only been to Alice’s grave once, walked all over her fresh dirt plot with his ratty Vans sneakers. You are standing on my face, she wanted to tell him. You are stepping on my hair, she tried to shout, as she watched him from somewhere above. That’s the funny thing about being dead, she thought, you’re both everywhere and nowhere. That visit, Joshua left yellow carnations on the top of her headstone. Alice thought about how she would have been absolutely livid, beyond pissed, if he had give her yellow carnations for her prom corsage, but now she thinks they’re sort of nice.

Alice wishes Joshua would come back to the cemetery, is sorry she got so mad about his sneakers. She’s glad that he at least remembers to write, even if all of Joshua’s postcards are very short and a little impersonal, which Alice chalks up to the fact that he’s afraid of spelling something wrong. She wants to remind him of the time he bit her nipple so hard it bled. It was only the third or fourth time she’d taken her bra off in front of him, and he just didn’t know what he was doing, he didn’t mean to hurt her. Still, those sorts of things bring people closer, and at some stage you don’t have to worry about spelling anymore.

But as the postcards keep coming, Alice grows more annoyed with Joshua. He didn’t say he loved me, she whines, and he wrote it in pencil. She hates that none of the postcards are from interesting places; he’s just going through the rotation of the cards available at the gas station next to his house. That was another thing she never liked about Joshua, he had no desire to travel, no sense of adventure. She did get jealous when Joshua wrote to her after the first time he smoked marijuana, behind the bleachers with a bunch of his friends. But she had already smoked Clouds twice at that point, which her glass-eyed grandma assured her was much better. You can’t trust anything that comes out of the dirt, Nana said, pulling a fat white grub out of her ear.

When there’s no postcard from Alice for a week, Joshua thinks it’s a good sign, and so does Mrs. Delaney. Mrs. Delaney says we never forget our first love, but we have to keep our hearts open. Mrs. Delaney has been married three times.

Joshua asks Tiffany Delaney to prom, because he can’t very well ask her mother, since husband #3 is still in the picture. Joshua gives Tiffany a corsage of pink carnations, and Tiffany says she loves them, that they are her absolute-most-favorite flower.

At the dance, there is a video tribute to Alice. Everyone looks at Joshua during it, and he nervously runs his fingers along the edges of the Georgia O’Keefe postcard in his pocket. The gym teacher walks up to Joshua after the five-minute memorial, and hands him a plastic cup of bright red punch. Joshua takes a sip; it is half full of vodka.

Later in the night, Joshua and Tiffany grope each other in the back of her mother’s station wagon. The whole car smells like honeysuckle.

“Was that okay?” Tiffany asks after, nervously pulling her taffeta dress back on.

“Heaven,” Joshua says, pulling her close so he could sniff her curls.

“Better than Alice?” Tiffany asks, and Joshua thinks about showing her the postcard of the deer skull painting, but decides against it, and pushes the folded up card further down into the pants pocket of his rented tuxedo.
The next morning, there is a postcard in Joshua’s mailbox, a photograph of a naked baby in a flowerpot. It’s not stamped or signed, and Joshua thinks it might be the last one he’ll get.

Nice night for prom, Alice writes, in barely readable scrawl. I’d still stand up on the Texas Tornado. Sorry about the handwriting. Fingers decayed. I’ve only got my teeth to hold a pen, and those are going too.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Folk.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Laura was not released from Ray Leopold’s basement the next day, or the one after that. She and Andy staggered their sleeping schedules so they would have a few hours alone each day. While awake, Laura and Andy talked, argued, picked each other apart. They shared their deepest feelings of alienation and discontent. Laura began to rest her head on Andy’s shoulder while he talked, her arm over his stomach.

The first time they kissed was a week into their captivity. Laura realized she had never engaged in sexual activity while sober. This made it awkward, and so did the handcuffs that still pinned Andy’s hands behind his back. Laura took her own clothes off, and offered bits of herself for Andy to put his mouth on.

Sex was only an incidental component of their relationship, something they did to pass the long afternoons. Without use of his hands, Andy became wholly dependent on Laura. His need for her was staggering; she had never been so needed by another person. Laura was the sole means by which his every desire was satisfied. She became as comfortable with Andy’s body as she was with her own.

Laura kept a calendar. She used the little fold-out nail file on the fingernail clippers to carve notches into the wooden top of the TV. They didn’t start recording days until they had already been in the basement several weeks, and they disagreed about how much time had elapsed; Laura thought it was five days longer than Andy did. She deferred to his judgment on all matters, though, including the passage of time.

Most days the door would open at some point–it could be in the morning or the afternoon, or late at night. The door would open quickly and a package would be thrown down the stairs. Sometimes it was a garbage bag, sometimes a small plastic grocery store bag. Toilet paper, soap. Cans of green beans, beets, water chestnuts, corn. Laura spent hours getting each can open, using the nail file on the fingernail clippers and the handle of their spoon. The green beans were several years past their expiration date, but Andy thought they should still be good. He let her try them first, and when, an hour later, she still hadn’t gotten sick, he allowed himself to be fed the green beans, one at a time, sucking the salty juice from Laura’s fingers.

Then the canned food stopped coming. Even Andy pined for the days of cornflakes and bologna. Now it was giant ziplock bags of old Halloween candy, cracked and waxen lumps of chocolate that sometimes contained maggots. There were Twinkies and all manner of snack cake, fruit pies in paper wrappers. Everything was stale, as if it had languished at the back of a pantry for years.

*    *    *

A typical day in the basement, the seventy-fifth, according to their calendar. Andy stepped on Laura’s sleeping bag, somewhere near her ankles. This was his usual method of waking her. Groggily, she got to her feet and waited for Andy’s orders.

“Fill my cup with water,” he said. He settled onto the couch.

Laura filled the blue cup and held it to his lips. Then she stood in front of him so he could evaluate her body. This morning she wore a white camisole with a pale blue half-slip. She cycled through the slips from the box, changing in accordance to Andy’s moods.

“Turn around,” Andy said. Laura turned so he could judge her backside. “Strip,” he said. Laura peeled off the slip and the camisole. She wasn’t wearing underwear.

“Okay,” he said. “Your legs look good. We’ll do more abs today. Clench for me.” Laura turned to face him, clenched her stomach muscles. “Yeah. More obliques today, definitely. Get dressed.”

Laura went to the box, bent at the waist, and reached in for the next slip. It was dark blue, with a modest neckline and a demure edge of lace at the bottom.

“No,” Andy said. “Next.”

Laura tossed the slip back in the box. The next slip she pulled was hot pink, with a sheer lace bust and an empire waistline.

“Put that one on,” Andy said. Laura put it on. “Turn around.” She turned around, slowly. “Okay. That’ll work.”

Laura sat beside Andy on the couch, and efficiently brought him to orgasm using her hands and mouth.

“Okay,” he said when that was done. “You can have some water now.”

Laura drank from the blue cup, and then sat at the table to prepare Andy’s breakfast. For the past several days, this had meant dissecting several of the “fun sized” Snickers bars, using her fingernails and teeth to extract bits of peanut. Andy expected the peanuts to be bare, without remnants of chocolate or caramel. She gathered the peanuts in her palm and brought them to him for inspection.

“Those look good,” he said. “Good job.”

He opened his mouth and Laura put the small handful of nuts in it.

“You may eat the remainder,” he said, and Laura ate the shredded chocolate and nougat, licking her palm where the candy had melted.

After breakfast, it was workout time. Each day they had exercise sessions in which Andy told Laura what to do. She was not allowed to stop moving until he told her to, and he worked her until she was soaked in sweat and on the verge of collapse. Andy assumed total control of her body, to the point that Laura felt she would stop breathing, her heart stop beating, should Andy command it.

Today, Andy ordered Laura to jumprope with an extension cord they’d found. Then he told her to drop into a plank position and do ten pushups. Then it was fifty squats, then ten more pushups, then another interval of jumprope. He never took his eyes off her. The workouts continued until Andy was bored, which could take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours. Laura had fainted during previous sessions.

“Okay,” Andy said finally. He allowed her to have a shot of mouthwash, just one. On her perpetually empty stomach, the alcohol gave her a strong buzz. Sometimes it made her dry heave, which she fought against.

*    *    *

Ninety-five days since the start of their calendar. Andy sat on the love seat in lotus position, meditating. Laura was pretending to meditate, but really she was watching Andy, his closed eyes, his blank expression. It was late in November. Andy had been saying more frequently, lately, that Laura was soon to be released.

In the early weeks she had missed her parents so intensely she felt like a little girl spending her first night at a sleepover. Now, Laura rarely thought of her parents. She felt no shame in the knowledge that her life back home had probably been picked apart, analyzed, her every acquaintance interrogated. All of that belonged to a different life, one she felt no attachment to.

Laura fantasized about leafy greens and lean cuts of meat. She avoided looking in the mirror above the sink, especially in the daytime, when gray sunlight highlighted the pallor of her skin. She had lost at least twenty pounds. In spite of Andy’s workouts, her muscles had wasted, her skin hung off her bones, and she looked much older than seventeen.

Each day, Laura would massage Andy’s arm muscles and help him stretch his shoulder blades forward as far as they could go. She didn’t mention her alarm at how his muscles had diminished. She encouraged him to eat more, but he said it was pointless.

“If I get out of here, I’ll eat nothing but dead animals for the rest of my life,” he said.

Laura tended the Beanie Babies, shuffling them from one shelf to another. She quarantined all the bears together in the top right corner of the display. She sorted the Beanies into taxonomies. Mammals, reptiles, aquatic life, birds, and “other”. Andy taught her to juggle using several of the bears.

A woman crying full of pleasure through the wall
Hands plastered on the plasterboard
I know that sound
She herself often leads me to the kitchen and then
Props me up, groaning, while I kiss her neck.
The whisperings of girls, smiles, sweet deceptions
Are not what they used to be,
Those thieves of wretched make-believe.

Our souls, being mainly air, cannot hold us together,
So breath and air together embrace the entire universe,
At least this one,
Each of us in our inner tube turning slowly
In a circle as we drift downstream on time.
How strangely my muddled senses swim!
As if some insomniac next door had left the TV on,
Filling the empty with its raucous emptiness,
A replay of something pre-recorded:

A woman crying through the wall.

DAY 30

Any routine is always the same but in between you could cut the space for my breastbone with a sword & fail to make contact with

When we walked together in the suburbs, in May, a single sparrow resonated in twenty-two different garages. The stink of apathy carried with it various remembered sparrows in other neighborhoods, like a stream.

(Most streams, I learned, regret the inability to stand still.)

The last sparrow I heard was your voice.

I am I in two moments but maybe not from one to the next.

The problem of continuity. The cat’s dead or out of the box.

One girl in front of a placemat. The same girl at the same time by the window of the spaceship on the mission to the end of the Universe (capital U). Her hair smells like snakeskin.

Play the scale for me like you used to, not lifting your hand from the keys.

DAY 72

In the logbook I try to focus on the tasks at hand

Listen, though; lately I have been thinking about death. About how the stuff out there may be smarter than we give it credit for.

Even a child would not step
toward a bed in the dark without considering
what might lie under it

(unbound)

[begin transmission]
the end of fear is the
end of both caution & imagination

the Big Rip-this whole shebang
overwhelmed & purple like a broken thumb

(dark energy creeping out
of boots, out of eyesockets & dogs’ tails, out of fathom
it fathom it the stems of )

Once you asked me what I would do if you died first

When I am quiet enough I think I can feel them:

two hands
pushing against
the body from the inside. one
against the belly, one against
the spine. as though
a tiny police officer
were directing
traffic in the guts

Stars will go first: gaseous confetti.

Then planets, curls of continents separating from the earth like a proper apple peel (the Universe always had such an appetite
for pie)

And then our own skin

From far away, a tiny effervescence.

Dear Martians,

can you ensure we’re not the only ones who bleed?

DAY 80

This evening I was supposed to measure the oxygen in the ship’s atmosphere, whether it fluctuated, if so how often. Looking at my watch, I began to count

One hour elapsed during that single minute, as it does when you are in the grip of a dream.

But awake. I could only ask the night,

When you’re strapped into the simulator, time works in the head like
a busted car, one whose gears can’t lock into place. The swing-the dip-the release.

I once wished to be reincarnated as a gun, but I meant to say bullet. Stone and mid-air.

Cutting into your flesh like the invisible band on an invisible

The busted car juking to a hard stop. When I say stop I mean:

Count to me, count to me.

Count the ways that my body could land in this net that I sometimes call night. Tighten the gears. Take the gag out of my brain’s mouth. We all know I’m less than complete

[A Letter Written to You While I Am Away]

each year the river sinks lower and I have been
nowhere new
save for clinics and their board game
rooms that rattle
in my head like dice
flashes of only men with overgrown
beards they have forgotten
their beards like dead farmer’s crops
but I remember them clearly
those men and their beards
they stomp between my ears every time
the doctor asks me
to shed the clothes beneath my waist

When It Was Too Cold to Sleep in a Tent

we had not seen such a black
our headlamps like the wrong knife through bread
the cold was a reverse swelling
in my knees and wrists
but you, drunk, kept insisting
that we had gone to the tropics

you put paper umbrellas
into our river water cocoa and told me you heard
waves instead of trees
and I counted five four three
hours until sunrise
when we could become thawed versions of ourselves
and pioneer back home

but how terrible that sun was
when she stabbed at our tent
before we could become sober
before you and I crawled out burned
and looking for some way to cross the hills

Fort-Da

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I would fog up your glasses tonight if I still had lips,
David said to me on New Years Eve. It was
beside the point that he did have lips, beautiful ones:
this was a third date and we were beginning
to make a world. Driving through Trinidad
in the first hour of the new year, we stopped
at a light behind a taxi blaring a Journey song:
Do I wanna be there in my city? David turned
and said, Don’t you find the sound of rootlessness inspiring.
I stroked his cheek, then gazed out the window
and took another hit. David, I said, You are now
my favorite magic trick in the entire Mid-Atlantic.
But he’d fallen asleep, head against the glass.
We were headed out to an island. We would rent
bicycles and ride the circuit, swerving for chickens
and stopping to smoke cigarettes at the feet of
Lady Guadalupe. Everyone else was less arrogant
than David, but his grunts were a miracle of sound.

What it Means to Excel

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He charts emotions
in a spreadsheet.

When someone asks him
how he feels, he says

can you hold
please
and then scans

the cells like an arcade claw.

“Surprise” has
381 subsets.
Mental note
to consolidate

the options
since he only ever uses

“love” and “boredom”
these days,

sometimes
“woe,” mostly for the sound
of it.

Starkly Starkly Little Twink

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We have been looking          for god
through the windows          of the bus
but have seen only red-tails          declaring
their hunting ground.

In the fog, it is easier
to pretend     the glass in our cheek          is a diamond,
old coal     made precious
from the pressures
of being a body          inside a body.

In a cabin in Humboldt
we wrote a list          on the ceiling
of all the whatfors          then hopped
the next train.

Now our fathers          get Botox
for medical reasons.          Let us all get          safe
for a minute.          If we cannot promise          to be good
we can at least               insist
on the strength          of our smallest          most locomotive
limbs.

There Were Once More Creative Ways to Say “Fucking” But I Have Forgotten Them All

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