The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Keep Things Alive by Beth Gordon

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I’m Inventing a New Language Redux

I’ve been counting sparrow feathers for 1800 days and I’ve unearthed
the love songs in the scar between my toes. Splicing consonants from
nest-twig, nouns from proliferation. Learning to navigate butter-thick
pronunciations of hurricane cocktails, jellyfish sonnets, jalapeno hush
puppies that dance between my teeth. I’m telling you I have oxygen
inside these aging lungs, I salivate when I smell a man with cigarette
skin. I have no need for precognition, the decibels of floods. I rise to
the present harmonies of fingernails upon my back, champagne
bubbles, something glistening in the dark. I’m finding abandoned wine
corks, the remnants of celebration, tulip bulbs exploding like rug
burns in the cool Nebraska sky, the talking rag doll my father gave me
on my third birthday, the string I pulled over and over to memorize
her rhymes. The lilac dust in the back corner of my grandmother’s
lingerie drawer, a bumblebee mating dance in the lingering sunshine
of Emily Dickinson’s window. I’ve reimagined castles of clover, of
bloom, of 3D printers, reading the instructions to redesign my DNA,
the source of my vibration in mitochondrial pairs, like the astronaut
who returned to Earth only to discover that he is now mankind’s
perfect celestial double.

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