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A History of Termina

In the mayor’s office, men with money pretend the moon is not falling.
Laborers point to its growing shadow, poets ready their pens—
a violence is not solved without memory.
Lonely children do not cry wolf.

Laborers point to its growing shadow, poets ready their pens.
When the moon chooses its end, who will remember us here?
Lonely children do not cry wolf
while playing in the forest past nightfall, they ask:

when the moon chooses its end, who will remember us here?
They wrote songs to one another, named them for the girls
playing in the forest past nightfall, asking
what happens to lonely children with aching lungs.

They wrote songs to one another, named them for the girls
hidden away in their rooms, lit only by moon.
What happens to lonely children with aching lungs,
who yell at the falling light?

Hidden away in their rooms, lit only by moon,
men with money ignore the children
who yell at the falling light.
If it’s something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!

Men with money ignore the children
with bones growing over their face; children, shrouded in light;

if it’s something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it

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Decay: A Triptych

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One Cool Rock

Old fears: the dark; hell; loneliness. New fears: coughing; the future; the dark; bears; crowds; loneliness. In the new world with the new changes I am suffering. I am saying to everyone, Did it just get louder in here or is it me? And everyone is saying, It is you. (Of course, when we exchange words, we are adding to the noise: it is not me.) / Nick is suffering, too. He was adopted during the pandemic, you see. 24/7 access to me is his norm, and now that the world is returning to its norm his little heart is broken. / I usually sleep with tiny lights shaped like stars on but they hurt S’s head sometimes so we shut them off and I feel so crushed by darkness I believe I will die. I admit: sleeping in the dark is an impossible task when I am alone. / My older sister who lives out of state has trouble leaving the house so I tell her Go to the woods and don’t come back until you have found One Cool Rock. Giving advice on how to act less like myself makes me feel less like myself. But I think there are more people who need a mission in order to leave the house than we realize, pandemic or not. / My apartment is swathed in beige so I bought plants and colorful rugs and now I want to leave the house even less frequently. / I get a remote job as a copyeditor. I spend the day editing self-help books in my pajamas while Nick sits on my lap. I’m not doing much that is special. I know, logically, that does not mean I am not worthy of love. / Because I often feel overcome by the weight of my failures, E advises me to construct a comfort list, which is what her therapist advised her to do. So this is my comfort list: star-shaped lights, colorful rugs, nice-looking rocks, the singing mice from Babe, the old man who walked into the mummy wing at the history museum once and said It smells like a church in here. The rest of the day all I could think of was that man, and of the care given to a dummy’s plaster foot tucked away under a turning wheel: the flour-soft tan line veeing the top of the toes. / I read an article recently that said rats love to drive tiny cars. Researchers wanted to see if they could teach the rats to drive; it turns out they not only could, but it took very little motivation. The rats love to drive! It makes them happy. That makes me happy. Later I read an article that said when scientists study rats they often only study male rats because female rats are too hormonal. That ruined the rat car story for me a bit. / I suspect in the next few hundred years animals will be treated entirely as equals to humans. I don’t think that means we will stop eating each other. / S thinks that my adopting a cat is a sign of maturity, but that I still need to buy a car in order to be caught up in life. Even the rats have little cars, I think. I’m behind even the rats! / I love S but sometimes his work ethic depresses me. I don’t think he puts enough stock in luck. I think this hurts him deeply; when I fail, the pain is acute, and I put a lot more stock in luck than he does. / S calls the shelf where I put all my tiny objects my Curiosity Cabinet. My curiosity cabinet is an old hardwood office mailbox: three tiny boxes by seventeen tiny boxes. I found it on the side of the road shortly after the pandemic began and S lugged it into my apartment for me. I have stored many things in it, such as:

                  • rocks
                  • dried clementine peels
                  • pencils
                  • dried flowers
                  • a matchbox car
                  • a lump of coal
                  • corks
                  • unused sparklers
                  • a token for a free game of minigolf
                  • feathers
                  • seashells

At the top of the shelf is a little sign that says LIBRARY. People are always giving me small things to put into the curiosity cabinet and this is one way I know that I am a part of the world, even if I do not feel it sometimes: a compact antique autograph book from J; a snail shell from S (Like the giant pink snail shell in Dr. Doolittle, he said; I have stuffed feathers into the shell, and now it looks like a bird has made a home of it); a tiny tin from C with the words ESTEEM THE GIVER curled up on the top; a rabbit figurine that belonged to E’s mother. What do I do to support my friends? Not enough, I worry. / My confession is this: the world is reopening, I am safe, I am well, and I am still afraid. I am afraid of the government, and of money, and of coughing. I am afraid of standing up for things. I am afraid of what it means that half the country showed themselves to be comfortably indifferent to their compatriots throughout this last few years. And—this is a small fear, you will say my priorities are out of order—I am afraid that I will continue to only feel safe at home, and that I will be swept under the rug and forgotten, as everyone else moves on with their lives, or doesn’t. / Other items on my comfort list: I Spy books; jasmine tea; the swallow in “Thumbelina,” how he smiled for her when she got engaged to the fairy prince even though he would be so lonely without her. Hans Christian Andersen’s stories are full of good-hearted losers. I think this is what I like best about them. I read that Andersen was so afraid of dying he would attach a note to his shirt when he slept that said Not dead! Only sleeping! / Someone online took a poll: what animals are introverts? I thought instantly of several different animals—spider, mole, mouse, centipede—and then thought further about the different ways there are of being alone. Spiders, I think, are content to be alone. They wish to be by themselves: confident loners. Mice and centipedes are simply too anxious to be extroverts. And moles are so full of resentment and disdain towards the world aboveground that they would seek to shame those who rightfully belong there into remaining secluded with them. There is a certain type of loneliness that is so lonely, it wishes to make others lonely too. Sometimes I worry I have that loneliness. / My bigger confession is that I only felt safe at home before the pandemic even started. I find somebody I love or admire and I want to contain them in my palms always. My palms, thankfully, are not big enough. / My biggest confession of all is that I never feel truly safe or at rest, even when I am home alone. In fact, sometimes when I am alone in my house I begin to worry that I am the only person who exists at all. / I have never been much of a meat-eater, but when I adopted Nick I felt an even stronger conviction than before that maybe I ought to stop eating animals, even though that’s really all he eats. One day he dropped a dead mouse in the hallway in front of my bedroom door. He looked at me so proudly! After taking a second to process the shock of a tiny dead body in my home, I scooped Nick up in my arms and deposited him in my bedroom and shut the door on him and fetched a plastic bag and tongs. I came back to the mouse and stared at it. It looked perfect, like it was only sleeping. I wondered, if it had not died, if I could have taught it to drive a tiny car, or a tiny motorcycle, like in The Mouse and the Motorcycle. I wondered how Nick had killed it—battered it to death, crushed its little bones, I supposed. Wary, I poked at it with the tongs, but it didn’t move, its skin only gave in a little, like a pillow for a doll, or a baked potato cooked too long, or a little balloon that has begun to lose air. Taut but malleable, flexible. I plucked the tiny corpse with the tongs and deposited it into the grocery bag and threw it into the garbage outside. When I released Nick from the bedroom, he circled in confusion the spot where the mouse had lain, looking around for his present to me, and I felt a small tug of mourning, and the mourning was not for the dead mouse, but for ignorant, murderous Nick, whose valentine was met with a look of horror. / I have trouble sitting in one spot while I talk on the phone. I wander about the apartment or go for walks. The other night I returned library books while talking to E on the phone and I saw a young deer sitting on the lawn by the library steps, eating some flowers in the dark, completely content. It was such a special sight. But since the day I discovered the dead mouse, I have found myself on multiple occasions talking on the phone and distractedly lying down on the carpet in the spot where the mouse once rested. I rise quickly mid-conversation upon realizing, and then days later I do it again. I don’t know what draws me there. I would rather be drawn to a spot of matted grass on the library lawn, by the flowers and the book drop. / During the pandemic, the place I wanted most to be was in the poetry section of the Carnegie Library, by the window where you could look down into the dinosaur wing of the history museum. But although the library has been open now for a month or so, I have only been there once, and I barely spent time by that window. I suspect what I actually missed during quarantine was one moment of sitting by the window, drinking coffee, and reading Šalamun. It wasn’t the window at all. Or maybe it wasn’t even that moment of reading poems on a day that happened to be unrepeatably perfect. Maybe it was just the belief that people could be good and kind and safe with one another, which has died, or looks like it has.

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When I Count, There Are Only You and I Together

Last night I dreamed of bears devouring babies, despite our best efforts. Two bears, two babies, one for one. I didn’t see it happen, per se, but I knew it did. I was in an alpine kitchen with the others and I was happy, I was feeling the breeze blow in through the double-hung door, and then the bears came. Two doors, one door. Oh, we were so happy! Then, collectively, we shouted, “No! The babies!” We scrambled to get them before the bears did. How nice it had seemed at first, to leave the babes outside on the porch in the sun while we tinkered! And then, fast as you knew it, the babes were gone. // I should say, none of the folks in that kitchen were anyone I recognize from real life, and I don’t know to whom the babies belonged. Yes, you were there sometimes, but you were not in the kitchen. And, OK, my old supervisor was there, but he also was not in the kitchen. My herpes was in the kitchen. You were very forgiving about that. // OK, listen. The bears devouring babies is not the main event here, but that is how I will present the dream to people. “What a bizarre dream about bears and babies I had last night!” No, the real issue worth exploring here is that I dreamed, for the third time this year, that I cheated on you with my old supervisor, and in this dream he gave me herpes. He never gave me herpes in any of the other dreams, or in real life. // I hate these dreams. They come up again and again and they usually coincide with waking-life self-loathing, or hallucinations of bugs on my walls, even though this is a new apartment with lots of space and natural light. The night before this dream I dreamed you were avoiding my texts because you wanted to break up. The day in between these dreams, you bought me breakfast and told me my writing felt like sermons and prayers. “It is the writing of somebody being hugged and shaking their fist at the same time.” The day before that day you sat on the floor rolling a little wooden ram on wheels back and forth across the carpet for my cat to chase and you said you were bored. “Bored of me?” I asked. “No! Just in general.” “I want to be a good hostess,” I said. // I am leaving my therapist, whom I have been seeing for two years. I told him I am leaving him because I think I would benefit from a female therapist. In reality, I am leaving him because whenever I tell him about my dreams he tries to tell me what they mean instead of letting me figure it out. I told him I dreamed of a golden dove that breathed fire and barked like a dog, and after it saw me it began stalking me. He interrupted: “Stalking…stocking?” “What?” I asked. “Like socks. Tights. Is there an association there?” “I have never,” I said, “referred to socks as stockings in my entire life.” Also, whenever I say I think I might need a female therapist, he says, “Nobody will ever understand you completely,” or “You don’t trust me. That is why you are unhappy,” or “You are trying to hurt me.” Then I ask myself, “Am I trying to hurt Timothy?” And the answer is: “Maybe!” // Next week, I will meet my new female therapist. I wonder what she will be like. // In every dream I have of being with my supervisor again, I am not dating you, or I don’t know I am dating you, until after the indiscretion has happened and I go, “My god, what have I done?” These dreams make me feel as if I could break your heart at any moment, irrevocably. And I suppose that I could. // In my last dream about being with my supervisor I was naked in his apartment making potatoes, which Timothy and I agreed was the least sexy food of all. // Of course, I never saw my supervisor’s apartment. He would never let me. For obvious reasons, in hindsight. // When I was a girl I read in the Bible that there is one sin the Lord will never forgive, and that is cursing the Holy Spirit. I’d sit in the backseat of my mother’s car at lights or in parking lots and play a game with myself: if I could not last an entire minute without blinking, I would curse the Holy Spirit and be damned. If I could not hold my breath for two minutes, I would curse the Holy Spirit and be damned. // In waking life, if I were to cheat on you, I am confident you would not forgive, nor would I want you to. // The more Timothy tells me to trust him, the less I trust him. // The thing is that in real life I never had penetrative sex with my supervisor. As if the distinction matters. But when I ended things, after Timothy had given me new self-confidence, my supervisor said, “Why are you upset? We never even had sex.” // I envision myself walking around with a little egg balanced on my head. One wrong move, and it will roll. // The more Timothy accuses me of wanting to hurt him, the more I want to hurt him. // I have never had a baby, but sometimes mothers speak or write about having terrifying visions of taking scissors to their baby’s throats, or dropping their babies down a well, and I think, “I get that, I understand.” // When I learned, months after ending things, that my supervisor wasn’t single, I yelled at him. Again, he said, “We never even had sex.” // You want to know what it was like, being involved with him? It was godawful. He had shark eyes. I was new in town, and lonely. I worked the late shift. My roommate back then didn’t know how to take care of Marigold, her giant, anxious dog, and she would leave me to take care of Marigold, but sometimes Marigold would piss on the living room rug and sofa, and no matter how you cleaned that tiny stinking apartment, it was still tiny and stinking. I spent all my time in my bed, under the centipedes that lived in the drop ceiling. I began seeing Timothy, who said, “Bed is for two things: sex and sleeping. Don’t eat dinner in there.” But I would. And my supervisor would come over and that tiny stinking apartment would be tiny and stinking, and he would come into my tiny bedroom and lie with me and he would tell me I didn’t want to belong to anybody. // Around this time, I dreamed I stopped at a convenience store in the mountains, by the highway. The man who ran the store invited me to try his special recipe, which was human blood in plastic cups. I wanted him to like me, so I drank the blood and said, “Thank you.” Then he wet himself. // Another reason I want a new therapist is because I think Timothy doesn’t know enough. Which is fair, because he’s technically still a student. Just before our last session I dreamed I had a small daughter who, rather than say “Me too” in agreement with another person, would say “Me three.” And it was considered cute, the way babies get hooked on saying dumb things when they’re learning. My brother used to point at motorcycles and say “Mommacackle! Mommacackle!” But what was actually happening in the dream was this little girl was acknowledging the presence of a third entity. A ghost, a demon, a shadow self—I never knew. I just know the mother in the dream was a little sad. When I told Timothy about this dream in our very last session, which we both knew was the last session, he said, “Jung writes of ‘the third.’” And I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He was always doing that, interjecting with a vague textbook statement without context. I said, “Or Jesus on the road to Emmaus.” Remote therapy afforded me the ability to pull up my bedside Eliot: “‘Who is that third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you.’” I was being obnoxious, and maybe a little aggressive. I didn’t care. “Or Peter Pan’s shadow,” I added, “sneaking around independent of its owner.” He only said, “Increasingly, you are the mother in your dreams, and not the child.” I don’t know if that’s right, but it sounded nice. It sounded like progress.

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Fortune Teller

In the theater, which is really a gymnasium, the fortune teller and his participant sit at a table in front of a curtain. The crowd watches and chatters. I stand offstage and fidget: though the fortune teller is young he is gray and bony and barely there and I become obsessed with wanting to know

that he is OK. He moves his hands around and the oblivious participant keeps slapping himself on the thigh and laughing “You’re so skinny! You’re so skinny!” The fortune teller makes his pronouncement like a trombone underwater and then there is the clapping. I follow the teller off the stage saying “Are you all right? Have you eaten enough? Are you sick? Are you being taken advantage of? Are you in danger of ending your life?” but he doesn’t hear me or he ignores me and he slips into the men’s restroom which is really a locker room and so I leave the auditorium. I don’t know what the future holds. // Everyone pours murmuring into the velvet corridor with the stars on the ceiling and at the end of the corridor are Joe my brother and Joe my friend. They call to me, they have been waiting under the stars, but I do not want to speak to Joe my friend because he is not dead even though he is supposed to be. I see him in the magazines. They still snap up his art without knowing that he is supposed to be dead, and he still has many friends who do not know that he is supposed to be dead. I wonder what they would say if I told them “Hear me, there is a traitor in your midst! This man you love promised me he would die.” When friend Joe was dying my father spat from the end of the table, “Maybe he is not actually dying, maybe he only wants A T T E N T I O N” and I screamed at him because I wanted Joe to be dying, because he said he was dying, and I was so haggard from the bus rides from city to city, and I was so haggard from the praying, and I was so haggard from the keeping tabs, and from the trying to get him to eat, and from the loneliness, and from the cruelty. My father was right and how smug was he when Joe was not dying! It is my family’s right to trust no one but God. When friend Joe was dying my mother said, “Joe has heard the Word and does not believe; when he dies, his soul will be condemned.” // I slide down the railing in my black dress without looking at the Joes and I run to the women’s restroom hoping they will not follow me. Friend Joe stays where he is, from shame or from indifference, but brother Joe follows me down the stairs and into the restroom and yells at me, “Show yourself and forgive!” I close the stall door but he kicks it in and tells me I must be gentle. // I am awake. // My sister said “What our father’s rage meant was, I lived this too once. A pain foretold that was replaced by a pain unforetold.” How shameful, how cruel, to be sad a man lives! Friend Joe, hear this pronouncement: You are deader by being alive. For months, I became you. I burned the soles of my shoes for you. I cried to think of you alone in the woods at night, confused from appetite, and from the messenger in your skull. And so we rushed to you, we brought you kindling—but when we found you, you sat beside a fire already inflamed, in the heart of the inky forest. // I heard your word and I believed it. Did you love me at all? The answer comes: a muted rumble.

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Lamb’s Ear

I think about what I would leave my children if I had any: lessons in self- comfort, habits to help them breathe, a prayer, a walk, picking up lamb’s ear by the side of the road. After a heavy rain the stalks bow down but when they dry they stand up again. I carry an ear in my fingers and stroke it as I walk. // Once as a child I heard the Lord say to me My frightened little lamb. Most of my beliefs have left me but I hold onto that. But how can you explain to a therapist who wants to know if you’ve ever heard the voice of someone who is not there that yes you have but this is different? When the therapist says, “So it was the result of sleep deprivation, desperation, sadness, loneliness,” I say, “I guess,” but what I’m really thinking is, How do you expect to help me if you don’t believe what I’m telling you? If we’re talking about life and death here, you should know that I don’t want to live in a world where I don’t now and then hear the voice of God.

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Delphi Falls

The distant drumming of water
grew to pounding thunder
as we drew closer to the falls.
We edged nearer on the scrabble path,
plunged into refrigerated shade
under the tuck of the cliff. My sister and I
leaned in to hear our mother’s stories, our voices
raised above the din of the oracle’s timpani,
her white hair misted dark
as she recalled her younger day, dancing
square and round there, in the nutbrown
pavilion overlooking the gorge.
We three turned silent
as we watched the bridal veil
fan across the granite.

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Lunar Triad

I.

I’ve read motorcycle crashes surge
during supermoons—imagine
the lone biker on the road, wrapped
in the night sky, eyes drawn inexorably up
by the bright orb in its perigee, filling
the horizon, momentarily mesmerized
as the bike skids into the rails. We live
beneath a spell of light and shadow, though
its spectacle casts its net, captures us,
only under extraordinary circumstances.

II.

Early January’s Wolf Moon
tried to overshadow the later moon,
called her Snow in a mighty swallow.
But Snow’s fullness eclipsed
the Wolf’s howl, slipped entirely inside
Earth’s umbral shade, bled red
in the crushing jaws of atmosphere’s
bending light, transformed herself
into Blood Moon: warrior victorious.

III.

O late January moon, who
do you want to be? Siren, shadow, beacon,
or bloodied? Your rare second appearance
paints you blue, your blueness
the end of a melancholy year,
a wash of sadness across a calendar
of loss passed in January last. Blue
flashes neon, a jazz saxophone’s notes
rising in wisps, a mournful ode
to those I won’t forget.

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Wound City Diptych

I.

At night, I move among the beds.
In this city, the streets are corridors branching

into alleys that run between bodies
wrapped in gauze. I speak this language

native to wounds: friable, purulent, granulating, necrotic.
We say serous and mean straw-colored. We agree this

drainage indicates healing. Serosanguinous, still a fine rosé.
At the foot of each parked bed, I listen to report

from the last shift, streetlights turned as low
as our whispers, ventilator breaths bellow

in pre-set rhythms. Mostly women, wearing sunny yellow
scrubs, gather at the station, sing-song voices

rise and fall, jazz syncopated with chirping monitors.
Code Red cuts in on the PA system overhead.

We mix morphine with gallows humor. We say,
I love the smell of blood in the morning. The circle

disperses with dressing kits, saline flushes,
IV lines free of air bubbles. We piggyback narcotics

in the main line, wait for heart rates to drop,
and travel with our patients to the most exquisite

locations. Anywhere but here. We deep breathe,
count down together while we unwrap.

II.

In this land, I am an expert. I know Pseudomonas
by its sweet but putrid smell, note labored breathing

from across the room. I’ve cauterized bleeders with a touch
of silver nitrate, made a study of the subtle color

shifts from air hunger. I’ve held hands with patients
who’ve just received a terminal diagnosis.

Great truths were made intimate in the yawning
chest cavity where I held rib-spreaders. Flesh and blood,

yes, but also animating spirit. Bodies that turn to wax
at the moment of death. In this land, I’ve seen the dead

come back to life—a young boy mid brain-death
protocol, his hypothermic corpse flooded warm.
Decades after I’ve left the old neighborhood,

I stand on every corner, waiting in the shadows:
I map the bloodstains remaining on my clothes.

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content warning for self-harm

The Gauntlet

Once, our world was                                                             a field of undetonated mines

               probable explosions                    when our feet swung over morning’s edge

   Clods of mud raining                                                         stuck in the muck

Once, every mammal was predator                                             fanged and clawed

                              We wrestled wild animals                    moved in slow-motion

                                             each clash       stopped

                                                                                          then replayed in technicolor splashes

Once, we carved our arms                                                                with sharp knives

                                    Blood-scores: a tally of stripes    to feed the deep hole in our souls

      Earth People shake their heads                                                don’t get the rattle

               We had long since switched

                              water for Beaujolais                                Wild Turkey or bitter hops

Once, we called the magician behind the counter

                                                                                          Our Savior of the Corner Liquor Store

               Our skin, once the ashtray                   of extinguished cigarettes

                              Cognac, elegant elixir                             Dexedrine, slimming smarts

                              Our bodies dwindled, our thoughts soared

                                                                                                                        Until they didn’t.

                              Once, we were the dregs, the drags, the dreaded.

                                                                                                         Scraped dogshit from a shoe—

                              That was us, once

                                             before we passed through the smoke-filled gauntlet

                                                            and pulled our aluminum folding chairs

                                                                                          into a circle.

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