I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.
Ingeborg Bachmann
She put the stones inside her vagina.
. She put the stones inside her vagina. One by one she put the small red stones inside her vagina. The stone was smooth and gray and round. She parted her lips and slid the smooth round gray stone inside her vagina. From a mouth the size of a button hole her cervix let blood from the endocervical canal to the ectocervix. The stones came out coated in sticky serum. She arranged the stones in the pattern of waves. One wave linked to another wave to another wave in net. She lay down on the dirt next to the waves and caught a fish casting the net up into the air around its blue and yellow body. She said the names of all the fishes she remembered. Roundhead galaxias, Lowland longjaw galaxias, Swan galaxias, Barred galaxias, Gollum galaxias, Clarence galaxias, Bignose galaxias, Pedder galaxias, Longjawed galaxias, Dusky galaxias, Delta smelt, Canterbury mudfish, Northland mudfish. She is an archive and her mouth makes the shape of bubbles of data. Bubbles of data wait inside her. The warehouse is kept to the perfect temperature and the stainless steel filing cabinets filled with seeds slide in and out. Just beneath the surface of her skin the coolant is limited. The heart runs neither too hot nor too cold and keeps the refrigerant pumping smoothly. More horizontal work. There is a vast rubric of signals to keep sorted. Red green green yellow green blue yellow red red yellow yellow red yellow red green green blue yellow blue green green green yellow green red red green yellow green red green red green blue. Her song her beautiful song her orchestrated song her program her instruction her life code
And this is how it was:
. And this is how it was: I was nuzzling the bodies for warmth. Their soft bloated forms. Their tensed corpses still clinging to the rock. And the scientists crunched our tender bones underfoot. My daughter from last year, son from the year before. Soft blanket of black where I am both dead and alive. The two of us still able to fly from the rock we cling to. At first they seemed as if sleeping. Then one by one they lost the ability to let go. We had all clung there sick together. Our fine bones crunching underfoot at the entryway. The night forest circling. Black boat on black waves pulled out. And the blood is a kind of lapping. Black icicles clustered in the far crevice. And I send my signal. I send my signal through the chamber. I chime the grotto with my signal. My signal plays the passage. I reach out through the night and the bones and the scrub pine. I am looking for you. Looking for you. Looking for you. Calling. Attend. Tend. Tend. Attend. Tend. Tend. My other body. The one still able to let go. You were there with me — I saw you wriggle and flap among the corpses. As we carry the spores. As the scientists crunch the bones of last year’s daughter underfoot. You were with me. As brother and mother and father turned to black icicles hanging from the ceiling. Black icicles hanging from the ceiling. We hunted moths by the stream. You click click as I reach over the rimstone. We circle sometimes for hours. We careen through the night glen with the dense loss hoisted to our backs. And they sleep. And as they fade the boat of a million years slips into black water. And silent we go ice black
Decisions were made for her.
. Decisions were made for her. Decisions were made around her body. In the vicinity of her body. The copper pipes were scrubbed daily. Her manicured hand tied to the bed frame. She was a form of convenience. A cigarette dispenser. This was her body here in Nebraska. And behind the grid of logic was a grid of lasers. And behind the grid of lasers was a grid of words. And behind the grid of words was her agency in a safe deposit box. — Stand here while I touch you now walk forward. And she and the dog lock eyes. They are blue pools surrounded with white. Under the leg of the dining room table. After a lifetime of practicing evacuation she chooses to cut a slit and let the clouds of self escape. The scale is balanced with fingers on an embroidery needle and fingers on a Smith & Wesson. And it is this gesture of power we pantomime to ourselves over and over and over and over. Aripiprazole, Asenapine, Cariprazine, Clozapine, Lurasidone, Olanzapine, Quetiapine, Risperidone, Ziprasidone. She looks out from the branches of a tall pine tree over the graveyard. In the dark she plays an out of tune guitar. There are spirits in the house and she communicates with them. A mother in the apple cider vinegar a crone spider above the sink a tub where she bangs her head against the floorboards. A cove of red and green corals. A tidepool at dawn. Her body and the first rays of the sun. A room of blue light and a sleeping boy. Shivering ribbons sent over the horizon by the sun in anticipation before dawn. Elderberries. Sambuca. Staghorn. Prickly Ash. She awaits instruction from the scent of song in the body
His body had been spun from nettle fiber
. His body had been spun from nettle fiber and she clenched and released clenched and released it in the shallows by the bank of the river. Her feet weighted down by water sloshing in her canvas flats the encumbrance of walking over smooth stones slippery with algae. Someone was singing. She grabbed hold of a grapevine she braced herself on a boulder. The twisting stream a churning flirtation without lover or beloved. Laughter without love and mourning without grief. Here were all the signs and symbols of emotion with no locus of care. The river contained a library of sound as if all the words for emotion were here with no one to say them to and no one to hear them. It was this noise that she collected in her knotted bucket. And she poured it first over one shoulder then the other. The current was a notebook full of pages bound with spirals. When she washed herself electrons of emotion within her body became demagnetized as if a piece of steel responding to lodestone. There her feet were in the water rusty. The clay on her arms a white streambed cracking. Would these song-lives depart and eddy would they fade to threadbare vapor? Dragonflies mating on the surface of the water. Cicadas burrowed in the deep brush on the steep banks of the river. Mud up to her calves now. Thighs cold under wet skirt. She laid the mesh of his nettle body on the full flat belly of some rocks. A plume of yellow dye released somewhere upstream a current of saffron came toward her. Spanish moss in the tree branches crust around the corners of her mouth. Across the water a hiss of grief evaporating and coming undone
Gaia Thomas
Gaia Thomas is a disabled poet living in Alameda, CA. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, and will be featured in the upcoming sequel to Beauty is a Verb. Her chapbook, Aloft Alight, is available through Antiquated Future. She lives with her partner Caitlin, a geneticist, and a cat named Ru, who teaches with love.
