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Story takes her skin. Story takes her bones. She finds her toes and her fingertips. When she speaks, like salmon running, the dead and the living converge. The river of memory rocks the hunger of claws and tongues. Electricity swallows itself back through its double-prod picana, bullets dislodge themselves from their chore of destroying the same day over and over again, and from the caverns of fear and revision, skin resurrects the skin. Each sentence closes in like the crawl of split skin sealing its red, wet avulsion. The enormity of the pending night scares the seven assassins on trial. They understand that in hell, they will eat their own throats.

I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me But I resisted for fear she'd think it strange I am very lonely Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness No other human had before to my ears And told me that I was no good Well maybe he didn't mean that But that is what I heard When he told me my life was not worthwhile And my life's work the work of the elite. I say I want to save the world but really I want to write poems all day I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep, Write poems in my sleep Make my dreams poems Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes I want my face to be a poem I have just learned how to apply Eyeliner to the corners of my eyes to make them appear wide There is a romantic abandon in me always I want to feel the dread for others I can feel it through song Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few Like when he said I am no good I am no good Goodness is not the point anymore Holding on to things Now that's the point

Adriaen het Kint, dead prisoner, passes back through the eye of the needle into the wombed-shaped anatomy theater in a caul of umbra mortis, lo. Tho I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I wear a caul stitched by the needle through which a camel passed, like the condom passed through the drug mule, sperm through the pierced condom, a camera through a heart.  Just as the face of every Dutchman is lit by a flashbulb conceived two hundred years in the future, Adriaen het Kint now lifts a flayed hand to demonstrate how to put the god back together once he’s been dismembered and scattered among the reeds. Adriaen het Kint, shall we gather at the river to scoop up the disjecta membra? How, with flayed hand, shall we pluck the white lyre that rides the black thorax of the zika mosquito, resplendent in her viral robes? She is a messenger to all nations as she lowers her improbable proboscis into the human layer and vomits an inky toxin from the Greek for arrow ink for arrow, an arrow that sinks its bleat into the alien chordata so that the future contracts into itself, slinks off, slips further down the drain, sinks further down the wall outside the clinic, the infected needle blocking the stoma of the future with a crusty pus. The sleeper juts a canine up through the gum without meaning to, and an answering moon orbiting Jupiter winks back a salt signature, betrays a vein of water asleep beneath the frozen strata whereunto a white-clad nurse or rover soon will sink a toothed cannula to draw it off How complete ly she circumvents the eye of the needle how completely she bypasses that camel-route to Heaven as she drains away for human use the plasma and the data

Everything was the apple and the glass of tea. The mountain, the mold, the apron on the grandmother— the neck of a brown baby holding its tiny head to get rid of the black bees. This is the end of a bad century, the opening of a door that was never built into the chest. A volume of loud wires coming out of the ground. My grandfather rising from fifty-four years of death to see me. The instrument carved out of bone. A lock of hair from a famous seventeenth-century poet. The disintegrating bible wishing it was another book. A hanging arm sweeping the water out of the way. My memory of flying through the tunnel that came out of nowhere. A dog with wings and a cat with magic. The sentiment and the sweat. The blue chest of the working man and the bare ankle of a young girl who drank beer. The shadow of a young boy named Carlos and the bare shoulders of a young girl who whispered. The hunger of an older boy named José. The hard work of a brother named Ramón with a closeness and a disagreement among them. A torn pair of work pants and a stiff and muddy pair of gloves. A pocket with two dollars crumbled inside. A bare foot rubbing the bare back of a young girl. The fourth can of beer. The farmhouse that belonged to the family and the chickens that were killed for food. The cactus garden that killed two men when they fell in and the pieces of green cactus that made them dream. The green juice that started the earthquake, the crushed flesh of cactus on their tongues and its swelling that made them dream. A garden hose washing away the blood. The sparrow hovering over the trash can and the back alley stinking of dog shit and drunken men. Falling feathers interpreted for what they bring. A church next door full of sermons and howling black faces. The corner of the house where a young boy went to hide. A single strand of hair found in a high school yearbook, the forgotten idea that hiding it in there would lead to a different life. The piano wounded by stones falling out of the cottonwood. The willow tree spreading over the entire front yard and the tiny white balls of gum that fell out of it one day. The smell of shadows, trains, humor, tumbleweeds, ice, empty parking lots, one or two torn knees, a baseball glove, the first guy to cross the finish line, the fear, the dread and the skill of escaping so no one would start a list of smells. Fear melted the memory of a lost boy. The old house, the rosary around the neck, the crushed dog in the road— a sudden calling from behind to warn him to come in and be still. Who recalls how this ended when the men built their ships and invaded to change the outcome? The right to cry out and wait a whole century. The embers, the lone piano, the oil lamps damaged by a dream. The ambition in the spine. Who will insist on tapping the window to show how easy it is to delay the next hundred years?

In the damp sick In the dough In the chewed on chew of faces of expensive car owner faces chewed ons of the world: I do not fetishize the truth I poke around Holding my bland sandwich in my non-dominant hand, I think what could be worse, I think what could be as bad? To feel the thing you want to feel and not to care To be a wet road in the dark I'd like to thank Toyota, like to thank my parents, esthetician Ritalin Clonazepam internet TV weed my beautiful dresses

From raindrenched Homeland into a well: the upturned animal was mine by law and outside the tunnel, him again! Everywhere I turned the children ran between. “Loose dogs!” he roared. I remember one sequence: a gulf in his thinking meant swim as fast as you can. But it was winter and the water was closed. The mouths of the children were sealed with ice. After all, we were swimming in emotion, not water. “Shut up! you Father!” I shouted over my shoulder. Racing, but not spent, my mind went, “It isn’t good that the human being is all I have to go by .... It isn’t good that I know who I love but not who I trust .... It isn’t good that I can run to a priest but not to a plane .... I lost my way exactly like this.” Inverted tunnel of the self. Throat or genital search for the self. Light that goes on in the self when the eyes are shut. Uniformity impossible in the psyche’s pre-self like a day never spent, or how the unseen can make itself felt. It was as if a boy was calling from the end of a long island. Docks were vertical and warlike. I would be on one side of my bed like a mother who can tell she’s a comfort because she’s called Mother. Still, we both would be able to see the edge of the problem. It’s true that the person is also a thing. When you are running you know the texture. I was clawing at the palm of one hand and brushing up my blues with the other. A man who wore his boxers at night remarked that my daughter was tired. He had nothing to do with anything. Ahead was the one with magnified eyes and historical data to last. Know-how and the hysteria to accomplish his whole life. It was horrible what we would do for peace. We told him the story of the suffering he made us feel with the ingratiating stoop of those who came second in the world.

1 Out the barred window sandbags in a sagging wall surround the guard post where a soldier half-hidden by the flag holds his rifle on his knees and looks a little lost. It’s Sunday and quiet, the traffic noise off aways, the sea behind the post flat as the tarps pulled tight over the troop trucks. Somewhere down the hall soldiers are being boys, telling some joke in Arabic in which I’m pretty sure I hear the word “zubrak”: I walk between shelves loaded with canned rations, the cool expiring slowly in the high-ceilinged room while a pinned-up PSYOPS leaflet declares, If you sleep in a cemetery,you’re bound to have nightmares. 2 No one sees the doll’s decapitated head small and neat in rubble. Never tired or sleepy, the head is its own country obstinately surviving, the pupil of   its one eye peering through the glass’s pure transparency. And a few feet away lie its slim, plastic, long-legged thighs almost like an obscenity the eye watches over — no one in the street, nothing but bolt-marks from tank-treads scarring the concrete to give any of   it drama — and what about the way the lips’ frozen smirk keeps daring me to touch the sexless V between the thighs staring up at me? 3 The barracks dissolve into a reef   of   rubble in the fog. On either side of the road, crater after crater flashes with glints of glass, plastic bags, a chair leg clinging to a dismembered chair. The TV station, the power stacks thrusting up through mist, the black-bearded posters and banners strung across the streets lead to an absolute nowhere: all that’s left in the emptied town after the army pulled out are PSYOPS leaflets fluttering up around the car that winds down the coast road deeper into mist, headlights probing like instruments in a wound they illuminate the more they violate.

seventy wingbeats per second vagaries of vegetation, rosy anticipation I turn the page without reading essence of accident what is the strongest motive what drives the solar wind time’s not so old, dating only from the creation New England has cooled significantly, icy core with a sooty coating this ice hard to break—the brain will have to wait catharsis of the vulture, obligatory vespers a bat, painted the color of joy, head downward because the brain is heavy I put on music but don’t always listen whether magma could rise to where tones reach audible frequencies modest success with a late parasitic moth we will soon find out if all this is true sudden drain on the heart, more doubt, the big melt: anything gone is replaced

The mower alone saw from the median the cloud come over the mountain down to trawl the valley like a whale and the swifts like water passing through her white baleen. The mower alone patrolling the haw with the hawks saw from the median the cloud come over the mountain to swallow where the sky had been and where the town had been pinned by steeples and hummed electric hubris. For everyone else on either side of the narrow the cloud was only a minute of a single verse because the highway treats the blues as all the same as if Bentonia were Sunflower County but the land between the lanes even while under the blades sees the power in every cloud and hears each song spiral out of an old familiar tune just so to devour our hearts.

In the middle of December to start over to assume again an order at the end of wonder to conjure and then to keep slow dirty sleet within its streetlight