Alice Fulton

For your birthday, I’m learning to pop champagne corks with a cossack sword when all you asked for was world peace. I’m actioning the deliverables to wish you many happy returns of the ecstasies that are imminent when all you requested was a contentment so quiet it’s inaudible. Remember when I gave you a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle? When all you desired was to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. And when you said I gave you what I wanted myself  I gave you what I didn’t want: gift certificates to spas that wax hearts, a blind date with the inventor of friction. Today I bring an actual-size sunrise and many glow words from the inmates of  this late-stage civilization who navigate in your slipstream and to whom you say keep rowing. When you were born you were placed on a small throne on castors while the Stop Shopping Choir sang hosannas, a defining moment. People noticed something nascent about you that persists in your fondness for the first person primordial. You own it. You know why voices die in throats and trees struggle in silence: the deepest trauma cannot spare a sound. If you meet a mystery you do not disturb it with little picks and suction things. You say the shape of  happiness is too fine for capture spray, and it is well to remember the days when plastic boxes snapping shut were all that women had to celebrate. Yet it is not seditious to rebel against a culture like circus music, so cheerful we’d need a cadaver tendon to fix it. That’s what you say. You are hard to fathom as a guttering compass that is neither hush nor howl. I’m thinking of  the time you placed an Aeolian harp in the window, took me by the notebook, and asked me to consider why turkeys bob their heads when they walk and geese don’t though they both waddle. You watched my ethereality show and commiserated when they adorned my rival in a deconsecrated rosary bead bikini and send her to St. Barts while I was remaindered to an orange jumpsuit organ-swiping plot. That century I was betrayed by a dedicated icemaker, you burned a feather pen to revive me. You tried my device that prevents accidental workplace nudity, vetted its magnetic veils, and at Christmas sent fruitcake privacy filters. Remember when I was dismissed as overness consultant? How you resigned in solidarity and grew a sky-colored flower since I could not be satisfied with the sky itself? You gave me a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle and advised me to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. If  I critiqued the treasure revealer you said do not test its softness against your cheek. Today I raise my glass of wheat grass and atmospheric information to wish you every beyond of  thought in which to consider all that is majorly good. I won’t sing Happy Birthday, a song so overdetermined it sounds bereaved. I’ll sing of  passions that persist in the Elysian Fields. Though shackled to a boulder at the moment, I’m unpacking boxes from your last move, wrapping the contents in recycled moonlight and presenting them to you as objects exactly forgotten and largely what you wanted. I nerve myself  for the encounter.

From the guts of the house, I hear my mother crying for her mother and wish I understood the principles of tranquility. How to rest the mind on a likeness of a blast furnace framed in formica by anon. A photo of lounge chairs with folded tartan lap robes. An untitled typology of industrial parks. The gentle interface of yawn and nature. It would soothe us. It would soothe us. We would be soothed by that slow looking with a limited truth value. See how the realtor’s lens makes everything look larger and there’s so much glare the floor looks wow under the smartificial xmas tree. After studying Comparative Reality I began Die Polyvinylchloride Tannenbaumserie. Turn off that tiny tasteful star, I commanded. While you’re alive there’s no time for minor amazements. Turn off the sallow pages of your paralegal pad. I don’t need a light to think of you. I don’t need a god to pray. Some things are glow alone. I said one thing you said you remembered I said. Was it will you be my trophy friend? Or are you someone else’s difficult person? I mean the more myself I become the less intelligible I seem to otters. I know what you mean you said. It’s like the time I was compelled to speak on hedonism to the monks and nuns. Did I say most religion is devotional expediency? Or religion doesn’t worry about being religious, its wisdom corrupted by its brilliance as light passing near the sun is deflected in its path. Deep in its caprices, the whole body thinks it’s understood. To think otterwise is isolating. When I said hedonism stressed cheerfulness, there were disappointed groans. Look, I’m sorry I gave you an ornament shaped like a hollow look. I liked its trinket brightness. Just don’t give me a water tower dressed up as a church steeple or one of those silly thunderstorms that hang around volcanoes. See how those teardrop lights make every object jump? The memory does. You made me love. Was it exile in honey is still exile? Am I the fire or just another flame? Please sell me an indulgence, I begged a monk. And tell me what creature, what peril, could craft that sound that night dropped like a nubile sliver in my ear. There is no freedom of silence when morture forces us to speak from organs other than the heart. It was something about love. A far cry. It was come to me unmediated, go to god lengths. In great things, the attempt alone is sufficient. I think this ’cause I’m finite. That’s an understanding to which reason can only aspire though an entire speech community labored for generations to say it in a fair hand clearly dated and scented with lavender. My one and only only a crass color orgy will see us through the dusk ahead, the months gray as donkey. See how it grows its own cross of fur and bears it on its back? I showed you that.

Everyone's spending Christmas Eve adrift in the corporal skirmish, mixing up the darks with the lights, fending with elbows and dirty looks. Wet wool and down crowd the air. Where are the stars, pristine as great ideas? Behind clouds the heavens saturate with luminous dust, shuttles wearing halos of earthdirt, light pollution from jets fired to keep things on course. Boys rickrack a ball off floor and ceiling past the table tree bubbling with giveaway ornaments from Burger King and lights that manage an occasional lackadaisical flash. Showstoppers: everyone looks every time and keeps looking to make sure it happened. The double frontloaders are going like abstract TVs. And the program is important: all about the boggling sullied lives we'd like to hide. But this is no place to do so, where known and unknown perverts come to pirate underpants and the innocent clutch their Cheer and Shout. The rules are posted: only the toughest habiliments, the superego of raiment can take such agitation. And only the poor are invited to endure the sneezy powders and clean resentment. Imagine a museum installation— 200 hypnotic washers stuffed with somersaulting cloth. Critics could rise to the challenge, their statements settling like coats of gold and silver chain mail over each machine: "These Speed Queen pieces thrust ahead of art- for-art's sake to confront us with a realism of socio-political magnitude. The vortex-like movement of pattern, color, and texture infuses these works with an abundance of unconscious bliss. The soft forms circulate with vigor across the screens. The viewer is not privy to the cause of dirt though one is witness to the dirt's ablutions. The point is we are not impeccable." Everyone would be happy to know that! And so we're forced to scoop and pour a fine white empathy over the hairy flannels, snaggy nylons, the glass front that gives forth this light industry, the silly tree and jingles about blue and white Christmases, chestnuts, sleighbells, just as snow settles on every unsequestered thing: from blistered gum - ball machines, clumsy bumpers, crepuscular theaters with sticky floors, to ramshackle mansions choked with smiling china animals where light shakes itself out from TVs and old women frail as walking sticks sweep their stoops at eight a.m. Just as snow makes the less than impeccable classical, stroking the merely drab or passing, quickly or slowly, so we can count only on its leaving, teaching liquidity to what seems solid.

it befalls us. an exchanged glance, reflective spasm. Is it a fantastically unlaminated question set in flesh or valentine that wears the air as its apparel? If you cut a heart from parchment, is it still a heart? A nontrivial knot, where turns of every gradient may kiss and tell. Does the vessel have edges? Or is it all connectedness, an embedding to be stretched or bent. Imagine being simultaneously alive, bound in both directions with a bow! Is it diachronic, a phenomenon that changes over time? Without ardor theory suffers. That’s why I’m stuck on you with wanton glue, per- severing, styling something blobbish and macabre into something pointed, neat. Love is a gift that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue. Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you. say it quivers rather than contracts, fluttery with ruptions. Doctors call it holiday heart. Valentine’s Day — named for a saint whose head is venerated in Rome — is also National Organ Donor Day, okay? Give anatomical dark chocolates infused with true invariance. With smoked salt pepper and beau- jolais in a plain brown box embellished with praises in a romance language in your hand. Please none cosseted in plush like the stuff inside a coffin. I’m just praying. Can you find a pulse or dry needle trigger point? Just saying this fudge has tears in it. Someone’s been sweating over this. Listen, Mr. Stethoscope, I’m at the end of my hope. Still, I’ll grow another blossom for that blossom-crowned skull. some give vinegar valentines. no pillow words. Just floppy organ thistleburr. Froot Loops and craft wire fashioned on a snarky jig: “To My Pocket Prince.” “By Bitch Possessed.” Tough tits, isn’t it? Some call it a day marked by commodified flowers, obligation chocolate. Some live on clinical sprinkles, asking where’s the feast. The carnelian pin with openwork components that let you see its self-pleasuring mechanism, storm hormones, and single pulsing vein. What even is it? Here’s the thing. A gift cannot be cynical unless the giver is. I will pay you to test this for me. Its closets vast with steadfastness at best at least for me surpass all other closets in the flesh. I’m sending this from my memory foam head. Valentines intensify the surface, heart the depths.

There are many opportunities here for unrequited friendship, the offer letter said. All you need is a chain saw and die grinder. In this spirit I force my eyes across your message, revisiting that due diligence tone you do so well. I’m searching for some whispered twist or shout, but all emotion’s leveled, the way a child will draw a snowman and a mansion the same size. What is a dedicated icemaker dedicated to? Do you really think those shades you wear above your head will keep the sun out of  your mind? Rainbows stick to any abject object. That’s why I’m wearing that same old funky dress. When you kissed my forehead it felt like the priest’s thumbscrew touch rubbing in the dust- thou-art Ash Wednesday smudge. I’ve learned the dance instructor’s expository gestures. Now I’m learning tangos to be danced alone. While comrades buff officious cases barfed from their brains — eight parts moon venom one part nose waste — I ask can mine be personally engraved? I’m living in a please state, smarming how I’ve long admired your hardscape of artists morphed to small appliances. That being said, I’m having issues. Do you really think that scarf  will keep your snowman warm?

I find it helpful to imagine writing in a blizzard with every inscription designed to prevent snow crystals from drifting in. Avoid the hive mind. Go fly a kite, raise a stained glass window in the sky. It’s the opposite of making love to drudgery, what I do for a dying. Remove the bitter sediment trapped in the brewer. It will be new whether you make it new or not. It will be full of neo- shadows. Full of then— both past and next, iridescent with suspense. Remember time is not the treasure revealer. More a midge larva creeping through a waterfall releasing suction feet. The curiosity rover lands on Mars! New is a hooligan. It breaks the reckoning frame and rests in pieces. Let me collect its dna from the tears on your desk.

The city had such pretty clotheslines. Women aired their intimate apparel in the emery haze: membranes of lingerie— pearl, ruby, copper slips— their somehow intestinal quivering in the wind. And Freihofer’s spread the chaste, apron scent of baking, a sensual net over a few yards of North Troy. The city had Niagara Mohawk bearing down with power and light and members of the Local shifting on the line. They worked on fabrics made from wood and acid, synthetics that won’t vent. They pieced the tropics into housecoats when big prints were the rage. Dacron gardens twisted on the line over lots of Queen Anne’s lace. Sackdresses dyed the sun as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass against the leading of the tenements, the warehouse holding medical supplies. I waited for my bus by that window of trusses in Caucasian beige, trying to forget the pathological inside. I was thinking of being alive. I was waiting to open the amber envelopes of mail at home. Just as food service workers, counter women, maybe my Aunt Fran, waited to undo their perms from the delicate insect meshes required by The Board of Health. Aunt Alice wasn’t on this route. She made brushes and plastics at Tek Hughes— milk crates of orange industrial lace the cartons could drip through. Once we boarded, the girls from Behr-Manning put their veins up and sawed their nails to dust on files from the plant. All day, they made abrasives. Garnet paper. Yes, and rags covered with crushed gems called garnet cloth. It was dusk—when aunts and mothers formed their larval curls and wrapped their heads in thick brown webs. It was yesterday—twenty years after my father’s death, I found something he had kept. A packet of lightning- cut sanding discs, still sealed. I guess he meant to open the finish, strip the paint stalled on some grain and groom the primal gold. The discs are the rough size of those cookies the franchises call Homestyle and label Best Before. The old cellophane was tough. But I ripped until I touched their harsh done crust.

You sway like a crane to the tunes of tossed stones. I am what you made to live in from what you had: hair matted as kelp, bad schools. Oh, you will never know me. I wave and you go on playing in the clouds boys clap from erasers. I am the pebble you tossed on the chalked space and war- danced toward, one-leg two-leg, arms treading air. In this, your future, waves rechristen the sea after its tiny jeweled lives that hiss “Us Us” to the shore all day. Where’s the kid called Kateydid? the moonfaced Kewpiedoll? The excitable pouting Zookie? The somber O-Be-Joyful? Lost girl, playing hopscotch, I will do what you could. Name of father, son, ghost. Cross my heart and hope. While the sea’s jewels build shells and shells change to chalk and chalk to loam and gold wheat grows where oceans teetered.

a face stares back. across the hostile centuries. add a twist — delicious. and never feel a thing. commercial — added stretch to every gesture. how it is made. I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise. I’d be all give. Let me put it like this== in the nocturnal, recessed bed== of nettles. resembles the bird it will fly into. Right now I’m trying to open wide. she turns to a tree. she would be neither-nor. smoky field. that is space. the bride. the exdream — the world gone into god again? the night. the white between the ink. the white navel — I notice — in the O. their harsh done crust. then some inbetween? to a nuptial lace. to ever dwell again. to mask the screen in dumb expanse. touch in linen walls. Turn — her — loose — What — does not console? who could bear to save her. yes, god her saurian voice into the ground.

Chandelier too full of brilliance to be indolent. Your prisms enunciate the light and don’t need rain to break it into rainbows. Snow with six crutches in each crystal. Your livery your glitter, your purring made visible. Only inanimate things can sparkle without sweat. My spinet, the threat of music in its depths and miniature busts of men composers carved of time on top. The hollow bench held sheet music. Sing me Charm Gets In Your Eyes. I hear you best when undistracted by your body. In headspace technology, where flowers are living in glass globes, their fragrance vivisected. Anything that blooms that long will seem inanimate. Heaven. Grief like the sea. Keeps going. Over the same wrought ground. The whole spent moan. Praise dies in my throat or in the spooky rift between itself and its intended. Like a wish- bone breaking. The little crutch inside is not a toy. There is no night asylum. A restless bed, a haunt preserve, a blanket rough as sailcloth. But sing me, was it kind snow sometimes? With true divided lights and nothing flawed about it? If song goes wrong, be dancerly. Dance me, at what point does west turn to east as it spins? I’ve never understood. Perspective. How charm gets to yes. Dance me Exile and the Queendom, by request. It is a ferocious thing to have your body as your instrument. Glove over glove, let your dance express what I’ve been creeping like a vein of sweat through a vastness of. This tune with mountains tied inside and many silent letters can be read as trackers scan the spaces between toes and birders read the rustle left by birds. As any mammal in its private purr hole knows, the little crutch inside is not a crutch. More a sort of steeple. Neither silver to be chased nor gold to be beaten. You were==you are more than ever like that too. Noon upon noon, you customize this solitude with spires that want nothing from me and rise with no objective as everything does when happy.