Amy Gerstler

The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while science was the music of our minds. Our sexual identities glittery as tinsel, we fretted about god's difficulties with intimacy, waiting for day's luster to fade so we could slip into something less venerated. Like sea anemones at high tide our minds snatched at whatever rushed by. Hush, hush, my love. These things happened a long time ago. You needn't be afraid of them, now.

Shook the box like a maraca. Stood around like a dope in my punch-colored dress, clutching your box to my chest. Opened your plastic receptacle, the size of a jack-in-the-box. But instead of gaudy stripes, your box is sober-suit blue, hymnal blue. Tasted them. You've gained a statue's flavor, like licking the pyramids, or kissing sandstone shoulders. I mean boulders. Remarked to your box: "REINCARNATION comes from roots meaning 'to be made flesh again.'" Stowed your box under my bed for a week to seed dreams in which you advise me. (This didn't work.) Opened the Babylonian Talmud at random. Read aloud to your gritty, gray-white powder: "There are three keys which the Holy One, blessed be He, has not entrusted into the hands of any messenger. These are: the key of rain, the key of birth, and the key of the resurrection of the dead." Worked myself up to watery eyes. Any intensity evaporated the instant I stopped reading. Tried to intuit your format, sift it from tides of void. Does shape play a role? My watch ticked in an exaggerated way. Closed my eyes, sent forth mental tendrils seeking the nothing of you. They curled back on them- selves, weaving around the wing chair, a dog's leg, a lamp stand, eventu- ally heading back toward the nothing of me.

Why so many senseless injuries? This one’s glass teeth knocked out. Eyes missing, or stuck open or closed. Limbs torn away. Sawdust dribbles onto the floor like an hourglass running out. Fingerless hands, noses chipped or bitten off. Many are bald or burnt. Some, we learn, are victims of torture or amateur surgery. Do dolls invite abuse, with their dent-able heads, those tight little painted-on or stitched-in grins? Hurt me, big botched being, they whine in a dialect only puritans and the frequently punished can hear. It’s what I was born for. I know my tiny white pantaloons and sheer underskirts incite violation.

lives on an island of last-ditch attempts and ancient consolations after the shipwreck she swam ashore near naked hands scraped raw on coral bra and panties soaked through sand in her teeth lapped by aftermath lying exhausted slowly approaching the condition of music he loved her stubborn luster sure they argued sometimes the word "argue" from Latin meaning to make clear while she sat quietly in the wing chair her eyes closed police ransacked his desk the note turned up in his pocket with the letter for his sister a baseball ticket stub receipts for two "taco platters" he whose soul was bound up with mine and part of a bookmark six weeks later she looks great thin and translucent a statue of justice sans blindfold she wears beautiful blouses now peach, gold, seedling green her complexion has never been better lushness nips at the heels of destruction tonight's lurid sunset's a cocktail of too many boozes she'd like to switch it off via remote control but there's no antidote for celestial events a frantic bat takes a wrong turn from the attic veers into her living room, bounces off walls a sick flut-thud each time it hits the suicide's wife pulls out her roasting pan climbs the kitchen counter teeters and grabs for twenty minutes at last claps on the lid walks her prize outside releases the creature into the trees where the lawn peters out where the idea that at death something is liberated can flap blackly away.

(Bubbling and spuming as if trying to talk under water, I address you thus:) Must I pretend not to love you (in your present bloom, your present perfection — soul encased in fleshly relevance) so you won’t believe me just another seabed denizen vying for your blessed attention? Some of us (but not you) are so loosely moored to our bodies we can barely walk a straight line, remaining (most days) only marginally conscious. We stagger and shudder as buckets of   blood or sperm or chocolate mousse or spittle or lymph or sludge sluice continually through us... I love the way you wear your face, how you ride this life. I delight in the sight of you, your nervous, inquisitive eyes, though I try to act otherwise. Being stoned out of thy mind only amps up thy fearsome brain wattage. Pardon my frontal offensive, dear chum. Forgive my word-churn, my drift, the ways this text message has gotten all frothy. How was it you became holy to me? Should I resist, furiously? Is this your true visage, shaken free, flashing glimpses of what underlies the world we can see?Do not forget me murmurs something nibbled by fish under the sea. After dark you’re quick-silvery, wet /slick /glistening. Don’t make me chase you, dragging my heavy caresses, a pair of awkward, serrated claws, hither and yon. Give me a swig of   whatever you’re drinking, to put me in tune with the cosmos’s relentless melt, with the rhythms of dish-washing, corn-shucking, hard-fucking, bed-wetting, and the folding of   bones of other loves into well-dug graves...    may we never become lost to the world.

“It is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto everyone we meet, he doth not kill us.” —Sir Thomas Browne We’re down here in the basement dodging bombs. As our loves freckle with age we must adore them more ferociously. Come winter you kick back and ready your weapons for spring. My next task was to get well. Five million years ago, there were different terrors. Saber toothed fears. Edgar Allen Poe was terrified of being buried alive. Fear is a civilising influence. It keeps us in line. Fear of bacteria. Of our own murderous kind. Of aliens superior to us in every way who’ll arrive any moment and sensibly decide to clean house. A terrible cry arises from the thick of things. My begging bowl runneth over. Heaven has been relocated and we’re not telling you where. Not even a hint. I don’t love you anymore. What might it mean to die a worthy death and how much should one brood about that ahead of time? I was just trying to get back to the boat alive. Let us lurch forward or hellward. What an adorable form of anarchy when the body outwits us. I am a heretic in their eyes, so they will kill us both and murder your children if they find our hiding place. Despite everything, I awoke full of praise for you, as I do each morning. Coughing constantly, I rinsed my hands and ate some seeded crackers. I thought about your face and prayed.

I’d given up hope. Hadn’t eaten in three days. Resigned to being wolf meat ... when, unbelievably, I found myself in a clearing. Two goats with bells round their necks stared at me: their pupils like coin slots in piggy banks. I could have gotten the truth out of those two, if goats spoke. I saw leeks and radishes planted in rows; wash billowing on a clothesline ... and the innocuous-looking cottage in the woods with its lapping tongue of a welcome mat slurped me in. In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex is barely discernible pours a glass of fraudulent milk. I’m so hungry my hand shakes. But what is this liquid? “Drink up, sweetheart,” she says, and as I wipe the white mustache off with the back of my hand: “Atta girl.” Have I stumbled into the clutches of St. Somebody? Who can tell. “You’ll find I prevail here in my own little kingdom,” she says as she leads me upstairs—her bony grip on my arm a proclamation of ownership, as though I've always been hers.

Gardens are also good places to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree, in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land, and colored carp if they plop into water. Suddenly the archetypal human desire for peace with every other species wells up in you.The lion and the lamb cuddling up.

A million years ago the earth grew cold. Iowa was covered by twenty-five hundred feet of ice. No one knows why the glaciers formed and spread, or why they eventually retreated. I blinked and you were gone. As a boy, he loved the idea of the ice age. Lumbering woolly mammoths and giant sloths. Outside, a vast white edict erasing the landscape. Inside his head, cave paintings of bison leapt in the firelight, their horns spiraling upward, the tips smoking. Men on skis came to dig you out. Though they worked all night, they were too late. Waking every day the frost reasserts itself. Its relentlessness a tedium, a closure. The earth must have looked more familiar when all was water. We don’t recognize ourselves amidst this overwhelming winter: static that censors newscasts, cold that burns, incessant dripping as icicles perfect themselves. The night skies are a riot of Chinese silk: bolts of crimson and shadow-blue. The radio crackles faintly. Medical refuse litters the beaches, spews into the water from a backed up sewer under the pier. Bacteria cavort in the seawater. The weather’s gone haywire all over the globe. The more sensitive you are the earlier you’ll die. Just hold your breath a little longer, dear. Once you start this medication, you can’t stop. Your life changes. You decide, based on a dearth of information, which force you want to submit to:nature, now less maternal than ever, or her idiot son—modern medicine. You make an effort to find some grand design in this blindness. If you can’t see well enough anymore to edit your film, perhaps you can still do the music. You set an example. Lemme outa here. As a boy, before his mother found out and made him stop, he’d bury the frozen birds he found on the porch after big storms by warming the earth first with his father’s blowtorch. Being human, we can’t help attempting to arrange events into patterns—the way a sick man sees faces in the stains on his bedroom ceiling. He names them. Months later, they all converse. The men in the ice-covered radio station play cards and drink bourbon. What defense can one mount against an avalanche? Spotless beakers, pipettes, rows of small cages. Welcome to the lab. Here’s the chamber where we run preliminary screenings. Better don these gloves. Why not use two pair, like me? The new man on the night shift nods off over his work, with the radio playing. Its tinny strands of music enter his dream disguised as a dead friend’s hair. He had short coarse hair, like a terrier’s, pleasantly stiff to the touch. The lab is brightly lit to ward off the backwash of night. Under the table the research assistant’s feet twitch spasmodically in his sleep. A series of blurry black-and-white newsreels flickers on the screen. Martian canals overflow their banks. A lake in Africa exhales a cloud of poison gas, killing thousands of villagers on its shores. Venice sinks. Anchorage, Alaska, is leveled by earthquakes. Pompeii is breaded and fried by its volcano. The swamp swallows another sand bar, then coughs up a tiny island. Subzero temperatures paralyze Acapulco.There have been several ice ages, a female narrator intones.The most recent lasted 90,000 years. A timer goes off and the lab assistant jerks awake. In about the time it takes to drink a glass of water, he remembers where he is. “This is probably the last time I will write to you . . .” The rocks applaud. Summers turn short and cool. The world remakes itself without us now.

He fancies his chances are good with her, unaware that in the years since the war she has come to prefer women whose cunts taste like mustard. To pin one’s hopes on a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled like crepe paper, a moth affixed high on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where it will likely die in noble clinging mode just under the cobwebby heating vent, is to confirm your need for more friends and a greater daily quota of sunlight. To raise C.’s hopes that T. can stop drinking and then to liken those hopes to fields of undulating grain, alfalfa perhaps, is to wish C. hip deep in acres of unscythed denial. The blind typist hopes she’ll be hired tonight without her disability becoming an issue. L. said he felt hope’s rhizomes race throughout his body, radiating in all directions, like some incipient disease he’d been fighting since childhood. Hope, he said, it’s as insidious as bitterness. If mother earth only knew how much we loved one another she would creak, shudder, and split like a macheted melon, releasing the fiery ball of molten hope at her core.