Dana Levin

Thirty seconds of yellow lichen. Thirty seconds of coil and surge, fern and froth, thirty seconds of salt, rock, fog, spray. Clouds moving slowly to the left— A door in a rock through which you could see __ another rock, laved by the weedy tide. Like filming breathing—thirty seconds of tidal drag, fingering the smaller stones down the black beach—what color was that, aquamarine? Starfish spread their salmon-colored hands. __ I stood and I shot them. I stood and I watched them right after I shot them: thirty seconds of smashed sea while the real sea thrashed and heaved— They were the most boring movies ever made. I wanted to mount them together and press Play. __ Thirty seconds of waves colliding. Kelp with its open attitudes, seals riding the swells, curved in a row just under the water— the sea, over and over. Before it's over.

Having to make eye contact with the economy— A ball cap that says In Dog Years I’m Dead—“The moon will turn blood red and then disappear for awhile,” the TV enthused. Hunched over an anatomy textbook, a student traces a heart over another heart—lunar eclipse. In the bathroom, crayoned graffiti: fuck the ♥ • He collected CAPTCHA, one seat over, Mr. feverish Mange Denied: like puzzling sabbath or street pupas; we shared some recent typos:I’m mediated(his), my tiny bots of stimulation, he loved the smudged and swoony words that proved him human— not a machine trying to infiltrate the servers of the New York Times, from which he launched (gad shakes or hefty lama) obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s black disaster, he lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio) a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum, some people “from where I used to work,” so much info (we both agreed), “The umbra,” the TV explained, shadow the earth was about to make— • ...and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness... ...firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened... ...so benighted and hopelessly lost... ...their eyes to the errors... MOON LORE , Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room, hour two. • Urgent Care. That was pretty multivalent. As in: We really need you to take care of this. We really need you to care for this. To care about this. We really need you to peer through the clinic’s storefront window, on alert for the ballyhooed moon— And there it was. Reddening in its black sock, deep in the middle of the hour, of someone’s nutso-tinsel talk on splendor— My fevered friend. Describing the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads fitting like a flash drive into the port of a healer’s hands.

And blush for a cheek of stone. Blush for the lips sewn tight with thread, no speech for the dead maker— You’ve got the razor. You can make each suture snap. And watch the mouth bloom up with foam, as if he’d drowned himself in soap— You lift the neck and let the head drop back. The mouth yawns wide its prize— White thrive. The larval joy. Hot in their gorge on the stew of balms, a moist exhale— as if there were a last breath, a taunt coiling into your inner ear,Good Dog, you dig your hands in, up-cupping the glossal bed— saying, Graduate of the School of Flesh, Father Conspirator— I will learn it. I will bite the tongue from the corpse.

You have installed a voice that can soothe you:agents of the eaten flesh, every body a cocoon of change— Puparium. The garden a birthing house,sarcophagidae— And green was so dark in the night-garden, in the garden's gourd of air— green's epitome of green's peace, the beautiful inhuman leg-music, crickets' thrum— a pulse to build their houses by, each successive molt a tent of skin in which skin can grow, the metallic sheen of their blue backs as they hatch out, winged and mouthed— Like in a charnel ground, you sit and see. In one of the Eight Great Cemeteries, you sit and see— How the skull-grounds are ringed by flame, how they spread out under a diamond tent, how the adepts pupate among bones— saying I who fear dying, I who fear being dead— Refuge field. See it now. That assembly of sages you would have yourself build, to hear the lineage from mouth to ear, encounter the truth- chain— Saying,Soft eaters, someone's children, who gives them refuge from want— Cynomyopsis Cadavarena. On every tongue they feed.

You’re gonna strike the match— You’re gonna strike it— Flame the bank up into pods of fire, be a masterhand— — And someone said, Gasoline. Someone said, We have to change the images inside their heads, said Gasoline? And motor oil, he bought at a mini-mart. — And the cat said Don’t even though it was dead and the squirrel said Don’t and the little dog missing an eye and a leg even though they were dead, said Don’t Don’t but you did it anyway. And someone said, That boy is sick— And someone said, It was kind of pretty when you didn’t know what it was from the road. — Hours now, by the trashed banks, counting the colored glass— Brown for beer. Green for the fizzy water, clear for anything and tail lights smashed, cars mucked like big cats trapped in tar, who ate the flesh right off their legs, if they were lighter they could hurry home, they could float on home— killed cat dead at the end of your stick, who could do that, shot in the head— Like in the shows where the cop cleans up his town, then the ambulance comes for the drowned. — You felt bad, so you did it. You thought it was pretty, so you did it again. You felt charged and buoyant as you picked your way home to the blue-lit fatherless den— So you did it again. The BB’ed mutt, leg smashed, home-bum toasting you with his beer as you dragged it to the sludgy bank, the match, the gas, the pile of tires someone had dumped,were you dumped? you had asked after another one left, and she had slapped you, and slapped— You were an ambulance, you could see she had drowned— Like in the shows where the warrior collects his dead and brings them to the shore, to burn them in their body-boats, release the spiritual — smoke— And the parents said, Didn’t he have a house key around his neck, didn’t he have a pager, an electrical tether to a list of chores and a stocked refrigerator— And the teachers said Yes, but what were the images inside his head, they see it and they make it be— And you put it in a tire, your viking boat, you set it on fire and it kept afloat as it sailed down the river— to the heaven of not being here.

—spring wind with its train of spoons, kidney-bean shaped pools, Floridian humus, cicadas with their electric appliance hum, cricket pulse of dusk under the pixilate gold of the trees, fall’s finish, snow’s white afterlife, death’s breath finishing the monologue Phenomena, The Most Beautiful Girl you carved the word because you craved the world—

You wanted to be a butcher but they made you be a lawyer. You brought home presents when it was nobody’s birthday. Smashed platters of meat she cut against the grain. Were a kind of portable shrine — I was supposed to cultivate a field of  bliss, then return to my ordinary mind. You burned the files and moved the office. Made your children fear a different school. Liked your butter hard and your candy frozen. Were a kind of diamond drill, drilling a hole right through my skull — quality sleep, late November. What did it mean, “field of bliss” — A sky alive “with your greatest mentor” — I wore your shoes, big as boats, flopped through the house — while you made garlic eggs with garlic salt, what “represents the living teaching” — Sausages on toasted rye with a pickle, and a smother of cheese, and frosting right out of  the can without the cake — You ruled with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, you raged at my stony mother, while I banged from my high chair, waving the bloodied bone of something slaughtered — I was a butcher’s daughter. So all hail to me — Os Gurges, Vortex Mouth, I gap my craw and the bakeries of the cities fall, I stomp the docks — spew out a bullet stream of oyster shells, I’ll drain the seas — the silos on every farm, the rice from the paddy fields, the fruit from all the orchard trees, and then I’ll eat the trees — I’ll eat with money and I’ll eat with my teeth until the rocks and the mountains curl and my blood sings — I’m such a good girl to eat the world.

The father died and then the mother died. And you were so addicted to not feeling them, you told no one about the clamp inside— around the vena cava. Dam against the blood's trash— But I've got you now. Trussed at the waist in a wooden chair, odor of spice and oranges, clove-pierced, incandescent stores to light our lab's decor— Here. I saved this just for you. Beetle-cleaned and sharp at the tip, the finger that shook in your set face from the hand that smoothed your hair— Make a fist. Wrap the tube round your fleshy arm, pull the black rubber tight— will we finally see the sludge of their accumulated mouths, ah, you've said, how they poisoned me... Pierce in with your mother's finger-bone, taste the slow up-well— Sweet. Sweet. Surge ambrosial and clear— A honey, an ichor. From those who waited long in your veins.

I want you to know how it felt to hold it, deep in the well of my eye. You, future person: star of one of my complicated dooms — This one’s called Back to the Dark. Scene 1: Death stampedes through the server-cities. Somehow we all end up living in caves, foraging in civic ruin. Banana Palace— the last of the last of my kind who can read breathes it hot into your doom-rimed ear. She’s a dowser of spine-broken books and loose paper the rest of your famishing band thinks mad. • Mine was the era of spending your time in town squares made out of air. You invented a face and moved it around, visited briefly with other faces. Thus we streamed down lit screens sharing pictures of animals looking ridiculous — trading portals to shoes, love, songs, news, somebody’s latest rabid cause: bosses, gluten, bacon, God — Information about information was the pollen we deposited — while in the real fields bees starved. Into this noise sailed Banana Palace. • It was a mother ship of gold. Shining out between happy bday katie ! and a photo of someone’s broken toe — Like luminous pillows cocked on a hinge, like a house with a heavy lid, a round house of platelets and honey — It was open, like a box that holds a ring. And inside, where the ring would be: • I think about you a lot, future person. How you will need all the books that were ever read when the screens and wires go dumb. Whatever you haven’t used for kindling or bedding. Whatever made it through the fuckcluster of bombs we launched accidentally, at the end of the era of feeling like no one was doing a thing about our complicated dooms — Helpless and braced we sat in dark spaces submerged in pools of projected images, trying to disappear into light — Light! There was so much light! It was hard to sleep. • Anyway. Banana Palace. Even now when I say it, cymbals shiver out in spheres. It starts to turn its yellow gears and opens like a clam. Revealing a fetal curl on its temple floor, bagged and sleeping — a white cocoon under lit strings that stretch from floor to ceiling — a harp made of glass incubating a covered • pearl — We broke the world you’re living in, future person. Maybe that was always our end: to break the jungles to get at the sugar, leave behind a waste of cane — There came a time I couldn’t look at trees without feeling elegiac — as if nature were already over, if you know what I mean. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. Cross-section of a banana under a microscope the caption read. I hunched around my little screen sharing a fruit no one could eat.

I here I’m here I’m here I’m here here here here