Idra Novey

Does no dishes, dribbles sauce across the floor. Is more dragon than spaniel, more flammable than fluid. Is the loosening in the knit of me, the mixed-fruit marmalade in the kitchen of me. Wakes my disco and inner hibiscus, the Hector in the ever-mess of my Troy. All wet mattress to my analysis, he’s stayed the loudest and longest of any houseguest, is calling now as I write this, tiny B who brings the joy.

Even the gun shows are gone now, even the scrapyards, the darkest, farthest barns. The strip mall half empty since my elementary years abides only chemicals now, the lot sequestered behind fences, its metal tanks checked each September for leaks in the seals. I lost my virginity in a basement here, lost my balance on a backhoe, had to pick the gravel out of my knees. For the prom, my date was the tank man just vaporized in the heat storm, his data screen open to augmented porn. This morning in my Honda pedi-plane, I flew over where we used to sled, old hills oranged now for warning, only the edges still brown. I saw a denier sitting outside in a lawn chair, her hair so long it met the ground. There’s no idling in the skyways now, which is why I can’t tell you if she was dying.

If our view were not a Holiday Inn but a fringe of trees, I could say G here is our greenly hidden. If we lived amid Joe-Pye weed and high grass instead of spackle and peeling plaster I could say perhaps I’m listening to G now but mean the owl, a wind playing the silo, a sticking sorrow, any sound but the snore of our latest visitor on the futon. Dear G, please make him turn, make me kinder. I’m not far from unfathoming it all.

He had to have it, his mother told him. How could he not, with so few left in the world? He felt heaviest at night with the miracle of it. He was a vessel now. A receptacle for a threatened being. What if he rose too fast and killed it? Or maybe his stillness would do it, too much sitting around, stunned and hungry. And what if the bear emerged alive and another formed in its place, would he have to have that one, too, and another one after that? He dreamed of the panda’s tiny eyes opening inside him, the doctor’s wide incision, a whirring pain, and then the furry thing emerging, the bear turning to him as to a stranger and whether that would be it—his bit part in the history of the future.

She expects nothing but to witness our lives and find kindness and why shouldn’t she but for the boiling water my partner spills on my arm and the FUCK'S SAKE that escapes my mouth now the snout of the spitting mammal in me. If there’s a craft to the failing of simple expectations, I have mastered it and majestically—but when there’s something that must be said, it must be said, Lispector says of a woman entering an empty room and finding a version of herself so dark it makes her pause and really see it, how she’s no better than the cockroach in her closet and so she eats it.

We liked to stick it in a bb gun and shoot it. We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah, the poor man’s tanning lotion. Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die. We got funny at Clarion, flung each other’s underwear into the trees. Why was it we got naked there and nowhere else? Maybe we knew we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water. Maybe we knew we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we’d go under, and there would be nothing of return.