Jennifer Chang

Dark thing, make a myth of yourself: all women turn into lilacs, all men grow sick of their errant scent. You could learn to build a window, to change flesh into isinglass, nothing but a brittle river, a love of bone. You could snap like a branch—No, this way

Something in the field is working away. Root-noise. Twig-noise. Plant of weak chlorophyll, no name for it. Something in the field has mastered distance by living too close to fences. Yellow fruit, has it pit or seeds? Stalk of wither. Grass- noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt and chant. Something in the field. Coreopsis. I did not mean to say that. Yellow petal, has it wither-gift? Has it gorgeous rash? Leaf-loss and worried sprout, its bursting art. Some- thing in the. Field fallowed and cicada. I did not mean to say. Has it roar and bloom? Has it road and follow? A thistle prick, fraught burrs, such easy attachment. Stem- and stamen-noise. Can I lime- flower? Can I chamomile? Something in the field cannot.

I will do everything you tell me, Mother. I will charm three gold hairs from the demon’s head. I will choke the mouse that gnaws an apple tree’s roots and keep its skin for a glove. To the wolf, I will be pretty and kind and curtsy his crossing of my path. The forest, vocal even in its somber tread, rages. A slope ends in a pit of foxes drunk on rotten brambles of berries and the raccoons ransack a rabbit’s unmasked hole. What do they find but a winter’s heap of droppings? A stolen nest, the cracked shell of another creature’s child. I imagine this is the rabbit way and I will not stray, Mother, into the forest’s thick, where the trees meet the dark, though I have known misgivings of light as a hot hand that flickers against my neck. The path ends at a river I must cross. I will wait for the ferryman to motion me through. Into the waves he etches with his oar a new story: a silent girl runs away, a silent girl is never safe. I will take his oar in my hand. I will learn the boat’s rocking and bring myself back and forth. To be good is the hurricane of caution. I will know indecision’s rowing, the water I lap into my lap as he shakes his withered head. Behind me is the forest. Before me the field, a loose run of grass. I stay in the river, Mother, I study escape.

This stream took a shorter course— a thread of water that makes oasis out of mud, in pooling, does not aspire to lake. To river, leave the forest, the clamorous wild. I cannot. Wherever I am, I am here, nonsensical, rhapsodic, stock-still as the trees. Trickling never floods, furrows its meager path through the forest floor. There will always be a root too thirsty, moss that only swallows and spreads. Primordial home, I am dying from love of you. Were I tuber or quillwort, the last layer of leaves that starts the dirt or the meekest pond, I would absorb everything. I would drown. Water makes song of erratic forms, and I hear the living push back branches, wander off trail.

Up late watching slug porn, you confess you had a boyfriend who could spin you like that, slug grace and slug ballet—we don’t touch the topic of slime—and those eyes dangling from tentacle tips must be a kind of love or lust, sighting farther and nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?) Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag, touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of memory and... What did we do before YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs, of course, don’t care, can’t tell girl from boy, (being, you know, hermaphrodites), and only want flesh to fly. Forget their infamous languor—here’s litheness in loving, buoyant miracles of want, one slug spiraling on the axis of another like a globe slapped by an insolent hand. Neither old nor young, we’re familiar with sluggishness, too tired to explain why nothing makes us spin like that: a-swirl, a pirouette, a gyre! It’s either fucking or marriage, I say, saying more than I mean. Why can’t lust be love and love be lust? you’re always asking, even now as the slugs begin their sluggish withdrawal—each complete in love and lust; each mother and father to what they’ve made together; each alone, content, and free.