Joanie Mackowski

Ray Way, Thunderbird Homeagain, Hugh and Mia Galore: they enjoyed such conversational topics as Mozart, tobacco , and four . “Today’s peach boasts rare fuzz,” said Ray. Bird added, “My mind is whale.” Mia forgot her songbooks, but Hugh said, “Let me embrace you all.” Ray Way snagged Homeagain by the lapel and fastened on Home’s left blue eye, Mia saw Home’s green right eye unanchor and wander away for the sky. Then Ray, he let go of Home’s lapel, and Ray let go of his ire, and Ray let go the floor with his feet to hover a bit on the air. Hours ticked while oars pulled over Lake Eekoutaheart. The pelicans kept to their quiet perusals of fishes, where the ripples teased apart. “Please heal my ruptured soul,” said Mia. Ray cheered, “The half-life got lived.” Thunder again, he just picked at his sweater where the yarn and his arms unweaved. “The sky, it must be adhesive,” said Mia, “elsewise the pelicans would fall—” Way, still floating, looked her cool in her eye: “Feel my faulty heart: it’s full.” “So tell me, do you wonder about the crackers once you lock the pantry?” “I know God when I wash my hands.” “Nothing makes sense like entropy.” “And the pelican, does it unloose its eggs like snow, an unbreakable good?” “And does love shape the snow to hope’s ellipses? “Who warms the nest—who could?” “What’s next when your own eyes won’t let you go?” “But the clouds won’t let me fall.” Hugh stood up and repeated, softly: “Let me embrace you all.”

A woman stepped outside, crumbled into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze blew up from the east, she scattered: her handful of heart, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway, and five of her teeth slipped between her neighbor's breasts; her neighbor unbuttoned her blouse to scratch at her suddenly red and luminous skin. Days passed. Each day the sun distractedly drifted from chair to chair; each night the stars, old scatterbrains, they commiserated. It didn't rain.Strange, the granular woman thought to herself:although I encompass so much, I accomplish so little. Her car sparkled with her hair and bones; her garden thrived. She tried to think: why did this happen? what had I eaten? why was I bothered?—those old hours, spotted and exotic lizards, darted the gravel, flicking through their colors of skin as one flicks channels on a tv. She couldn't catch a one. Then, as a flock of sparrows converging for the skull of an oak, all her twittering dust, her brain, bone, and the dangerous shreds of her fingers clawed for the sky; what an interesting cloud someone said.

I don't know how it happened, but I fell— and I was immense, one dislocated arm wedged between two buildings. I felt some ribs had broken, perhaps a broken neck, too; I couldn't speak. My dress caught bunched about my thighs, and where my glasses shattered there'd spread something like a seacoast, or maybe it was a port. Where my hair tangled with power lines I felt a hot puddle of blood. I must have passed out, but when I woke, a crew of about fifty was building a winding stairway beside my breast and buttressing a platform on my sternum. I heard, as through cotton, the noise of hammers, circular saws, laughter, and some radio droning songs about love. Out the corner of one eye (I could open one eye a bit) I saw my pocketbook, its contents scattered, my lipstick's toppled silo glinting out of reach. And then, waving a tiny flashlight, a man entered my ear. I felt his boots sloshing the blood trickling there. He never came out. So some went looking, with flares, dogs, dynamite even: they burst my middle ear and found my skull, its cavern crammed with dark matter like a cross between a fungus and a cloud. They never found his body, though. And they never found or tried to find an explanation, I think, for me; they didn't seem to need one. Even now my legs subdue that dangerous sea, the water bright enough to cut the skin, where a lighthouse, perched on the tip of my great toe, each eight seconds rolls another flawless pearl across the waves. It keeps most ships from wrecking against my feet. On clear days, people stand beside the light; they watch the waves' blue heads slip up and down and scan for landmarks on the facing shore.

What vegetable leviathan extends beneath the dinner table, an unseen, monstrous green that pulls the chair out from under our faith in appearances: see a mere tuft of leaf on the plate like a wing, but if it flies away, it undoubtedly will disturb the continental drift asleep under the salad plate, the hidden world we forget as we reach for the smaller fork— (and now, mouth full, don't speak: politely chew your leaf of firmament that's torn and tossed up in vinegar here as we'll be tossed before its vast root maybe someday or any moment).

A momentary rupture to the vision: the wavering limbs of a birch fashion the fluttering hem of the deity’s garment, the cooling cup of coffee the ocean the deity waltzes across. This is enough—but sometimes the deity’s heady ta-da coaxes the cherries in our mental slot machine to line up, and our brains summon flickering silver like salmon spawning a river; the jury decides in our favor, and we’re free to see, for now. A flaw swells from the facets of a day, increasing the day’s value; a freakish postage stamp mails our envelope outside time; hairy, claw-like magnolia buds bloom from bare branches; and the deity pops up again like a girl from a giant cake. O deity: you transfixing transgressor, translating back and forth on the border without a passport. Fleeing revolutions of same-old simultaneous boredom and boredom, we hoard epiphanies under the bed, stuff them in jars and bury them in the backyard; we cram our closet with sunrise; prop up our feet and drink gallons of wow!; we visit the doctor because all this is raising the blood’s levels of c

How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander the halls of the skull with the fluorescents softly flickering. It rests on the head like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel and awkward as soon as one stops to look. That pile of fallen leaves drifting from the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove, to the grooves in that man’s voice as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves of books with moonlit opossums and Chevrolets easing down the roads of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet itself is a swarm, a pulse with no indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo. Our compacted galaxy, its constellations trembling like flies caught in a spider web, until we die, and then the flies buzz away—while another accidental coherence counts to three to pass the time or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds a fraying map from the pocket of the day.

Bustle and caw. Recall the green heat rising from the new minted earth, granite and basalt, proto-continents shuffling and stacking the deck, first shadows flung from the ultraviolet haze. A fern uncurls from the swamp, the microscopic furnace of replication warms the world, one becoming two, two four: exponential blossom. Lush with collision, the teacup balance of x and y, cells like balloons escaping into the sky—then the dumbstruck hour, unmoored by a river, a first fish creeps to the land to marvel at the monstrous buds of its toes. And stars grow feet and walk across the years, into these dozing, ordinary days, climbing the spine’s winding stair, where crickets yawn and history spins.

Two wandering across the porcelain Siberia, one alone on the window sill, four across the ceiling's senseless field of pale yellow, one negotiating folds in a towel: tiny, bronze-colored, antennae 'strongly elbowed,' crawling over Antony and Cleopatra , face down, unsurprised, one dead in the mountainous bar of soap. Sub-family Formicinae (a single segment behind the thorax), the sickle moons of their abdomens, one trapped in bubbles (I soak in the tub); with no clear purpose they come in by the baseboard, do not bite, crush bloodless beneath a finger. Peterson's calls them 'social creatures,' yet what grim society: identical pilgrims, seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path only three seconds to touch another's face, some hoisting the papery carcasses of their dead in their jaws, which open and close like the clasp of a necklace. 'Mating occurs in flight'— what better way? Weightless, reckless rapture: the winged queen and her mate, quantum passion spiraling near the kumquat, and then the queen sheds her wings, plants the pearl-like larvae in their cribs of sand: more anvil-headed, creeping attentions to follow cracks in the tile, the lip of the tub, and one starting across the mirror now, doubled.