Joyelle McSweeney

Then in the August of my twenty-seventh year, naked except for my seaclogs, I greeted an audience of piers. After my dip, I came up covered in salt and sand: hair tough as an angel’s. Who could disappoint me now among the so-coifed? Disappointing menus for a banquet of twenty-seven. The hostess cannot hear the hotelier, walls blow ope’; lousy with wallets and checkbooks, the air. Naked except for The checks and the monies flapped like birds. I partook of the seasonal activity and caught a check in my hands—to myself from myself— and was caught; I was smart and dumb. I hadn’t been clobbered in such a long time! Now, shoved against the carpeted headrest, I wondered at its cold and slender neck. The nakeder I feel the happier. Camp is over, and the children come out wearing hats; the children are happy for each other, each camp having been maximally appropriate. The ocean grew gritty with proteins. I arose and clomb to the yard with its spigot. It looked up and blinked. Above, kite strings wrote toing and froing was the same motion; tiny sighs above the halls at the county airport; swung on tiny chains; my father swathed me in two handtowels, said nexttime, swim in the sea. A gold thread falls from an eagle’s towel onto the beach. A gold face big as a quarter of the sky looks at us with gold-milk tears in its eyes and the gold girl goes on brushing the countryside with a twig-broom big as a tree. When our competitor finishes third, he approaches the throne with a gold wheel of tillamook.

O melting rainbow that embrace this roof O persistent covenant hangs around giving us nothing, leaves its muck in the water expects us to be knocked out by its fine colors weren’t you nothing too, weren’t you sea bottom crunched down into fuel and when that eggshell roof busts through mama’s gonna buy you a rainbow ride for free an illumination, an inflammation hyperion flame headdress dream pins in the fuel balloons of Koolaid burst down to cool the sticky baby’s head plus a credit card a glock a new bible a princess dress a mermaid princess dress so you’ll be twice submerged or an erased Indian princess pajama set now go to sleep

Leaf-keep, un-sibyl; if the soul Has the weight of a swallow, what less Has the weight of a sip? You equal This riddle, unposed in your dish As a hand at rest in a lap. Held to, You hold back what can't be Prevented, what's no more palatable For that: the unfine; formerly, our future.

The puppy must be learned of all this material. No map of the hospital. First, the war effort. Then, the war itself. The water makes and remakes its walls. No persons or boats are allowed in them. This plot is to be played out in the buildings known to us. Swim for the stick, baby! You’ve got an anti-sink device. The nba guard flips forward and back in his hologram. Fish-fission. Light. —and found wheels beneath her linen skirt. The kids mill around like businessmen-clowns. Their organization is a matter of choice and thus not protected under reedlight. Candlelight. Horizonto-rotary gaze beating clearly to the right. Now, corrected, to the left. Fish! Flip! and Out of Hearing! Alone in the pink apartment with your little swab. The moth-mom tries out everything at once: straps on wool, ties a candle to her head. Don’t pity her. She wants to eat the moth! Which dithers over whether it eats wool or flame. The skyline lifts, and the gulfstream slips out barefoot clear to England. Maidens rhinocently down the cowpath clomp. Toothbrush into yogurt cup,Recyclamente! I am so adamant. The siren with a catch in its cry starts over. Eternal transistance. Ent’ring our marriage ride.

—Hoooooooo Lay in an array of pixels Fat, simulated proteins Looks just like nutrition! Acts just like an avatar! I just wanted to give my body to A net of guarine Gingko-balboa azatine melamine Camphobacter phylacter nicotine Which hung like neuron-nectar in a cell, net of Vatic coughdropped hairball tells the future of Neural center where the straight lines hopped Like a hairline fracture on a bender jumps a Mulholland retaining wall and crashes the crinkled Vale of Food-for-thought Fruit for monkeys in a barrel, one fruit per monkey For a total of fortyseven monkeydays For a total of twelve hours at a clip The go-home-and-feed-the-baby milk of it That man is a mouth chased by ghosts Round a rainslicked hairpin off a cliff in (And now I pause to remember How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling Where you cut your hair For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana The scissors-sister who slits where she goes-into Cuts as she cuts—) This machine makes its need louder and Invites me into its duct, unlike the baby Sleeping on the other edge of Pow’r, Eyes roll’d, mouth pinch’d shut Round Pow’r’s earthly sinks and shunts—

Now I know what it is to bite the tongue inside the mink stole: I do not want my inspiration stolen! ms. merongrongrong , for you I do my husband’s hairdo in a kind of flip. Now for once I want to build a data cage, a firewall, encrypt a fiber option, to lock up his image, lock the tick into his rib. I grasp his slim wrist and mask him for the gas: what a pheasant operation, his plumage brilliants as he whites out in closed caption, under glass. A harmless operation, a lipid removal or a viscous camera drip. ms. merongrongrong , please do not misprism me, for normally I am not like this, I do not creep or crypt, do not go hissing, bent double, kettlewaisted, clinched. When pressed I spread; when pinched, pinch; shiv and shinny my way out, make a finger mouth that shrinks the moon to a pupa, shove it in my purse to pupate on my cabbage stash, my petty rash cashola. In your stall, I dump the stenchy contents of my clutch on your counter, your clerk Moonlight scrubs the Wikifile, slicks the nail down to a nib, mums me in muff, ruff, muffler, ruffle, stomacher, pannier of ribbed silk, knight’s visor, hutch where I keep my prize rabbits, ms. merongrongrong I and II, which liplop the moonlit garden in stitched minks. ms. merongrongrong you send the Dutchman moon to touch us you cinch my betrothed ’s throat till he has to swallow what I bite, he drags himself to the window to vomit, he drags the bile sea in drag like a widow with a ghost lover, mourning over the suck white sand in white I wear a glass pane over my face, a teller’s window or a train’s, ms. merongrongrong , I stutter by in sailor’s guise, adrenal sink disguised as swagger, a thickened chest wall, a fat and padded neck. I go a specimen, I pose between the slides for my decline, ms. merongrongrong time thins and quickens, I help my husband up over the lip of the Dutch oven, his flank is ripped, one paw limp, one soft ear hangs by a thread, I lug myself up the path you have prepared for us, the trestle, the wooden tread—

This is the body of, waiting to turn on. graced with a little tremor, a little-known form, a fibrous hook, a flimsy lever that makes the jar work a lever and a clasp :voila. The pathetic filofax unfurls, the owl describes; on air; makes an apse; lopes left off the phonepole, woodenly. we rise above the wind park, commemorially. our whorled fossil, pinned open. our emergency kit holds aspirin. digitalis. adrenalin-in-in.

Adriaen het Kint, dead prisoner, passes back through the eye of the needle into the wombed-shaped anatomy theater in a caul of umbra mortis, lo. Tho I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I wear a caul stitched by the needle through which a camel passed, like the condom passed through the drug mule, sperm through the pierced condom, a camera through a heart.  Just as the face of every Dutchman is lit by a flashbulb conceived two hundred years in the future, Adriaen het Kint now lifts a flayed hand to demonstrate how to put the god back together once he’s been dismembered and scattered among the reeds. Adriaen het Kint, shall we gather at the river to scoop up the disjecta membra? How, with flayed hand, shall we pluck the white lyre that rides the black thorax of the zika mosquito, resplendent in her viral robes? She is a messenger to all nations as she lowers her improbable proboscis into the human layer and vomits an inky toxin from the Greek for arrow ink for arrow, an arrow that sinks its bleat into the alien chordata so that the future contracts into itself, slinks off, slips further down the drain, sinks further down the wall outside the clinic, the infected needle blocking the stoma of the future with a crusty pus. The sleeper juts a canine up through the gum without meaning to, and an answering moon orbiting Jupiter winks back a salt signature, betrays a vein of water asleep beneath the frozen strata whereunto a white-clad nurse or rover soon will sink a toothed cannula to draw it off How complete ly she circumvents the eye of the needle how completely she bypasses that camel-route to Heaven as she drains away for human use the plasma and the data