Kyle Dargan

I imagine each enunciation, each syllable pronounced—Mississippi—makes a noose cinch somewhere, rope reduced to arousal, tightening. The pull, the hard-learned feel of vertebrae supple within a neck's column, and marrow's juice sucked clean until what remains are flutes of bone, a wind section of rubble. Whenever I meet Mississippi in a dream, it is always a landfill of labored breaths or a grand mammal crippled in morass. What did you ever want of us? I ask. It beams, The same you want for me—the subtle heft of razors beneath the magnolia tongue's lash.

with clear-cased woofers for heads, no eyes. They see us as a bat sees a mosquito—a fleshy echo, a morsel of sound. You've heard their intergalactic tour busses purring at our stratosphere's curb. They await counterintelligence transmissions from our laptops and our blue teeth, await word of humanity's critical mass, our ripening. How many times have we dreamed it this way: the Age of the Machines, postindustrial terrors whose tempered paws—five welded fingers —wrench back our roofs, siderophilic tongues seeking blood, licking the crumbs of us from our beds. O, great nation, it won't be pretty. What land will we now barter for our lives ? A treaty inked in advance of the metal ones' footfall. Give them Gary. Give them Detroit, Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten nurseries of girders and axels. Tell the machines we honor their dead, distant cousins. Tell them we tendered those cities to repose out of respect for welded steel's bygone era. Tell them Ford and Carnegie were giant men, that war glazed their palms with gold. Tell them we soft beings mourn manufacture's death as our own.

Name one revolution whose inception was unlike a fist. Factions disparate, then tucked together—coiled like a fist. Foreign policies are symbol languages—idiomatic, cryptic. In America, nothing says "We desire peace" like a fist. The heart is a one-man rave in the body's industrial district. Blooddrunk and insomniac, it pumps toward sleep like a fist. Mammogram magic revealed my lover's dense breasts. Behind each nipple I kissed, a soft knot threatened her like a fist. Our universe's yet shattered mysteries fear the astrophysicist. "Damn his galaxies-thick glasses, his mind, relentless, like a fist." "Like a glove"—the young groom exalts his wife's love, its fit. Sounds romantic. (He means sex—her love's grip like a fist.) "An unfocused punch, Kyle, risks a broken hand or wrist." So laden the psyches of men. Father, must I also think like a fist?

Los Angeles Across from the gorgeous dog park, men dream against poodle-pissed trees — their pillows made from breath captured in milk cartons. Only arid, temperate climate offers respite. Let us suppose they have tales, here in this city where filmed stories turn a mint. All around, one wide screen — the dark hills due north pixel-pocked with villa lights. Below, streets hemmed with haggard brown men — jack-in-the-box bodies ever unfolding. Who is pitching this script? Title: “The Child of 1968.” Voiceover:After the Integration Apocalypse, one man must find his way in a land where the sole survivors who look or speak like him are those rendered disturbed and indigent

or Poem for Eighties Babies (~also for T. P., 1950-2010) If it's Teddy singing it—don't leave me this way—it isn't the arrangement your parents spun themselves through, becoming another strobe-lit dervish. Listen as it pounds. Think of them instead not dancing but stilled in a corner, buttressed by their own sweat and clairvoyant uncertainty. Every plea, every atonement that reaches sweet and hard from Teddy's vocal folds, is ambivalent toward their present, its travails—the night humid, reduced to tissue paper's fragility. It's June 1976, years before code like mother and father—before either is prepared to admit they could not imagine the uphill slope of love after disco's tongue licked the vinyl unfurrowed and the babies —babies that began as mere pheromone exchanges on a dance floor— began falling into their young laps. It isn't your fault. You did not stop the music. Or if you did, it was Thelma Houston's cover, not this bearded prayer of negative capability— the pleaseplease under each pace your parents took beyond the cusp of realizing nothing so good could stay that good so long.

I know the planet Earth is ’bout to explode. Kind of hope that no one saves it. We only grow from anguish. — Mac Miller In the likely event of galactic calamity — our sun’s hydrogen reserves fused through, the star-turned-red-giant bloating as do our corpses — you will require flames. Between the solar shockwave and Earth’s rattling — an opaque interval — you must stare, but we people prior will have left no crude fluid for ignition, for light, having tapped this rock to gorge our bellies to petroleum ache. Perhaps you will have evolved — blood supplemented with Edison and Tesla’s currents, half your body fed by generators that slow-cure your biomass or waste. Maybe you will be self-luminous. But if you are still — like we, like me — a mere meat-pod fated to watch Mercury and Venus engulfed, surely you hold designs for an interplanetary ark. Anticipate humanity’s years spent adrift in the dark liquor of space — lost within hibernation and missing mother- planet, further estranged from all revelation of how we came to be. From this unproven vantage point (inside our history with no solid alpha), I claim to pity your inherited task — to catalog the last telluric pulse, close the case of man as now known. But beneath my softened hide, I’m envious. All of our missteps as shepherds, all the graffiti eclipsing our souls, all of it will cinder and you will view this erasure from your Mars-bound barge. You will know the phenomenon that is judgment, see it real-time as prophets allegedly witnessed. Man will never have beheld a clearer beacon to be reborn —