Lisa Gill

Cinder blocks ripple. A hard lot is suddenly glammed up by an illusion. Cats will slip under chain-link and lap this dirty pool. I want to go there, be gone there, be anything liquid or even topped with barbed tape. But the sky is swept away and I am stuck in a parked car, all limbs attached to the idea of being human. As if sketched by da Vinci. As if stretched across a piece of parchment, I am drawn. Fear circles flesh boxed in by so many tawdry corners: disease, grocery lists, and suchnot. Even my thighs face Vitruvian quandaries: whether to stay together or fall apart. The mental ward is not unappealing: I check my calendar. What’s a lesion in the temporal lobe except an opportunity for time to fall into a black hole? These are clinical terms, time and black hole, words even this century’s doctors will recognize as problematic: both should help me forget but don’t. Heal, deaden. Either way I am a woman who wants to be rid of memory, past and future. Today I desire nothing more than to sit stilled. What’s so rotten about this willing suspension of all inclinations to engage anything other than stasis, brow furrowed, body puddled, hollow? Earlier, I watched a shiny black millipede on turned dirt make progress that could be measured in inches. Perhaps the art of letters is as insubstantial, as oddly disconcerting, and as unwavering. Nothing can be mistaken for resolution, yet the allure of metamorphosis, the way hard things buckle under the line, ameliorates something, at least encourages the generalized slurry of bad thinking to flow into the next available trough. Slop has purpose. This much I know.

Lash everything irredeemable to the ficus with muscle. Use the flexor digitorum brevis from the arch of my right foot. This is how what’s grounded gets hitched to the rooted, everything cramped into place and contemplative. Tight striations might as well be bindings to Bodhi as body. Why not dump this tired mind at the foot of a tree, aerial roots less caustic than an unanswered calling — or perhaps this is it, to sit, to ponder, to ask: what violated cunt, what unhappy gasp, what sad spat, and toppling building left us blooming untoward? Who puts flowers on the inside of a fig except the injured or the bereft? The ones who hankered hard and failed to do anything but live lush and fallible? What regret is: bark or bitch. The world succumbs to beauty even now, in the throes. The sky is dark and hidden behind branches, cephalic veins clotted with grief. Hush now, finally. All the face can do is flush, sympathetic nervous system, visible horror of wounded and wounding. All inflorescence remains safe inside that place the mind opens up pear-shaped and vast: the body of every lover is unattached to hurt or hope, falls in its own field of daffodils, to curl fetal with singular prowess or glut.