Mary Margaret Alvarado

Seed corn strung like scalps, Dil's tree with its crossed foxtrot legs. A story about habitations carved from snow. Fallen snow, not falling, Buttonwood, peavey. When Alvaro and Christina die they become two doors: one black; next, sky. They are also, perhaps, the cast-iron skillet, the string-bikini girl poised to sow beans. So sometimes the world is made still. Sometimes you're home and it's thaw. Sometimes a swashbuckler with a dry brush bivouacs to catch the salt breeze that bristles the lace. Hush. Honest men sleep with their shoes on. We love things for what they are. Texture of shingles, say. Lobster trap elegies. The way a hung coat suggests a general's death on the banks of the Monongahela, and dinner guests, toreadors. How, sixteen years before he kills himself, Allan's handlebar streamers and foxtail fly. Everything birthing its vanishing point. Even the sycamore, which is to say, even the man, is due to be shot, skinned and tanned. But seedpods are sachets or paper balloons and an oil drum serves to roast nuts. Meantime: Arabella Cleveland, her chin returning to slop, grows blue flax in clumps. Cooling sheds, phrenology. Moose racks, buckets. The smoothness of a plank box and the irregularity of hay. I think it's very cold there. I think Andrew loves his wife: her posture beneath a flat-crowned hat.

Out of orange juice out of gin. Me & him? We like to walk around. Lumpy houses cars on blocks. Jesus Jesus rest your head.

And then I began my habit of walking at night to get rid of the strings, witherings. The Lord revealed to me that I am full of birds turned smoke and hook è d strings. I say to the Lord, Lord take a string. I have named it mesas ringed with beeswax wicks, footsteps sowing up my stairs, tambourines in trees. Then a tedious, gruesome miracle unfolds, for the Lord takes the string and what attends it. Walking over a grate there is the sound of the grate. Margarita Mondays mean exactly that. I say, how could I eat? I ate. And how can I sleep? I shake. The Lord says, look at the branches, how they braid over graves. And the Lord says, look at the HandiMart, a bright, ordered box. They have their grief, the people there. Now the tableaus mass color, now the tableaus fall down. I say wet pavement keep on holding me up. Wet pavement hold me up. Now the fetishes crumble, now the meteors cup. The Lord says, I meant of it a blessing. And I say, I made of it a curse. The Lord says, sound of roots, sound of shoots, sound of asphalt, sound of cars. I say, I am walked into deeps. Here are the jewelthreads and throbbings that I need to leave. The Lord says, chomp and be chewed, alleluia. Sever and stitch, alleluia. Exceedingly, the Lord says,bar,barr,barr. I say snowfield? Snowfield? Pi ñ on roasting? Chaparall? The Lord says, is what you want the terrible free? And I say to the Lord, Lord speak. And the Lord says, sound of earth in orbit, its muffled, its four-chambered beat.