Matthea Harvey

At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes. The Ferris Wheel is an overgrown version of his own bells and whistle eyes. His Flashers, his mother calls them. The Tilt-A-Whirl is the angle his head tilts when the Flirt Program goes into effect, usually in the vicinity of a Cindy or a Carrie, though once he found himself tilting at the school librarian which caused him to wheel in reverse into the Civil War section knocking over a cart of books that were waiting to be shelved under B. There’s a dangerously low stratosphere of pink cotton-candy clouds being carried around by the children. If Robo-Boy goes near them, the alarms will go off. It’s the kind of sticky that would cause joint-lock for sure. In a darker, safer corner Robo-Boy finds the Whack-A-Mole game. He pays a dollar and starts whacking the plastic moles on their heads each time they pop up from the much-dented log. He wins bear after bear. It’s only when he's lugging them home, the largest one skidding face-down along the sidewalk getting dirt on its white nose and light blue belly, that he remembers the program: Wac-A-Mole Realism™—the disc on the installer’s desk. Suddenly it all fits together: the way a deliciously strange thought will start wafting out of his unconscious—and then WHAM, it disappears.

In the aftermath of calculus your toast fell butter-side down. Squirrels swarmed the lawns in flight patterns. The hovercraft helped the waves along. From every corner there was perspective. On the billboards the diamonds were real, in the stores, only zirconia. I cc’ed you. I let you know. Sat down to write the Black Ice Memo. Dinner would be meager & reminiscent of next week’s lunch. So what if I sat on the sectional? As always I was beside myself.

1. Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through Where the marble is worn away with industrious Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say Because the queen does not want room for splashing The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only Support

When my hole-punch drizzles tiny paper circles onto the carpet, my wolf sister moans and bites it, covering her ears with her paws. I think she’s tired of the moon. She takes a stack of dinner plates from my cupboard and slinks off to the park to break them. Our brother shows up a week later, collapses on the sofa like a fur throw. Why have they come here when everything I do is wrong? They howl in the shower together but the water doesn’t mask the sound. I go in afterwards with paper towels to mop the droplets–I know there’ll be water all over–but the room is bone dry. Maybe this time things will be different. I hide the home movies in case they ask for them. In the one I always watch, there’s some wobbly footage of the sky, then my father lowers the camera’s eye to mother teaching my sister and brother to “tell time.” They’re following a mother hare on her sunset rounds–one leveret mouthful at 12 o’clock, another at 3, 6, 9. Then the camera zooms in on me–I’ve spat out my pacifier made of fur and I’m on the porch surrounded by bonsai trees, killing or saving Barbie.

The Inside Out Mermaid is fine with letting it all hang out–veins, muscles, the bits of fat at her belly, her small gray spleen. At first her lover loves it–with her organs on the outside, she's the ultimate open book. He can pump her lungs like two bellows and make her gasp; ask her difficult questions and study the synapses firing in her brain as she answers to see if she's lying; poke a pleasure center in the frontal lobe and watch her squirm. No need for bouquets or sad stories about his childhood. He just plucks a pulmonary vein and watches the left ventricle flounder. But before long, she starts to sense that her lover, like all the others before him, is getting restless. This is when she starts showing them her collections–the basket of keys from all over the world, the box of zippers with teeth of every imaginable size–all chosen to convey a sense of openness. As a last resort, she’ll even read out loud the entries from her diary about him to him. But eventually he’ll become convinced she’s hiding things from him and she is. Her perfect skin. Her long black hair. Her red mouth, never chapped from exposure to sun or wind, how she secretly loves that he can’t touch her here or here.

Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.

The scent of pig is faint tonight as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue, looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten. Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimed I was still soft-fingered when I planted you. In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds, pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests on the plane’s wing-tip colored pink by the sun. Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo, like the hawk that usually flies between or above their branches, found skimming the ground with its catch of mouse or mole, or the barge that passes every day at four, its metal nose just out of the water, while empty at eight, its sleek sides flash signals to those on shore. Later, on the highway a row of trucks lit like orange squares in the setting sun— a colony of ants each with a piece of chrysanthemum on their backs—begins to reassemble memories; the petals become lining, the shape of the flower is lost, so that years later, looking at an old photograph, she will not remember the names of cousins and uncles but the exact bend in the river behind them, the pattern of trees.

If there were gamebirds in our gables, shouldn’t we shoot them ourselves? Thus we went glass-faced into glory. We had our hearts set on staying here, so our steps seemed more hesitation waltz than straight-ahead tango. We danced the hokey pokey on holy days— put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about, we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. The illuminati spoke to us over the intercom via interpreters. Meanwhile we had iodine dribbling from our wounds and itch mites in our blankets. Ours was not a job to joke about. In the lantern-light, the lawn speckled with lead looked lovely. We would live this down by living it up. My pile of looseleaf was getting smaller—I wrote in margins, through marmalade stains, on the backs of maps. I put a piece of mica in the microwave and before the explosion it made the mirage I’d imagined. I was hoping for a noticeable increase in nutmeats or a one night stand in the oubliette. I outwept everyone at the pageant, even the children from the poorhouse playing possum. We studied the protocol for astronaut removal the minute we saw his spit hit planet earth on the spaceship window. But though the scandal reverberated round-the-clock, we had to let it slide. He was up there turning somersaults while we spun ever-so-slowly below.

The generalissimo’s glands directed him to and fro.Geronimo! said the über-goon we called God, and we were off to the races. Never mind that we could only grow gray things, that inspecting the horses’ gums in the gymnasium predicted a jagged road ahead. We were tired of hard news— it helped to turn down our hearing aids. We could already all do impeccable imitations of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion. That much was true. When we got jaded about joyrides, we could always play games in the kitchen garden with the prisoners. Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick the Kidney were our favorites. The laws the linguists thought up were particularly lissome, full of magical loopholes that spit out medals. We had made the big time, but night still nipped at our heels. The navigator’s needle swung strangely, oscillating between the oilwells and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves together by practicing quarterback sneaks along the pylons, but the race to the ravine was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.