Natalie Shapero

Dirt on my chin and I wonder: am I already in the ground? Like a toy turned real, I cannot shed the sense that I have died. The German word for Heaven’s the same as the German word for sky. On hearing a cruel prince was in danger, I prayed for him to thrive, not for his own sake, but for the concubines, sure to end up buried along. To my real face, a man once crowed i ruined you , and though he did, the joke’s on him: he ruined me only for this world, and this world is not long for itself. The Earth, that ever-loving but distrustful kin, keeps leaving us just a little pocket money when it dies, never the land —

on seventeen, I come from hearty straw. My grandpa wore a gallon hat. My grandma, like a shogun, bun and shawl. For their honeymoon, they went to the movies. No one knows what they saw. You arrive with licorice, cigarettes, the documentary on Woody Allen. Don’t feign a passion for his start in tv , or his clarinets, or Love and Death. Just skip to the Soon- Yi part.

Some people say the devil is beating his wife. Some people say the devil is pawing his wife. Some people say the devil is doubling down on an overall attitude of entitlement toward the body of his wife. Some people say the devil won’t need to be sorry, as the devil believes that nothing comes after this life. Some people say that in spite of the devil’s public, long-standing, and meticulously logged disdain for the health and wholeness of his wife, the devil spends all day, every day, insisting grandly and gleefully on his general pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly considers himself to be an unswayed crusader: effortlessly magnetic, scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of the devil’s several advanced degrees, a luminous autodidact. Some people say calm down; this is commonplace. Some people say calm down; this is very rare. Some people say the sun is washing her face. Some people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.

How to get close without going over. How to feign lust for whatever’s on offer. How the largest possible quantity of anything is a lifetime. A lifetime of oat bran. A lifetime of timing belts. A lifetime of saying, sure, why not, i’m only on earth x number of years , and not knowing what to make x. Sometimes I pick a number I’ve already passed. I remember the gambler’s credo — when you only have fifty bucks left in this world, you’d better get rid of it fast; the last thing you want is money around, reminding you every day of the money you lost. The recommended retirement plan is arabesque, then leap and smash on the seawall. We made a promise not to catch each other.

What I adore is not horses, with their modern domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore is a bug that lives only one day, especially if it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day when no one thinks of anything else, least of all that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, and even that won’t keep me alive. I share my home not with horses, but with a little dog who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps, makes her muscle known to every statue. I wish she could have a single day of   language, so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid— our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.

Six years ago, the big museum sold eight famous paintings to purchase, for unspecified millions, Gustave Caillebotte’s Man at His Bath. Now it’s hip to have a print of it, and whenever I see one hung for decoration, I’m almost certain that this is what Caillebotte had in mind when he broke out the oils in 1884: some twenty-first-century bitch in Boston catching a glimpse of a framed reproduction, recollecting a study about how washing oneself may induce a sense of culpability. What I remember is he insisted I clean before leaving. That, and he was trying to be dreamlike. He took my jaw in his hand and said in the next life, we’ll really be together , and the clamp in his voice made me almost certain he knew something I did not. Now I eat right, train hard, get my shots. This life — I’m angling to remain in this life as long as I can, being almost certain, as I am, what’s after —

Where can the dead hope to stash some part of themselves, if not in the living? And so when I had a daughter, I gave her your name. She does not use it. She goes by a silly, other thing she was called once in fun, and then often enough that it stuck. But oh her hideous pill- eyed toys — to them each, she has given her given name, and so it is you I hear her again and again calling to. It is your name she shrieks to the bale-head farmer, the woven goat, the cop made of buttons and rags. Your name, to the squat gray dog on wheels, tipping on its side as she drags it by a red string. That dog, always prone and pulled along, as though constantly being killed and paraded through town to make an example. What did it do — Whatever it did, don’t do it.

The comet taught us how to watch the war. The comet contended that fire is romantic and recommended we each behold it alone, envisioning out there somewhere our next lover, craning up at this same sky. Was the comet simply endeavoring to keep us divided, I asked it, and the comet did not reply. Then we discovered the men who wanted us dead were convening at night on the site where their hero had been unceremoniously interred. And so we exhumed the guy, burned him up, and fed his ash to the rapids, to be churned into marlstone and mud-rich air. Good thinking. Now he’s everywhere.