Nick Flynn

After Lucille Clifton Vulture, follow me up: here is the arm my mother held me aloft with (as well as she could, until she couldn’t), it is cut free of her body now, pulled away from her shoulder, away from her breath, as you, Vulture, point your wing toward her offered heart, toward me — let’s pound her fingers into paste, pound the hand open, come down, I chant, each word opens the sky, the clouds need to be warned — once she was hand & now she is wing, once she was dirt & now she is air, she was food & now she is bird, she was lifted & now she is gone.

Do this: take two fingers, place them on the spot behind your ear, either ear, the spot where your skull drops off into that valley of muscle & nerve—that is the muscle that holds up the skull, that turns the dumb bone this way & that, that nods your face up & down when you think you get it—press deeper, touch the little bundle of nerves buried there, buried in the gristle—the nerves that make you blink when the light bewilders you, that make your tongue slide in & out when you think you’re in love, when you think you need a drink, touch that spot as if you have an itch, close your eyes & listen, please, close your eyes—can you hear it? We think our souls live in boxes, we think someone sits behind our eyes, lording in his little throne, steering the fork to the mouth, the mouth to the tit, we think hungry children live in our bellies & run out with their empty bowls as the food rains down, we sometimes think we are those hungry children, we think we can think anything & it won’t matter, we think we can think cut out her tongue, & then ask her to sing.

Here, at your feet, all the gargoyles of heaven— kneel upon your furnace, their tongues worship you. You can love only one, the one you rest your hand upon, his head so sharp, his sulphur breath...Even now a saint makes his way up your steps, on his knees he is coming, he will find you, with his sword he will kill the beasts, all of them— he swears this will save you. • Earlier, a deer stood by the side of the road deciding whether or not to kill me. I cannot blame her, I cannot blame anyone—many animals were hurt in the production of this book just as many trees were hurt & all the clouds. Open any book & the cloud above you bursts into flame, you know this & yet nothing stops you, the sky stuck to the end of your finger as you point to it. • This is how it works—the master does not bow before his servant, he does not stand naked before her robes, his hands are empty yet he does not offer— not even a cupful—of his emptiness, how could he? How could the world then keep spinning? He made his money (as they say) the old-fashioned way, meaning he earned it, meaning slaves, meaning go fuck yourself. • Geometry deals with properties of space. Figs (a "multiple fruit") are like strawberries only inside out—its skin is a receptacle. Saint Francis didn't eat for forty days, until his body erupted & now we call it ecstasy. Years later Frankenstein found a way to raise the dead.Friend, his creation mutters,flower. • A storm will come the radio says find a ditch & lie facedown in it. Find your ditch & lie facedown & pray we will all lie down & pray after all there's only so many places to hide. We all need help the land is vast & dense & full of eyes & so many flowers the soil inside us is darker than oil lie down in it & pray. • Remember: it's not that everything has to look like something else, or even remind you of something else—everything is something else. This is the story we've been telling ourselves since we could speak.Possess nothing, Francis says.Do good everywhere. No one believes those wings will lift you.

Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box  filled with enough Vicodin to kill me.  I would  have sworn that  I'd  thrown it away years earlier,  but apparently not. I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of them,  before  (finally, definitely)  throwing  them away.  I'd been sober  (again)  for  some years  when  I found that box,  but every addict  has  one— a  little  box,  metaphorical  or  actual— hidden away.  Before I flushed them  I held them in my palm,  marveling that  at  some  point in  the  not-so-distant  past it seemed a good idea  to  keep a  stash of  pills on hand.For an emergency, I told myself.  What kind of emergency? What  if  I needed  a root canal on  a  Sunday  night?  This little  box  would  see me through until the   dentist   showed   up  for   work  the  next  morning.  Half  my brain  told  me  that,  while  the other half  knew that  looking into that  box  was  akin  to  seeing  a photograph of myself standing on the  edge of a bridge,  a bridge  in the  familiar  dark neighborhood of  my  mind,   that   comfortable  place   where  I  could  somehow believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.

One boyfriend said to keep the bullets locked in a different room. Another urged clean it or it could explode. Larry thought I should keep it loaded under my bed,

Petals on a river, a tree in blossom, one pink bud—unopened—falls & is carried downstream & out to sea. From above the other petals seem to carry it. Closer— this is our map, these our footprints, we grew up drinking this water. At the start there was doubt, we lit a torch, no one believed we would make it. Closer— the legs, the heart, the lungs. It's too soon to say we were lucky, it's too soon to say anything until the cloud is pulled back from the sky, until the ringing is pulled back from the bells. Look— everyone we've ever known runs without thinking not away but into the cloud, where we are waiting

The cause of death seems to have been starvation—his throat closed & so he was no longer able to swallow. On his deathbed he was editing The Hunger Artist,

unlike you and I jesus knew he’d die some days a headache woke him it lingered nothing terrible but the word hung around his temples like this soul everyone wants but can’t find jesus knew he’d die he just didn’t know how & that bothered him sometimes & then he’d do one of his little bootleg tricks what the hell, didn’t hurt anyone didn’t make anyone disappear for- ever but the tricks stopped working he forgot why he did them & what for he confused a story about a guy named jesus with a story about a father he never knew & it all began to hang like a motheaten coat pulled out of a trunk on shaky days hey let’s return to the scene of the fucken tragedy at least we all know how it turns out instead of this end- less uncertainty hey let’s sell our souls a few more times no one’s really counting (those little papers you trade for your sins, what do you call them? anyone? no?) —anyway—jesus this jesus that god of nickel god of dime right, the real jesus he was lost he walked in- to the desert not far really his friends his disciples he told them he’d come back like us he said this every time he left but jesus never said wait never pointed to the sky never claimed he’d rise again never asked us to eat his flesh jesus never asked anything as far as I can tell he got tired everyday & then slept sometimes okay sometimes un- bearable, the dreams, the father pointing a finger at everyone a finger we can’t even look at.

They say you are made of clouds, they say you are made of feathers, they say you are everywhere or nowhere—we know you are both. Our flight is delayed, this airport another nowhere.If this is your final destination, the air murmurs,if a stranger or anyone you do not know well offers you anything... but how well & what's he offering & is this our final destination? At the hotel a man hands us the key to room three one three—home for a week or so. On the lobby tv a woman once apparently enormous holds her old jeans up to her body & smiles. Neil Diamond sings & when I go in- to the bathroom he follows.Everybody has one. Paradise is cloudless, they say, impossible to know. Yesterday a man was sucked into the earth as he slept—a sinkhole opened below his bed—not even his brother could save him. In the hotel restaurant my daughter orders corn flakes, they come with a pitcher of milk, she pours nearly all of it into her bowl, until I stop her she will keep on pouring. Three more tvs are screwed into the wall above us—a car goes round & round, a pitcher throws a baseball, a woman slams her racket to the clay. My daughter pushes her bowl away, picks two packets of jelly from the basket, pulls the plastic off one, then the other, lifts each to her tongue—red, then purple. The wallpaper is the texture of trees, a landscape seen from above, a contour map of an unnamed mountain, people wandering the face of it. If we were closer we could tell river from leaf, mountain from shadow, a fire making, unmaking itself. What is this strand of DNA between us, unconnected to & of the shadows parading past, our outlines already chalked into the earth? I live on air & light, I drag my daughter everywhere, this morning she muttered Federer Federer Federer like a spell & it was as if he stood before us again, his perfect red jersey. How many mornings, the sun not yet up, did I swivel on the red stool at the supermarket lunch counter, my mother in back extruding donuts, the aisles dark & empty behind us—she'd bundled me into the car still sleeping to get there. I'd twirl or wander or make toast, contemplating the basket of butter & jelly, each in its little wasteful tub, impervious to air or time or decay.Angel of Grape, your purple body not only filled those coffins but took the shape of those coffins—emptiness made whole, color now a shape.Angel, my daughter now wants only you, she asks for the whole basket, she pulls back each sheet, puts her tongue in— strawberry is her favorite, because it tastes like strawberry.

more the idea of the flame than the flame, as in: the flame of the rose petal, the flame of the thorn the sun is a flame, the dog’s teeth flames ~ to be clear: with the body, captain, we can do as we wish, we can do as we wish with the body but we cannot leave marks—capt’n I’m trying to get this right ~ the world’s so small, the sky’s so high we pray for rain it rains, we pray for sun it suns we pray on our knees, we move our lips we pray in our minds, we clasp our hands our hands look tied before us ~ I remember, capt’n, something, it didn’t happen, not to me—this guy, I knew him by face, I don’t remember his name, one night he’s walking home from a party, a car it clipped him, for hours he wandered, dazed, his family, his neighbors, with flashlights they searched, all night, the woods, calling out his name ~ here’s the part, capt’n, where I try to tell a story as if it were a confession: once, in elementary school, I was hiding out on damon rock, lighting matches & letting them drop to the leaves below—little flare- ups, flash fires—a girl wandered down the path, she just stood there, watching the matches fall from my hand— ~ capt’n, I’m trying to be precise: hot day, a cage in the sun, a room without air, the mind-bending heat, the music a flame—hey metallica hey britanny hey airless hey fuse, I don’t know how it happened, I was perched far above, I offered her a match to pull down her pants—one match, her hairless body, hey little girl, I dropped it unlit. I didn’t know what it was I was looking at. ~ hey capt’n I don’t know if I’m allowed hey capt’n years ago I’m walking down a road one drunk night, even now I wonder—sometimes still I imagine—was I hit by a bus, am I stumbling am I dazed, this dream this confession, hey little girl is yr daddy home, hey capt’n hey sir am I making any sense? ~ the boy stood on the burning deck, stammering elocution, wait— the boy stood in the burning cage, stammering electrocution, no—the boy stood in the hot-hot room stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did I did. ~ hey metallica hey britanny hey airless hey fuse hey phonograph hey hades hey thoughtless hey ~ capt’n this room is on fire capt’n, this body will not stop burning capt’n oh my captain this burning has become a body capt’n oh my captain this child is ash capt’n oh my captain my hands pass right through her capt’n oh my captain I don’t know what it is I’m looking at ~ it’s important to be precise, to say what I know— the sun is fire, the center of the earth is fire, yr mother’s cunt is fire, an airless flame, still, still, I don’t know why she pushed me out, this cold-cold furnace, we all were pushed, a rim of light around our heads, she gave a kick, sent us crawling out, toward the flame, toward the pit, the flaming pit, yr lover’s cunt, the flame her tongue, the flame a thorn ~ everyday, capt’n, sir, captain, I was left, a child, after school, I was alone, I found a match, under the sink I found a can, a spray can,ly-sol dis-infectant, it made a torch, I was careful the flame didn’t enter the can, I knew it would explode, somehow I knew, I’m trying to be clear sir—the flame shot across the room, then it was gone