Nicky Beer

The night’s turned everything to junipers shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit, weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut. I forget this isn’t my universe sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling most of my life to land here, a lone skirl in the immaculate hush. In my world I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung. Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will do if I don’t keep a close eye on it. Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms, seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well— I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.

After Jim Steinmeyer’s book “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear” Over the years they hunted, the wayward apprentice watchmakers, the disappointing sons who transformed their surnames, hunted over acres of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey, mustaches a breath from feral, poured an ocean of fortune into fabrications of brass and iron, spent entire seasons strumming massive harps of wire into perfect calibrations of invisibility, prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors, cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights, broke the legs of imitators and thieves, chewed holes in each other’s pockets, harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops making endless passes over the bodies of the dead, hoisted high a cenotaph for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits, breathed miles of delicate thread into the lost labyrinths of their lungs, all to make a woman float to make a woman float and none of them ever thought of simply asking her.

The Poet: Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine— where’s the pink crimp in my side where they took you out? The Octopus: It must be a dull world, indeed, where everything appears to be a version or extrapolation of you. The birds are you. The springtime is you. Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators— everything becomes you. I, with a shift of my skin, divest my self to become the rock that shadows it. Think of when your reading eyes momentarily drift, and in that instant you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text gone before you can focus. That’s me. Or your dozing revelation on the subway that you are slowly being digested. Me again. I am the fever dream in which you see your loved ones as executioners. I am also their axe. Friend, while you’re exhausting the end of a day with your sad approximations, I’m a mile deep in the earth, vamping my most flawless impression of the abyss to the wild applause of eels.