Rae Armantrout

1 That a memory, caught and mounted for permanent display, is not much like anything that happens can’t be surprising. But where does that leave us? Night at the Museum, the set pieces in their comic ignorance of one another take the stage. 2 In this series, he tosses her on the bed like laundry as she struggles irrelevantly against the stickiness of tape and it’s just this: the blind persistence of her struggle and his (feigned?) indifference, the way each proceeds, blinkered and mechanical, into whatever this recreates

1 I stare at a faint spinning disc in the black endlessly ready to pounce. 2 I actually say, "I'm so sick of zombies!" 3 Viral relics in the genome? Genes that switch themselves off and on, unthinking but coordinated? 4 Zombie surfeit Half-off zombie. The best zombie imitation. Invisible zombie hand

1 Stars are the campfires of exiles. Language exists to pull things close. * Stop that! Communications are being monitored. Collusion is forbidden. Humanity will be punished with the profusion of new jargons. 2 Inverted in glass, a white cup invents the underworld. * Fog thins to chiffon, nylon, Easter. * In the universe next door, I’m gone and the shadows of the leaves of the elm I had pulled down still make a fuss over the earth.

1 Discomfort marks the boundary. One early symptom was the boundary. The invention of hunger. I could use energy. To serve. Elaborate systems in the service of far-fetched demands. The great termite mounds serve as air-conditioners. Temperature within must never vary more than 2 degrees. 2 Which came first the need or the system? Systematic. System player. Scheme of Things. The body considered as a functional unit. “My system craves calcium.” An organized set of doctrines. A network formed for the purpose of ... “All I want is you.” 3 was narrowing their options to one, the next development. Soldiers have elongate heads and massive mandibles. Squirtgun heads are found among fiercer species. Since soldiers cannot feed themselves, each requires a troupe of attendants. 4 Her demands had become more elaborate. He must be blindfolded, (Must break off his own wings) wear this corset laced tight (seal up the nuptial cell) to attain his heart’s desire. Move only as she permits (Mate the bloated queen each season) or be hung from the rafters. How did he get here? 5 Poor baby, I heard your hammer. The invention of pounding. “As soon as it became important that free energy be channeled.” Once you cared to be set off from the surrounding medium. This order has been preferred since improvement was discovered. The moment one intends to grow at the expense. When teeth emerge Demand for special treatment was an early symptom

1 Since the irrational “because I said so” start, they’d had their differences: color that isn’t really color, spin that isn’t spin because attitude’s best when it has no content. Ask a physicist what “charge” is; he’ll say your question makes no sense. 2 Word had it that if they surrendered their feckless ways and their lives with no end, if they joined up, they would get a head, something to speak for them: The head says, “I don’t want to die.” Says, “I am all alone here.”

A vine drapes the fence in its cool enthusiasm, stemmed cascade. My skin has collapsed in flounces, in anticipation. • Look how I change the subject without changing, I appear to say — which seems like nothing but is practice for the bigger change to come. • My mind is just like the stance and disposition of these trees — dense, sparse, conical, lopsided, frilly (as was the mind of the tenant before me

1 The subject will claim that she has been taken to the wrong place. That the room she is brought back to is not the room she left. That these comings and goings are happening to someone else, are gathering momentum controlled by a secret mechanism. That she needs to tell someone. 2 I walk out the door to the stone bench without meaning to (without meaning it?), each step jarring my frame as it would anyone’s

God and Mother went the same way. *       *       * What's a person to us but a contortion of pressure ridges palpable long after she is gone? *       *       * A thin old man in blue jeans, back arched, grimaces at the freezer compartment. *       *       * Lying in the tub, I'm telling them— the missing persons— that a discrepancy is a pea and I am a Princess.

What flickers with some delicacy of feeling, some hesitancy— and then persists. • What circles. What darts. • Hunger is like the inside biting you. “Like” is like insomnia. • These green cherry tomatoes; their false pregnancies, staked. Lustrous. • “That’s all I meant.” All I meant by “witches.”

Stiff stilts of   herself. Silver bag of   herself with turquoise gilt midriff. (Shake it but no more will fit.) Red lipstick line between the folds — precise — opposite baby’s soft gurgling. Have you lost your passes? Greeks pictured the afterlife as an insipid version of  the world they knew. But they couldn’t see this. Two women, with red mesh crests atop white hair, enter the lounge area; one laughs, “I feel like we should say something.”