Pluralite des Mondes

Each morning before dawn, a woodpecker and a scold of jays fight over the feeder, screaming and screeching like demons. Over the course of the day, other birds call out: the spotted towhee, the robin and finch, and the siskin with its pitiful, one-note squeal. At dusk, the mourning dove’s breathy melody echoes through the canyon. It’s enough to break your heart, this tune I can imagine being played on a flute carved from bone.

First of all, we’ve been using the wrong word all these years. It means without rhythm. The only arrhythmia is asystole, I tell my students. That’s the flat line accompanied by the clang of alarms in all the television dramas. There’s not much you can do about it; the patient is dead and usually stays dead. The correct word to describe all the ways a heart can dance and die is dysrhythmia, which means a disordered rhythm. There’s the soldiered march of ventricular tachycardia or the pirouette twirl of Torsades. Ventricular fibrillation simply quivers on the monitor. When these rhythms occur, the patient is pulseless and sometimes you give magnesium, usually shock, and always pump their chest to the beat of whatever song lives in your head. Once I was speaking with a man who stopped in the middle of a word, and I watched the rhythm on the monitor change. When I didn’t feel a pulse, I started CPR, and then we placed the paddles on his chest and shouted, Clear, just like in the movies. And it worked. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said, I don’t feel good. And I said, It’s ok, I’m going to get you better and smoothed the hair from his forehead, but then the alarms blared and the V tach returned, and we did it all over again—the drugs and compressions and shocks, and his eyes opened one more time and he mouthed, I’m scared around the tube I’d placed in his throat, and I said, I’m here with you. But that was the last time he said anything. We didn’t stop for thirty minutes or more. He’d waved to his family when the medics loaded him into the ambulance with just a little chest pain, so they were shocked when I entered the small consult room to tell them he had died. His teenage son collapsed and landed on his knees and punched the ground and said, But we were fighting, and I think the last thing I said was I hate you. All I’m trying to say is that it’s really important to use the right words.

We’d lift gin from your mother’s cabinet and walk the hallways of Robert Asp Middle taking swigs in plain sight from a 20 oz Pepsi Clear, your gap tooth flashing at teachers we passed, your hands forgetting to pass the bottle, screwing and unscrewing the cap. After that I moved. We lost track. The news was six months old by the time I heard. When they don’t say what happened you know what happened. We used to catch rides from highschoolers out to the Red to jump the bridge. Water thick with clay. Red with clay. We kept close watch for underwater logs. Smoked Menthols. A 40-foot drop into swirls of currents. One time you stayed under and kicked downstream to trick me. Nervous, I stared at the surface for signs. No signs. I stumbled down the bank to dive in. The moment you were certain you had me the valley cracked with your laughter.

Mine is a life dedicated to the calculation of loss. I know with certainty almost nothing. Yet here I am executing legions of decisions each moment. I aim to organize my ledgers like a skull. A place I imagine to be full. Of spreadsheets that seizure like cities. Undefined functions that compile just fine. Explore, record, explore, record, explore, record. Eventually I learn to limit the loss. I come to know where I should not go: The fire escape, zip codes with low property taxes, some drugs, some jobs. Then the threshold beyond which I'm just an airplane. Occasionally I fly new routes but never load more than a few hundred passengers. Nor advance into the sequence of sky that vibrates behind the sky I have seen. Never the pilot undressing in a suburb when the flight is over. Pressing an unclosed hand against a cold bedroom window.

The light came on. I reached out my hand, wet and callused. A statue, throat full of ash.

You’re doing it again—debating the use of beauty. I’m sorry, really. I haven’t been to a party in over a year and I keep needing to ask everyone if they’ve bought a gun too. So I feel most American when I’m masturbating. Or maybe when the DoorDash driver leaves my food in the lobby. Or when my boyfriend begs to be degraded. It’s all the same, really: Fetch. Now he’s guiding my hands to his throat. I kiss every inch of him until he cries then slap him. It’s okay, I whisper. Let it out, I dig. I enter him in increments, as rain would stitch starlight into marsh. You’re doing it again—confessing everything but the point. Who knows, I’ve only been alive once and so far l’d rather God’s austere silence. What’s love got to do w/ it? What’s love but a second-hand smoke? I’d go ghost too if my poems kept begging for a mercy they were born to invent. What earth-awful static. Yeah, I’d build a gate w/ the leftover bones. Use me Daddy, our lonely music. Yeah yeah I’d paint it pearl too.

I feel like—he starts, rattling the silverware drawer to lift a spoon, walk it to his coffee, stir—something’s against me. He’s said this before. Our backyard grass, the color of drought, is drowning in a downpour. Our plastic pool is half-filled with rainwater, dirt, the tiny black flickering of mosquito larvae. Someone should drain it. It’s been eleven months of looking. He runs his hands through his silver hair, shakes his head. The backdoor lock won’t latch. There’s a crack in our bedroom window that I’m afraid will splinter come winter, and the credit cards are maxed. Mama, our children shout from another room, fighting over a plastic toy we got from a drive-thru restaurant, interrupting my calculations on how long we have before foreclosure. I just feel like—his voice breaking—I’m not worth anything anymore. I flinch when I hear the shatter of the toy against our wall, then the wail of our youngest whipping against my mind like a salt-storm. Someone should keep the peace. Someone should cross the cold kitchen linoleum to hold my husband. Someone should.

Too much hope bloats the peasants was an old Church tenet. Your grandpa told me. He was a Catholic Priest, did you know that? When I’d finally asked him why he left he answered: ‘after years of waiting nothing came . . .’ Maybe waiting is what faith is. The way he’d patiently sip low- grade vodka from wax-paper cups most days all day to sand away his burrs, which grew back every morning. As for me, after I learned Mark’s gospel I knew how things would end I knew The State would win. Three more times. And when I crossed the street to where no son is saved it hurt to change, even though it was best to. I think for god to believe in me is what I’d wanted. This Easter, I heard through swung-open doors congregants singing as one Were you there? Were you there? Let me tell you, Lan, I wasn’t; I was in a car driving north passing San Quentin listening to Dylan sing the presidents, too, must sometimes have to stand naked.

With trembling hands, it lifted the charcoal and drew.

the first thing the auk notices about heaven is just how thin it is: one aglow tentacle of a jellyfish stretched between the high cirrus & plankton-dusted space. the amenities are that it feels like flying & that there's no shade. the auk is not impressed. she never needed air to fly & she'd like to sleep without the sun's insistence. oh well. she bides her time laying eggs on the backs of passing birds. she dives for plankton but the stars are farther than they look. space is barren, shorn only rarely by mute mirror-sided whales. she floats for some immeasurable period on the tufts of a great conversion: the sailors of st. kilda, christian at long last. then they forget what they've done or they die or the wind changes. the auk, who has subsisted on clouds, snags a piece of the tastiest & drags it down with her as she descends. it is then—in how the fogs wreathe her, in some gone-grey twist of the light—that she transforms / witch-auk lands in the north atlantic. she is an invention: the fantasy & its rejection— a monstrosity—slippage—not-human & not-not. the sea is a sheet of glass that breaks to pieces, breaks to pieces—wounds that suture themselves. working as fast as they can.

after Carl Dennis I earned a degree quoting the many thoughts of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Elliot, etc. Every night, my head bent at the reading table where the lamp light licks my eyes into an itch, an epitaph echoing in my mind because I thought books were going to be the destrier that'd gallop me to my slaughter. In my other life, I am a boy, and what do I know except to run alongside the other boys, bare skin, leaf-pants. Our bodies wet from the river's very spittle. I climb trees, learn the dialects of leopards, sleep with birds cooing by my bedside. In that other life, a boy my age who has my face slits my wrist and what gushes out is gold, and we aren't surprised. In our lexicon, there is no word for force, kill, bite, etc. The closest word to violence is forty syllables long. In my current life, I'm an ellipsis —a thread traveling in the tendon of a dead animal. I wake up every night amid bones clacking then distilling into ash. In this life, I'm 23, sober, jobless, have dreams where I stand before students who'd never hesitate to laugh at how I pronounce their fathers' fathers' names. I write poems where I am either an arrow or the body that suffers its violence. In that life, my other life, I soliloquize into shells, and my God eavesdrops, laughs, advises me to be a comedian. The angels nod, agree with Him. I'm a bridge and a boon. I build lives out of ligaments. My clan puts me on a camel to save a dying continent. I am neither a lamb nor a wolf. I am a tree at a river's tongue, which means archangels gather around me to assign duties to destinies. In my one true life, I search for joy. Colted by loss, paddled by ghosts of women who planted their names in my ribs before knowing the calm of coffins. In that other life, I am no one's child, even joy begs to adopt me.

I kept my mouth open. I practiced falling asleep with a clamp to my lips. If I was hungry, I swallowed hard- boiled eggs. I showed my neighbors a kindness. I dug holes through my backyard. Little graves for the lost. I said a prayer. I fell asleep. I dreamed of severing the fingers of the three federales who raped my best friend in the sundrenched alley. I woke up at 3:46. I opened the window. I knew not to close my mouth. I listened to the hallway's faintest voice. The weeping. The echo of an ancient hurt. If I was in pain, I stared out the window at a bed of cempasúchil. Petals bright as a bonfire. If I was in pain, I recorded myself. I unhinged my jaw. Its muscles pulsing. Watch this pain in the old VHS tapes in the basement. That year, another friend went missing after taking a bus from the maquila to her father's house & another friend stopped speaking for seven months. The new bruise on her neck darkened like a dead flower, her voice a coffin to carry her dead. & another friend⸻ & another friend⸻ & today, a new flower grows in my backyard, & I blow the dust off the videotapes, & today, my mouth is still wide open.

The sound of quiet. The sky indigo, steeping deeper from the top, like tea. In the absence of anything else, my own breathing became obscene. I heard the beating of bats' wings before the air troubled above my head, turned to look and saw them gone. On the surface of the black lake, a swan and the moon stayed perfectly still. I knew this was a perfect moment. Which would only hurt me to remember and never live again. My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for.

of extinction; but these are the colors.

It was a tropical landscape, much like Florida’s, which he knew.  (Childhood came blazing back at him.) They glided across a black And apathetic river which reflected nothing back Except his own face sinking gradually from view As in a fading photograph.                                                 Not that he meant to stay, But, yes, he would play something for them, played Ravel; And sang; and for the first time there were tears in hell. (Sunset continued. Years passed, or a day.) And the shades relented finally and seemed sorry. He could have sworn then he did not look back, That no one had been following on his track Only the thing was that it made a better story To say that he had heard a sigh perhaps And once or twice the sound a twig makes when it snaps. 

I will teach my daughter how to carry the body of her mother west stepping over the Rockies to bury her beneath the red chest of Utah’s desert. Cup my hands over hers as she smooths oxidized dirt careful to cover the face first if it makes her feel better. She will learn how all daughters of our lineage bury sins of unrepentant mothers. The line of graves, a long ribcage.

Sometimes she sings, whispers, prays. One day she carries her coffee out to a patio at her temporary residence which still retains two palm trees. She can see the moon, not yet set, and feel the breeze, still normal. In the background, fighter planes roaring, she doesn’t mention them. She says, I’ve been thinking. I just don’t know . . . There are gaps in the message. Sometimes she cries, pulls herself together, apologizes. Her favorite student who posted his little tomato and mint gardens on Instagram was incinerated en route to coffee with her one month ago. He’d been down to the beach to take some deep breaths. So handsome he could have been a film star. Recently he told her he wanted to write stories of his people in a way anyone could understand, those who’d never been in war, or been to Gaza. He knew she would smile. This had been her job, encouraging students. She’s afraid to know what’s happened to everyone else. He was just walking over. She was proud he had realized this was something he could really do.