Attempts on Life

Annemarie Kemeny

Department of English
SUNY-Stony Brook

 

Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, I’m just the mouth piece. The whole is buried in an old plot with its corpse roaming. Sometimes it comes to haunt me, and I spill a little wine on the carpet to loosen its tongue. There are no guests. They’d expect butter-churn stories complete with cow bells in some smoky evening, the fat dripping from a one-day-dead pig. A real red dawn summoned by the five-year plan to every village. And will you visit Ellis Island where all you people come from? This frantic itch to swear shivers in through walls and sticks. Words at times are juicy as the glutton’s steak. A real mouth piece. For what? Speech is in my fingertips. It has been known to bloom through ten skyfuls of snow. It also melts in Spring. And it always finds the surest dam.

 

No, it’s not poor huddled masses of Cassandras convulsing to the currents of a blank Apollo. Our frames are not that open to the trade winds. I’ve seen Parnassus gray and bare against the sun. It’s a good spook dressed in crags. But something else. When it takes hold, I never twitch and this broken English ain’t no second tongue. It’s one big jam to scramble the airwaves to my crib. Before my mouth was a piece of something. Like a slice of pie missing the perfection of its disk. Except that Sylvie had a hunch about that. Perfection is terrible–it cannot have children. So I dish it piecemeal for a new set of yakkers who will ask the past in and play at haunted house. Well, I lied. I twitch something crazy when it takes hold. We both grab tight until I fade. It’s a seance. Anything short of a seance is a good short story neatly tied like tubes. Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, it’s a badmouth, and it’s blowing at a land that hasn’t slipped.

 

***

 

Writing is the only act worth dropping. It wouldn’t suffer from ending on the rocks like meat does. Its split-open muscles wouldn’t twitch. Its broken shinbone wouldn’t slice through skin. It would just silently carve itself into a whole coast line of Rosetta stones. But what would it be carving if not the meat that fell with it? The world text has real god-chunks rotting between vowels. Somewhere amidst the schizes and flows of ecriture a tiny slit is bleeding where some uncle’s finger scraped it. Don’t you feel your narratives of oppression and your literary productions of the real stuffed to bursting with the thief’s missing ear, some woman’s bloodless clitoris and her daughter’s head, your apple, that fell too far from its tree? This ink, invisible though it is, has come from where her head and body used to meet.

 

***

 

The wall by my bed was always threatening to fall–it sustained cannon-ball damage during the war. I constantly wanted to excavate, hoping to find the ammunition all pock-marked and heavy. Momma, of course, assured me that the only thing left of it was a shaky wall we couldn’t hang pictures on. Yet regardless of her hovering protectively between me and the world as any good Rilkean mother would, I spent my childhood with a phantom cannon ball lodged ominously behind a thin layer of plaster and an even thinner layer of yellow paint. I used to tap the wall as a primitive form of eartraining, and soon I could tell that it had more holes than it had bricks. This wall I faced every night in sleep, this wall that felt cool against my feet in summer, was my umbilical chord to 1944. Sure I had seen films like Budapest Spring in which women, who always looked a bit too much like grandmother with their soft brown waves falling to the side and the dark lipstick and the severe wool suit, were shot into the Danube. I remember the domino effect, the unflattering shoes left behind for the Arrow Cross gunners who were flipping for gold insoles, and then the utter vacuum of a spring sky admitting nothing. And I remember this woman and a man doing the love thing when all the Danube carried was pieces of the Black Forest. And if there ever was such a thing as ancestral memory, I remember hiding between the waxed cracks of the parquet when grandmother stuffed her down pillow under her dress. She wanted to look pregnant for the Arrow Cross.

 

Momma gets this sudden space in her eyes as she tries to describe for me the sound of machine guns on a tenement lock. I want to tell her I was there hiding out under her shoes, too shocked to scream, with all our eyelids doing a crazy family dance to a-thousand-rounds-per-minute and grandmother’s pillow bulging out to her right side where no infant could live. And the door slamming the wall of the foyer and grandmother squeezing momma so close that the down in the pillow cracks and the orders for the swine to move and the gun to the spine and momma’s whimpering into grandmother’s belly and grandmother’s dark lips in a line with the horizon and the words ghetto and lager and grandfather’s rages melting through his knees–we are poor got nothing but a wife and kid and trouble on the way spare us you are good men–rifle butt between the ribs and the trembling sullen bargain-begging silent sobbing unbroken procession of yellow stars down the stone corridor and the fresh blood seeping into my floorcrack from the grooves of a stolen shoe.

 

I would like to say I remember the ghetto–that I was the guts, the little bit of future in every willed breath grandmother took to survive. I can’t. Maybe ancestral memory has more holes in it than bricks. It would be the stench I would have to bring to the page–one of those fold-out ads that trap clouds of perfume and give a magazine its sex appeal. Step right up folks, sample the dying and the decomposed. Just do it with the lushly dead. Poke your nose into communal buckets for the urge. Try to dig up asphalt with soupy nails to bury the dead. No. You can’t keep from being haunted. No Achilles here to come down a peg. Not even Dali to paint your shit surreal. And it’s the stench that blinds you and plugs your ears and numbs your touch that I can’t conjure up. It’s unnameable. The only true god the ghetto ever knew.

 

***

 

The war never happened. Grandmother is goo-goo-eyed over the soaps. My other grandmother is dead after a life-time of rheumatism and which seventeenth-century king fucked whom with what underhanded purposes. The war never happened. And what bastard or bitch was next on the throne. Daddy cultivated a fine cancer by minimizing his diet to headcheese and spam. I don’t remember his teeth so the fact that he lost them at eighteen is irrelevant. The war never happened. And how many boils Marx had. And how she was ashamed of her big breasts and how she wrapped them until they sagged. The man-bird has to dress nice if he wants to be a father. That’s why only the woman-bird is gray. That yellow and blue thing on the teapot must have been a man-bird then. The war never happened. We won’t cry over spilt blood. If we drown the baby in the bathwater, it will finally make sense to dump her. And what a big nose you have. You’ve seen one snowflake, you’ve seen them all. The war never happened. And your mother is a beautiful woman. She can afford unlimited hours of beauty sleep now that the government check has replaced my only son (cries profusely). And you know Rasputin was a rascal. You don’t know who Rasputin was? (sigh). The family is going to the dogs. The war never happened. I prayed and prayed on that cold stone floor for him to return. And he cut off their heads because they wouldn’t give him sons. And the cat you dragged in gave me fleas for a week. How is your beautiful mother? The war never happened.

 

***

 

Writing is the only act worth acting out. If you prefer the organic metaphor, it takes root against the wind in deserts and its ghost dance splashes the sun. It oozes down in glaciers and builds islands. It drags on. It prefers the whip. It picks its scabs against the ultimate, the strong. Does nothing. Mimes. Gets hooked on opium and dreams. Carries its fetus to the nearest john. Drops hints. Puts in a few good words. Bleeds and takes a scraping against cancer. Dies.

 

***

 

Purges in triumphant silence. Daddy would appear once a light year at our place as the man of science come to chide the masses for belief in words that kill and the evil eye. He took the empty streetcar across the Danube, full of compassion for lost time. I’d summon fevers, hacking coughs, wounds attributed to something someone said. An aura of fake death to kindle old paternal fears about succession. And you thought our transcendental Fathers bit the clay. No. They dance to our rhythms now and obey false cadences as if their life depended on it. It does.

 

Let me break the silence. If you plan to butcher someone’s soul–either little by little over that proverbial lifetime-of- devotion, or suddenly, by wringing their thin chicken neck– someone is writing your darkroom dirties into headlines. When you get the urge to abandon what you made, your airplane will excrete it. When you tear your side to dig through ribs, the pain of wrenching will be more than biblical. Somebody will sign their name across your lungs. Every time you breathe it will muck up the room. And when your gossip blooms red in the spring, stones will mark the spot where the town whore bled. Every foot that wanders bare into your town will read it. Their prints will talk up a storm. And when you gather your token nigger in your arms and rent your wisdom out on what it takes to loosen the embrace, your balls will vanish whip, chain and uncle, from the book.

 

So daddies of the world with your magic carpets and skeleton closets, relax. I’ve come bearing gifts. You’ve asked me in song, you’ve sworn me in rape. Here is your immortality.

 

***

 

According to Rilke, poetry is a kind of apprenticeship that prepares the most deserving among us for love. It is a beautiful sentiment (letter seven, the one about relationships), but I am slightly suspicious about electing a chosen people based upon oneself. The big bang might be lonelier than the poetic stairs you had to take to reach it. We might say that disgust and disillusionment were the lot of those writhing, huddled masses that were not developing into healthy apple trees. But what if I, the living mascot of the developmental tale, should find some more disgust and disillusionment at the height of my seedy powers? What if I, poet extraordinaire, wheeler-dealer in immortality, should get stuck around the crotch of my inevitable Bildungsroman given me by covenant? Oh yes! The rainbow sign. God gave Lawrence the rainbow sign. The world made new. “From the heart a red ray, from the brow a gold, from the hips a violet leaps.” Violet, indeed. Royal purple. The seed of seeds. The hottest chemical stain on the market. Except that my mother and my grandmother always insist on invisible ink. Like the one I am writing with now.

 

***

 

Didn’t drown. Didn’t break his neck-joint in a scarf-loop. Didn’t pine away on poison petals for unrequited love. Didn’t overdose on elixir. Didn’t dry out with the weeds on a war field, sword-in-hand. Consumption didn’t eat holes into him. His wasn’t a one-woman oven in a kitchen pumped to the stature of Auschwitz. But his head was brought in upon platter if war is half the bitch of legends. And his head held a tongue that spoke the smallest scrap of Babel. A chip off the old block that was once some God’s shoulder curve. Whose face was it this time that launched a thousand cattle trains to camp? He wrote poems about chickenwire stretching in the moonlight, juiced. And before that it was moonlight and the weight of lovers bending emblems into wheat fields. No one knows him in this world of nations. Any verdict he might have improvised from bone-mush is Chinese or Greek, at best. Bla-bla from the belly of a war that never happened. So let me give you lives in a nutshell, without cracking the meat.

 

Don’t know date of birth. Don’t know age at death. Killed his twin brother as he slid through the birth canal. An inadvertent crushing, a tarrying for green light. Killed his mother on entering. The world. The guilt of the sole survivor until they herded him into the engine. Premonitions of the past. To think in metaphor despite the fleas, the typhoid and the guards. Hallucinations of the sane. Eclogues and hexameter finally worthy of their turf. An artificial genre, like summer homes and quick vacations, like showers in gas. All the civilized comforts a bit displaced in one postmodern jumble. Hocus pocus. If we kick our plot in the usual place, we’ll lay to rest our master narrative. The nazis were great masters of the readymade. The cutting edge in surreal flicks. The expert tease. The laugh behind the flow and schiz. A woman’s buttock– a bar of soap. Her hair–a blanket against Russian winters. Let’s disconnect the oven and frustrate their expectations of the clean. When they try to read the nozzle in the old way as a comfy mother’s womb, we’ll surprise them with the atmosphere. A one-act play for lungs. Then we’ll reconnect the oven and fry our hungry guests.

 

Want to document how signifiers play? Go read a deathcamp. Do your number on the Palestinian shifter. See if the bullet has a referent. And when I give you this life in a nutshell, be glad the meat is gone.

 

***

 

Somewhere in its bedded mud the Danube holds a skeleton crouched into a barrel. The familiar closet would’ve hit too close to the so-called nerve. Saint Gellert rolled from the top of the mountain, Saint Gellert on the rocks. The hill channels the river’s curve where the roaring barrel did its belly-flop. I swore I had given up this conjuring of lives from the nutshell. A necromancing crook that pulls more than veils over your eyes. A tale told. For the welfare of the worm in the apple. Do you like picking history in the warm autumn breezes to make cider? Maybe with a small edge to the flow, a little cloud to hide the nakedness. Wait! We are born opaque and make loads of noise. Good. Roll out the barrel and we’ll have a barrel of fun.

 

Isn’t it strange that the wine was so literally red on landing. Or rivering. If it was in winter, there might have been a loud crack and splat–a momentary wave-crest over drift- ice, maybe a quick whirlpool that popped up, and then the heavy ooze of the iced river blanketing the deed. If it was in spring, the drop would’ve been shortened by the volume of molten snow eating up the banks. If the sun shone, the contour of the barrel over those jutting white rocks may have left the eyes of the onlookers sore with knowing. If it was misty with a thick drizzle (the bitten kind), those connoisseurs of wine may have felt a muffled twang at the sudden lack of sound. And maybe the barrel was rotten or too dry and was smashed half-way down the trip and left just the typical roll of a breaking body down the slope. Or maybe, like the war, it never happened. The executioners didn’t stop and dip their hands in the Danube’s upper stretch.

 

***

 

They have those silver poplars pillaring our field of vision. The summer light is wind-blown over reclining hills and it teases out those woman dreams that everyone forgets after the cock’s crow. The usual distance shimmers with breath. Where the poet stood, the dirt road whispers that the land is a unanimous womb and all those rows a welcome mat to wipe on. You see, the polka-dotted maiden with the pitcher spilling on her breast just got done tying the red scarf around the neck of her baby pioneer. Maybe for you she shook ribbons into her cleavage, shoe-stringed to woo your pen from the lazy fruit trees and the sailing grass. What she picks out of the earth is too small–a patch of grease for the work week’s engine. And the stain of currants popping on the tongue and the orchards where we picked them shoot the breeze. She stirs the grub and embroiders the foreman’s day with thighs. The mother, whom our poet laureate imagined hen-shaped, cooking with smoke that tints the village, has just stopped bowing at the medal conferred upon her Hindu arms. She brings the slab of bacon from the snaking food line and melts it into the land’s familial romance. All around her the blond river Tisza shivers in its banks toward Africa. It will never reach.

 

There have been marches en masse–the wind-tickled imaginary sighs. Those dances that convulse the hips stop and start, turning black or turning blue against the wall. When I open the latest version of the nation’s history, my pressed daughter will crumble out, missing at the edges. The paragraph is stained. And where she never was, the next world will grow up and spit itself in the eye. As she tears half her usual freedom into tatters, she thinks it’s real. Somewhere in a nerve her pricked fingers still sting from pinning a new flag on the sky. She thinks it’s real. As good as the next fluffy cloud or geometric plane or poem or meal or bed. This woman mooned the red star as it fell. But before that, she grew wet just thinking of its tips. Five was her lucky number. So, as General Electric spreads her chignoned, waltzing on the screen, maybe something of her shrinks from the lens. If Lenin never lived, still doesn’t live, and never will live, maybe something of herself will miss the feel of her legs as she is gliding. She’ll grow wet to the rhythms of Strauss and think it real. After all, she is the map they have redrawn again. If they pressed hard enough this time, maybe the Danube spilled under her skin to let her know. It never had been, still isn’t, and never will be, blue.

 

***

 

I took to sailors early. It was the gifts they lavished on my buxom, melancholy mother. We’d share the foreign spoils, which were the promises of tangible mornings in the kitchen, burned eggs, the concrete linking of hands despite high levels of lead in the blood. Everything was Made in DDR, England, the USA. And the marriages that never took place must have been made in that eroticized heaven where Christ could satisfy a universe of the rejected.

 

It always seemed to happen in summer. As soon as I could talk, we boarded trains for Yugoslavia, Austria. My mother read expectation into every reeling cornfield and foresaw the light at the end of tunnels miles before they dawned. I still feel like a dingy rabbit’s foot–the guarantor of consonants and vowels against their tarnishing at sea. At our destinations we were always the last to leave the platform. Our bundles, too, were amulets–all this snail house baggage couldn’t possibly be stranded in some corridor of space, without a house somewhere to fill.

 

I felt smaller than the clutter we compressed into the journey. The transition from sentences to asphalt was never smooth or matter-of-fact. I needed to sleep away all that nowhere, the opal shimmering left of my mother as she hovered between the last man and thin air. Someone should’ve told her that Marlow was chiseled for calling her the horror of the world. Why was Brandy such a fine girl? Was it because she put out and launched slow, mournful ballads out to sea? She should’ve been a fire-breathing typhoon to wreak havoc on that freighter’s bonding crew as they were swapping conquered-pussy stories in the dark.

 

It was strange to see my mother fade in and out of flesh like some Star Trek goddess beamed aboard the Enterprise but lost in transit. We just sat there, crouched on the bundles made of coats, dishes, nail files, underwear, shoes, and let the dusk fall down on us. I don’t know what she was hoping for in the hundredth abandoned railroad station with a shitload of history on her back. Could it be that history doesn’t repeat? That each time she made the epic journey from bed to some forever she traveled light on the aura of first love? Did she see the ship ceremonically sunk in favor of the land where words take root and grow old together as stories?

 

The train already left our side to transport tourists to their beige hotels. I listened in disbelief to the announcer’s voice prattling train schedules, insisting on the punctual arrival of the 5:05 from Athens. But I know that every time I have a memory of waiting, or scribble the outlines of madonna and child on paper, I become an announcer of schedules, the I.O.U. for the timely arrival of bodies. I really don’t remember two drained figures holding vigil over vacuum. All train stations look the same to me with their Simon and Garfunkel burn-out, and what really stands out about momma’s boyfriends is their vanishing.

 

We took the 10:16 back. The train was gray and the seats were a red, gray, beige, black vinyl weave. We saw nothing of tunnels or cornfields. Our reflections rode with us in a steady drama of double or nothing. Momma’s evenly sloping nose stood guard against the penetrating stranger straight across, already offering me half his sandwich. He struck up a conversation with me about the mystery blond by my side, and despite the constant shattering of facts against the wheels, I nudged my mother accomplice-fashion and she beamed him a smile. What I remember most about him is his disappearance over breakfast a month later, and the brass tacks of the journey I wouldn’t bet a life on.

 

***

 

Writing, lately, has been an act of desperation. I am not proud of that. Grabbing for a phrase as if it were a life- preserver leaves all kinds of revolutionary fervor to be desired. You can’t build utopia entirely on blind jabs at the future. I ought to plan for a watershed; for that erogenous point I can put my ring finger on; the epitome. But in the meantime, how do I keep from drowning in my own shed water? Maybe I’m just trying to understand what chronology obscures. Looking for the old one- two punch–writing blow by blow. Maybe I thrive on acts of desperation-the pointed gun; the gossip about how it wilts; the numbness of steel in the soul always mistaken for strength; the cut-throat word that finishes the present and makes future out of death. Very pagan. Very Judeo-Christian. It smacks of Nirvana. Strawberry Fields. Maybe it’s the blind jab that distills specks of place for us to live in. We are here to say, Rilke says. We are here to keep quiet, lest we disturb the dark gods, Lawrence says. Let the cunt and prick speak in silences. But what Lawrence never owned up to was that his words were full of pricks and cunts, just as those pricks and cunts were full of words. And maybe every desperate act is an attempt to save the dignity of that union from ourselves.

 

***

 

Don’t matter which boot-licking shore. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs that get to light the stove. The braindead books are leaning into our middles like international candy and we lick into the air. Grandma’s stroke coincided with call waiting. The four-foot pillar next door had no dough for health insurance. Made a sissy of her boy who masturbates and cries on trains. She has to tell me over the line where a numb electric goddess towels off her pain. She is next wall to me. I’m sick of hearing her distance through the bricks. I’m sick of hearing that boy’s silence through my fucking.

 

Meanwhile, Diamond goes life hopping between two shores. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs who’d love to burn him but instead will light the stove. It only hit me now that cigarettes are nested coals of fire. They feel like a mind one is about to lose. If only it could stay on the bus like a black umbrella. A bone I could bury like a dog. I’d die of rabies. Watch it float away on a trash mission in space. I swear I’d let it bleed from my busted reputation like some red desert. But it sticks and smells and thinks into the sink as ochre moments of the day when the heat becomes a man. The wheat waves through my windows. It is lotus and at night I light the stove. Grandma’s stroke will have to wait. The neighbor’s baby has to swim another month. I can’t afford this calling, dust to flight.

 

***

 

Dottie was the scrawny one who turned to tube pants at twelve. Cricket was freckled with Machiavellian talents for stealing the boys. She developed first. But only like goats with first Moses horns that itch. We followed with loose cotton hills moving to some law of plate tectonics, subject to erosion by wind and sand. Judy was the one becoming V. Her doctor told her about how an eighteen-year-old body grew up in her thirteen- year-old shell. Convenient as hell. Agatha sang. Her mother used to cut warts from shifty hands and counsel men on rashes that broke out in dreams. I hated the smell of offices like hers. And the skin problems of men. Scylla also developed first. I thought I’d be Charybdis and find out which death the boys preferred. They liked their water on the rocks, but didn’t know myths that bodies move by. Scylla had no need for sisters to complete a testy, rotten passage, they said.

 

That year we tried on one another’s souls like languages that never meant a thing. Why lie? It was like bee-hive clinging scatterbrained after the rocks the first boys threw. We never shared blood like brothers. The only stains we knew were test runs of saliva over our blue jeans to prove they were authentic, from America. None of them was. We had to fake our clothes, our breasts, immutable spaces the eye can always skip, our allegiance to the revolution, our fashionable longing for the West, our pains.

 

Even then the bee-bee-gunning menace was cutting off his sister’s head in photos. We thought him a danger only to the birds. And that boy who threw the hypodermic in my back from twenty feet must have stabbed by now. He was a connoisseur of wounds, an art critic on purples, blues and black paling toward yellow.

 

Yes, at Judy’s party it was Judy’s turn to cry. Nobody stabbed her, exactly. Maybe just a little in the back. Her doctor with the needles (a balder version of the spearing brat). Her doctor with the pills. Her parents with their booze license for daughters who talked back. Her hairdresser who told her blonds have fun. Her manicurist who discounted on blood. Her teachers who stripped her of all this. Her friends who conformed to hating bitches. Her mispronunciation of her dread, the silencing of always-spoken letters. Her body language from the wrist. The nowhere long before they found her dead.

 

They said shoo, and we flew away to strange inside countries where the prices are too high and we are always spotted for tourists hunting down mementos for a rush; where we think the women too pregnant, the men too chauvinistic for our taste, the air too brutal, the bridges unsafe, the ruins too old, the words too dense to get through. And where we are the women raising men, breathing bare necessary gulps, crossing our bras, renovating murals to cover up the crumbling of our tissue, settling for the first ventriloquist.

 

And then there were none. The pedophile’s childless wife suddenly broke in half. They buried her with a bunch of limestone angels, her heart completely bored. She believed in Christmas and the grace of God and the husband she took instead. Then the seamstress lost the rhythm of her pedal, the string snapped, the tapestry flew out and up. No child–no Lady of Shallott. No Sleeping Beauty. No Arachne. And no calico to warm somebody’s bed. Just a click of the line and the mannequin crushed into a landfill. Someday she’ll appear cross-sectioned for geologists as a scrawny layer of their momma scraping hell. The third one grew a cancer in her lung and let it spread. It ate up everything she ate, threw the ceiling in relief, bulged in through the door despite the dresser. It turned her smile into papyrus, and every line that rationed her got brutally recorded. But I have kept no records. I tried but they don’t keep. Hers served well as shroud at the cremation. The next-in-line’s still beating up some stone. A spinster who fucked boys for pleasure, then made them laugh into an ecstasy of piss. The irreverent bitch had the audacity to pass go more than once without the huffing and puffing that peacocks live as law. She was uglier than Fate and told more truth. And if she hadn’t smoked her throat shut like a grave, she’d still be stripping an emperor of clothes.

 

The phone was disconnected last night. The mailman broke a leg. I do not socialize. I avoid God like the plague. I scared the paperboy away by raving. The sky stares in the window to meet blinds. I’m popping caffeine pills as garlic against telepathic dreams. But I feel mirrors in my bones like some damned Dorian Gray. And the bitches of the world are dying without quaint proper goodbyes, or burials at sea, or conduct books in strength for those of us still breaking.

 

***

 

Kemeny. Let’s trace Kemeny. Probably Cohen. Or Klein. When the first wave invaded with the jingle-jangle of their coins. Hard. So hard. In English. When they invaded with that Eastern-European darkness they learned from the air. Momma’s joujou, a fashion jewel in the crown of creation from that red clay, that Adam. Ornaments in earth tone. Toned down. Turned out. And staring at those iron mines she pricked her hand to taste them. And then she slid. Out from under the heavy sky. The fun was in sliding with the pebble dance where nothing cared about landing. Queen Anne’s lace caught in the weeds. A saint, too, with clean hands. Maria, the dove love woman, plump in the middle of a valley looking up. But the sky is so much heavier down here. Hard luck with a calling in October. Stuck. Stuck to her rump like syrup. You catch flies with sugar, honey. Then you’re eaten into the bargain. I’ve seen them pass on with those huge “WET PAINT” signs hung all over. And some made vicious bull’s eyes. It stuck, as always. With only themselves for hope chest. They hold a lot so they figured gold.

 

Up in the hills it seemed like rashes. Some Rebecca, some Rachel of the salve. Lines get so tangled in a cat’s claws. But the road was a line and it drove. Until it ended in a sea somewhere where ships sink or sail. Back there, hunched over the meat, someone must have tamed a dragon. Even the sea has a hot red belly when it turns. And imagining the sea she pricked her hand to taste it. Iron again. They make rails and bars and hammers. Brave magnetic world. When does it call for blue lightning? A big KEMENY crouching in the weeds. She must be glaring under all that midday sun. In the mines they would blast her to bits. That’s what the signs are about. To warn in case she treasures something more than a good glance. She pricked her hand so she could close her eyes. It was damn loud in the Queen Anne’s lace with the dove love woman dreaming.