The Unborn

 

We gave the unborn tripods
to recline in. They lean back

slicked with amniotic

 

fluid. The unborn tell us exactly

what to value. The legislators

 

                        lean in close,

decipher. They pay someone to

code the unborn’s intentions

 

into the voting machines that dot

the nation. We know you think

the unborn are fetuses,

but in this you are wrong.

 

They speak without imposed bias.

And in today’s market, nothing is

 

more valuable than to speak

directly and without

metaphor. Without the unborn,

 

we would, by simple fact, be

a vanishing population. The voting

 

machines purr in the back rooms

of the YMCAs, civic centers,

and in the elementary school

                        gymnasiums. We read

 

the unborn’s words and say true.

You understand why—

how in today’s market, a nation must

 

take every advantage it can to secure

its future, how the future is within us

 

                        growing and growing

until the legislators tell it to come out

and praise God who gave his only son

 

who died on a cross for our nation,

though our nation wasn’t even gestating

in the minds of men.

To give freely, in this economy, you

 

must realize, is an act

of charity. It’s why we must choose life,

 

no matter the hour because not even

the legislators can know when

the market will fluctuate and call

 

us to pay our debts

in full. We need the unborn to be

 

there, to foot our debts—you must

see their importance to the security

of our nation’s assets.

 

 

To Swallow The River that Spews from The Mouth

 

Someone hid the fountain in a corner

of their backyard, covered it with junk,

but I could see it, through the chain-link

 

fence, though not at first—when I was

new to walking the neighborhood’s alley.

I hurried then because dogs would rush

 

from porches to tell me I existed. I walked

by often. Often in dreams I saw this shape:

three concrete fish entwined, slurred.

 

A single fish. Bodies like tubes of muscle

sheaved in scales, their wriggle slowing

at the base of heads bent perpendicular

 

to the bodies, mouths full of wolves’ teeth.

The gills’ repeating frame, coral and bone.

The gullets pulsed as the fish inhaled me.

 

Then winter, spring, and the yard was bare

except the fountain. It stood in the corner.

It sulked. Maybe it was too heavy to move.

 

Or connected to a water main and needed

a professional to sever and seal its innards.

Doubtful, but the world can still surprise.

 

A thick spout protruded from each throat.

Along the spouts, pooling in grooves

on the tongues, and spilling over the lips,

 

green algae dried black like a walnut husk

decaying into the ground. All who touch

this pigment wither, but the seed, its flesh

 

sustains. In time, flesh rots. Even stone.

The fish, pockmarked by weather. No telling

the skill of the fabricator’s hand, if there was

 

a hand, if there were only this one defunct

fountain or many around the world spitting,

distorting the glance of those who look

 

into the pool above which the fish appear

to leap. The hand itself is bent by still water,

even more by the ripples of the spouts’

 

trickling until unrecognizable. What mass

production does to the body, the name.

Someone sketches a fish on a fountain

 

and distorts it by stealing a dimension,

and everything stolen wants to buy itself

back—if only as a shell, joined around

 

an armature, multiplied though remaining

one. Giving and taking like flesh itself,

its many versions around a picnic table,

 

around a pig skewered and split chin to tail—

eyes burnt and dripping black in the skull.

The body turned over flame; the ecstasy

 

of flesh turned over tongue. The mouths

seem to breathe in the sizzling. They do.

The scent slithers down their throats before

 

the hand delivers one morsel and the next,

each surrendering less pleasure but still

the need grows. And so a manufacturer

 

buys a design, takes a mold, and distributes,

at a fraction of the cost of the original,

the same fountain that was before me.

 

It stood, but the fish, joined at the belly

and splitting at the pelvis and the gills,

seemed to move, a motion complicated

 

because the basin was filled with water,

thick and black, like a pupil that absorbs

too much—the pool small, no bigger

 

than the curls fanning out from a child

as she spins in a yard alone—strange

how it takes only a letter to shift the hunt

 

to the hunted. To fish. Two fish, no three

curling around a center. The eternal

geometry of binding one and one. God

 

said, multiply, and creation followed. First,

robots weld the skeleton, then concrete

gushes into the mold. Hundreds upon

 

hundreds a day, drying in a hangar, waiting

for a button to click, for digits to move

one account to another, to make one

 

with three heads several hundred. Bills

stacked neat, the closed mouths of world

leaders like the locked handle of a safe

 

where money is no longer held. It takes

some mind to translate art into schematics.

Though the spouts protruded from the fish,

 

I could not imagine the piping that must

be at the heart. Leaning closer, I saw, spinning

in, a wolf’s web—the spider must have traced

 

its design until the web was thick as the water

that once gushed from the spout. Hiding

in its burrow, on the central nerve-cluster,

 

the wolf spider once waited—a hand pressed

on a throne’s armrest, knuckles curled stiff

and pulsing. Each leg an extended claw.

 

It felt the insect twitch and knew where

and when to move, to bow ominous music

from the web. The wriggling slowed; the wolf

 

spider emerged, mouth hidden. It wrapped

and dragged the body inside to inject it

with an enzyme that digests from within.

 

I can’t believe how long I waited for it

to emerge. All evening, my fingers numb

in the spring cold, tossing bits of bark

 

into the web. The spider must have died.

The web now a mausoleum in the mouths

of stone fish. The caught insects desiccated 

 

for nothing, their exoskeletons now armature

in the web. One death then many. How deep

it must stretch. To the center, in the hollow

 

belly multiplying on its own, by its own

design, wrapping itself with itself, gauze

and wound. A patient nursing. A web

 

of web. Body and brain waiting for the world

to melt into its white blossom, for someone

to pluck and toss it where it cannot be seen.

 

 

 

 

Jolene at 33[1]

 

The speaker’s pleases bloat.

A drum in the stomach’s soft pit.

A guitar strung with rain.

The name

 

that spins within the sleeping leaps

from another’s mouth. The flaming

swells; the fire shrinks, the tongue

unconsumed. Every

 

comparison reverses this triangle.

The hesitation stretches woman and woman

to man and woman and man.

The deadwax

 

crackles a coda. The slowing hertz.

On the lip, the word to cue the end.

 

 

[1] Playing the Jolene 45 at 33rpm makes the vocal track seem more masculine.