Sixfold Poetry Summer 2014

  Jim Pascual Agustin

  The Man Who Wished He Was Lego

  His hands would be yellow

  and forever curved

  into a semi-square “C.”

  Designed only for quick

  and easy snapping

  of pieces meant

  to fit. His shoes

  would be the same color

  as his pants with no zips

  or buttons, no pockets

  for slipping in notes

  that could be shredded

  in the wash. He would need

  not worry about the shape

  of his head, or haircuts

  and thoughts for that matter.

  And best of all, his chest

  would be stiff and hollow,

  far too small

  for a heart.

  Do Millipedes Bleed?

  The bathroom sink reflects

  a clinical glare

  from the white light bulb.

  Close to my toothbrush,

  a dark shape

  thicker than a string,

  curved upward at one end.

  My hand quickly tries

  to reach for something,

  a comb, a slipper,

  anything to flick it away,

  perhaps crush it.

  Then up close I see

  it is hunched over

  a drop of water,

  drinking. Tiny feelers

  waving back and forth

  in a gentle rhythm,

  minute legs, thin

  as the hair between

  my knuckles,

  quivering.

  The Photograph

  Stripped of leaves from the planet’s change

  of angle (scientific calculations can predict

  the end of such a cycle), the limbs of this tree

  appear no more than frail, black streaks

  against the grey sky. But for the birds.

  With folded wings they have chosen to adorn

  the branches. It is not the first tree

  to be so starkly dressed. A friend on the other side

  of the world shared a photograph that looked

  nearly the same as what is now before

  my window. Echoes of the same rhythm,

  only composition and lighting differ.

  The image remains longer in the retina, a memory

  reinforced, perhaps more intensely remembered?

  Would any photograph chanced upon,

  then lingered over, become just as embedded

  in the mind? That it, too, burns? Here, with the click

  of a mouse, I browse: a photograph of two soldiers.

  One on the ground, the other holding a rifle.

  Afghanistan’s range of mountains never looked

  so violated. The grass that clings to the jagged

  surface appears dry, dead. The colour of the soldiers’

  clothes, like soil before rain. Both of them wear green

  vests, for bullets and provisions. The one with a knee

  close to the ground where the other lies

  is smiling. The lifeless one has thicker beard

  and no helmet, his shadow touches the sling

  of the other’s rifle. I first saw them on my old laptop

  screen three years ago. I see them again

  on another machine, just as frozen.

  Science Fiction 1

  “Yes, please,” her last words. Ears

  waiting for the flick of the switch.

  The thick glass plate between her

  and the man she trusts won’t allow more

  than a dim red glow. Chamber of recycled

  truck container. Crusts of rust on the stretcher

  stolen from an abandoned clinic. Energy

  saving lightbulbs with darkened tubes

  like fingers burnt in a power outlet.

  In a split second she will no longer remember

  a loved one’s last embrace. That is her hope.

  Throb on her temple, beating

  of a moth. What comes next

  is always a surprise even for the man

  who has done this too many times.

  Recycled Chandelier Tales

  “Trust me, I’m telling you a story.”

  —Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

  1

  Held up by spiderwebs

  more than an iron ring clasped

  to the ceiling, I burn

  with the last lightbulb

  that may bring an end to this.

  All past existences

  down to ash and rubble.

  2

  I was a trinket in a box

  for the emperor’s twenty-seventh

  concubine. I had three eyes

  of rubies and a diamond.

  I felt the grip

  once of love, then no more

  than lust. Until the people came

  to set me free, so many voices,

  so many feet soiling the chamber floor.

  3

  Dreams always end in darkness

  from where they came.

  My skin was not always white

  or tinged with rust. I was red

  with the blood of infidels.

  Then of believers. Then of my master’s.

  I used to cut the wind,

  sing as it gasped in pain.

  I remember petals coming down,

  and thorns. Always something sharp

  along with the touch of velvet.

  4

  I am electric. An abomination.

  Spiders weave more stories

  than I can remember. They taunt me

  with their clumsy legs, their non-geometric

  traps that catch nothing

  but dust. They obscure

  my view of a painting that was hung

  for me to illuminate. Someone

  spare me this existence. Crush

  the last lightbulb and stab

  a candle in its place.

  I was meant for grandeur.

  Not for this. Not this.

  Jessica M. Lockhart

  Scylla of the Alabama

  Scylla’s taking more

  to men

  than she’d ever

  care to admit.

  These days you’ll find her going through a few.

              I saw her in the river once,

              playing at ancient catfish—giant,

              grotesque, ages-long whiskers mingled

              with lights reflected from the bridge

              all distorted, all crude and reconfigured

              something elses.

              All slicked and reforming bodies—

              the fish, the lights, the water,

              and us on a fish fry party boat,

              eating them all.

  Mapless in a Recurring Landscape

  Everything is like this:

  Air, brown cloud line, old

  water stains on linen.

  Life in sepia

  dust-bowl, derelict.

  I’ll ask the tumble

  weed where to go.

  I’ll ask the sage

  what I smell.

  Where is the yellow

  page. Where the faint-

  print words.

  Thirteen Ways of Looking

  after Wallace Stevens

  1.

  When in motion, attend

  to the still.

  2.

  Out. For glinting yellows,

  deer by the road.

  3.

  At a half-empty glass

  as a drink.

  4.

  Behind you.

  5.

  Down. Watch for pennies.

  Pennies are m
oney, too.

  6.

  With mirrors

  surrounding your head.

  7.

  Relax your eyes

  and a picture pops out.

  8.

  Scan the tuna salad. Leave

  no scales.

  9.

  Up, maybe

  at a blackbird.

  10.

  Use binoculars. Use microscopes.

  Point great lenses to the sky.

  11.

  Never at the sun. Never at the face

  of the holy.

  12.

  At the news. Would you

  look at the news?

  13.

  Seeing the crowd, populate it

  with persons.

  Things to Remember

  The crunch of gravel under

  sneakers at 6:30 in the morning

  when the pine trees, even

  the school buses, were gray.

  The way the mailbox was always empty,

  and a raised flag meant we would

  meet later in marshy woods where

  an old shack no one built fell

  apart a little whenever we weren’t looking.

  The long route to the county school where

  whites and blacks were pretty

  much equal in numbers. How we liked

  to think we were enlightened, but lived

  on the edge of town for a reason.

  The ditch that ran up to the road,

  perpendicular. The one

  we called the Amazon,

  when the Alabama was

  only the river. How Selma is

  a place of water and rust and blood

  and ghosts. Dad’s fried deer.

  Where the blackberries grew.

  An empty trailer lot with no old

  shack behind it, ancient Amazonian

  tree stumps. A dull bus driving by

  in gray morning.

  Lost: Alvin the Aardvark

  When Mom finally moved I’d forgotten

  that toy, and we tore up the trailer,

  because you can’t sell or relocate

  wet pressed board and punched-in walls,

  but when I saw it—

              I’d had a plastic anteater. It rolled,

              and it clicked, Velcro tongue

              shooting out at blue-fuzz ants. I remembered orange

              about it, and green. I remembered the mud

              beneath us, how the water leaked and ran

              below, through the floor.

              I can’t remember, though, how it got

              there, the anteater. I’d never go

              under there with a toy:

              Spiders and snakes settled the damp, the cold

              aluminum skirting sometimes soundtracked

              in the paw-scrapes of infant cats and dogs.

              I’d crawl, flashlight in hand, toward the weak

              yelps of a newborn litter. But not with an anteater—

  When the wide trailer split, saturated particle

  board shred open in mash-up of creak and hiss,

  it was revelation:

  the mud, the dirt, five-gallon buckets and beer cans,

  a crooked Stonehenge of half-buried

  cement blocks, rotting softballs, and among the brown

  and gray, the orange.

  Fifteen years and still

  bright, undamaged polymer, but sticker-eyes

  peeled, strange blind plastic creature,

  the wet smack of suction popping,

  anteater removed.

  James P. Leveque

  Three Films of Jean Painlevé

  Our Sins in French

  (Les Oursins, 1958)

  Between morning yawns on the end of the jetty, divers, stripped

  to the waist, waiting for the sun to kick off the sheets, burnishing lenses

  and pointing out promising shallows, feel the water wet their toes.

  Fishermen settle in with the haze, cigarettes dozing between fingers

  stained and scratched. Their quiet French has a way of slipping around

  the corner, striking down an ally, leaving a song to be remembered by.

  Our sins grope the bottom of the ocean, scouring the silt and gnawing

  rocks with five teeth arranged as a star, until the tide is pulled

  away by the moon and the world is reduced to a dozen litres

  of brackish water while the colors are wiped clean by the light

  from a camera that can’t but look for trouble. Our sins keep an eye

  over their shoulders, fashion shivs, and don’t trust how your voice pitches

  up when you talk to them. And they pass away into their white

  brittle skeletons, become their own headstones, landing themselves

  on a desk, in a glass case, curios from the dead and the damned.

  Most will land in a net, the fishermen grabbing a few for breakfast,

  cracking their shells, and barely contemplating their bright-

  yellow glands before taking their forks and digging in.

  Hippocamp: Vivisected

  (L’Hippocampe, 1934)

  As if every seahorse is an oyster, growing a pearl in its gut,

  able to swallow every slight, every irritation and annoyance

  and wrap its own self around it, bathing it in slight, pink stone.

  This bladder in its chest shines from finally being released from the lockup

  of fishbones, split down the middle and spread wide like a Rorschach Test;

  “What do you see?” “I see a dead fish who gave its life

  for my longing to see the inside of a dead fish.”

  The unborn eggs are hardly alive as scissors bring light

  into the father’s divided womb, clip by clip. Under the flash

  and whirring of the camera, there is a mild suffocation of celebrity.

  Interrogatives

  (Voyage dans le ciel, 1937)

  What is the angle at which time lies down,

  with a heaving chest, rickety pulse, and shaky knees?

 

  How precise must be the calculations to detonate

  the sun onto the page in chalk and acrylic?

  When one eye is closed and the other opened, does vision, pitched

  from sun to tower to hand, eventually lead back

  to the vortex in the head and the brainstem?

  The questions ride a hand-held Pegasus through plastic models,

  the moon and Alpha Centauri suspended from visible wires

  and wearing their genesis in glue and cheap paint.

  Was the vegetation on Mars edible? Did it rot faster than ours?

  Who placed the gemstones around Saturn in 1937?

  The questions are embarrassing celluloid manuscripts of the mistakes

  you can finally admit to after the sparks, water, and ashes

  have taken all relevant parties halfway across Europe and America,

  after time answered your letter before you finished writing it.

  When the editing room light is switched off, and your sound engineer

  stretched his neck, blinked, and put on his coat, did he hear

  your voice through the microphone describing other planets

  instead of the cars and conversations on his way home? Was he compelled

  to look up to the speckled ribbon of stars between the buildings?

  When you talked of loneliness on a tired planet,

  were you describing the scratch and static when the needle hits

  the record before the music begins?

  From Pandemonium

  The wind is a brief b
enediction in the street, undoing scorch and sweat

  yoked for weeks around the shoulders of the underemployed, sopping up

  the grime of work and not enough work, from the pissed-off pavement

  to shade’s providence, on a café patio, where it’s the absolution of gin and lime,

  where water cites its Freedom of Assembly on the side of a glass,

  where sensualists drink to the bikers and their 80 decibels of Layla,

  and where the rarer features of a passing ’41 Olds are enumerated—

  “Hydra-Matic transmission,” they say, “advanced for its time”—

  alongside the drawbacks of psychoanalysis or Keynsianism.

  A static vanguard we are, glossing the foliage of signals and feedbacks

  as it speckles the sunlight with a constellation of meanings, deciphering,

  like adepts, from our windows above the flagstones and the courtyards

  to anticipate the hot breath rising from Pandemonium,

  exhaled from the gutters down the street toward the yellow glow

  in a street lamp and then, further down, another lamp, and then, another…

  The music is a riff for aluminum cans echoing in a dumpster,

  the rattle of one loose shopping-cart wheel and the muted creak

  of bedsprings through thin walls, a sigh unexpected by its own mouth

  when the printer spins out another article called, let’s say, something

  like Jazz and The Real: Coltrane, Mingus, Monk. But we still hope

  to hear that movement’s horizon and its Tempo Rubato,

  let the pale sheet of pre-dawn fend off the day for a few minutes more

  at your computer, initiating countdown on the following message:

             Dear Sirs,

  After much discussion, we recommend these few steps so that you might adapt

  to your new lives: claim less luxury and wake at half-past 5;

  learn to pry open sleep and reheat the remains of yesterday’s coffee;

  get a little Spanish under your belt. Take some comfort in the fables of the princes

  of Greece and Russia, recalling their Westward escapes to New York, Baltimore,

  and Montréal. In downtown, there was an archduke, a descendent of the Tsars,

  managing an ice-cream parlor named The Winter Palace.