Our Andromeda Read online

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  for Cal

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  1. Liquid Flesh

  Artless

  Head Handed

  All Possible Pain

  Nemesis

  The World’s Arm

  This Person-Sized Sky with Bruise,

  Glassbottomed

  Streetlamps

  Liquid Flesh

  2. Double Life

  Parallel

  Visitor

  Why Should Only Cheaters and Liars Get Double Lives?

  It Never Happened

  The Seven Deadly Sins of (and Necessary Steps toward) Making Art

  Karaoke Realness at the Love Hotel

  Outfoxed

  Inappropriate Dreams

  Products of Perception

  Miracles

  Big Game

  3. Arcana

  Card 5: Hierophant

  Card 12: The Hanged Man

  Card 0: The Fool

  Card 20: Judgment

  Card 14: Temperance

  Card 7: The Chariot

  Card 9: The Hermit

  Card 16: The Tower

  Card 19: The Sun

  Card 6: The Lovers

  Card 17: The Star

  Card 8: Strength

  4. Family Trip

  Family Trip

  I Wish I Had More Sisters

  Magi

  My Water Children

  Vacation

  Cover the Lamp with Its Own Light

  Mermaid’s Purse

  Vanity

  5. Our Andromeda

  At the Book Shrink

  Headlong

  To My Twenty-Three-Year-Old Self

  To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self

  To My Twenty-Five-Year-Old Self

  To My Thirty-Eight-Year-Old Self

  The New People

  If You So Much as Lay a Hand

  Nachträglichkeit

  Hearth

  Hide-and-Seek with God

  Our Andromeda

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Donor page

  1. LIQUID FLESH

  Artless

  is my heart. A stranger

  berry there never was,

  tartless.

  Gone sour in the sun,

  in the sunroom or moonroof,

  roofless.

  No poetry. Plain. No

  fresh, special recipe

  to bless.

  All I’ve ever made

  with these hands

  and life, less

  substance, more rind.

  Mostly rim and trim,

  meatless

  but making much smoke

  in the old smokehouse,

  no less.

  Fatted from the day,

  overripe and even

  toxic at eve. Nonetheless,

  in the end, if you must

  know, if I must bend,

  waistless,

  to that excruciation.

  No marvel, no harvest

  left me speechless,

  yet I find myself

  somehow with heart,

  aloneless.

  With heart,

  fighting fire with fire,

  flightless.

  That loud hub of us,

  meat stub of us, beating us

  senseless.

  Spectacular in its way,

  its way of not seeing,

  congealing dayless

  but in everydayness.

  In that hopeful haunting

  (a lesser

  way of saying

  in darkness) there is

  silencelessness

  for the pressing question.

  Heart, what art you?

  War, star, part? Or less:

  playing a part, staying apart

  from the one who loves,

  loveless.

  Head Handed

  Stop belonging to me so much, face-head.

  Leave me to my child and my flowers.

  I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that.

  It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead

  and no talent for creatures.

  No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s.

  Don’t you have a place to go, face-head?

  Deep into the brick basement of another life?

  To kill some time, I mean. That furnace

  light could take a shine to you.

  There are always places, none of them mine.

  And always time—rainbow sugar show

  of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky—

  but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply.

  “Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans

  and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it.

  All those prodigal particles,

  flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment

  of glitches. The chorus just more us.

  But nowhere bare and slippery have I

  got a prayer. If I had two hands

  to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.

  All Possible Pain

  Feelings seem like made-up things,

  though I know they’re not.

  I don’t understand why they lead me

  around, why I can’t explain to the cop

  how the pot got in my car,

  how my relationship

  with god resembled that

  of a prisoner and firing squad

  and how I felt after I was shot.

  Because then, the way I felt

  was feelingless. I had no further

  problems with authority.

  I was free from the sharp

  tongue of the boot of life,

  from its scuffed leather toe.

  My heart broken like a green bottle

  in a parking lot. My life a parking lot,

  ninety-eight degrees in the shade

  but there is no shade,

  never even a sliver.

  What if all possible

  pain was only the grief of truth?

  The throb lingering

  only in the exit wounds,

  though the entries were the ones

  that couldn’t close. As if either of those

  was the most real of an assortment

  of realities—existing, documented,

  hanging like the sentenced

  under one sky’s roof.

  But my feelings, well,

  they had no such proof.

  Nemesis

  The sun has its neme
sis, evil twin star,

  not its opposite but its spirit,

  undead angel,

  extra life. Another version.

  The Andromeda Galaxy bears children

  who become us, year after ancient,

  ridiculous year. The children,

  the alternatively filled selves unrecognizable

  to our faeries, our animals and gods:

  us utterly replaced.

  The kids we were, rejected like organs

  donated to the wrong body.

  Why aren’t they dear to us?

  Why is that child least loved

  by its own grown self?

  If you aren’t me then be banished from me,

  weird orphan with limp and lisp.

  Who, nameless brainsake, are you?

  Not my substance or my shadow

  but projectile vomit, a noxious gas.

  Don’t be me, please don’t be me,

  says the adult, looking back into wormhole

  as if jumping into foxhole.

  Not me, never again: that terrible child

  with the insufferable littlesoul

  and bad mom and sameself sister,

  and balky, stalky brother

  and monotone uncle and messed-with cousins,

  and let’s not even talk about the father,

  the fater, pater, hated, fattened, late, latter dad.

  Perhaps the Andromedans are such early

  versions of us we can’t hate yet, ghosts

  or our pre-living selves, earliest babies.

  Perhaps they’re only lifelike, like

  a robot cook or a motion detector,

  not like a dog we love and know,

  or claim to know,

  who nonetheless attacks grandma

  somehow. We say so, said so, toldya so.

  That’s what you get for believing in aliens,

  for replacing our earhorn of plenty

  with a megaphone of corpsedust.

  Listen, it’s moving closer, the Andromeda

  Galaxy, this other us, this museum of mucus

  and keyboards and keyboard fingertip records

  that their governments are already optimized

  to keep post-digitally. All of which looks

  much more like a craps game to us, a hinky

  life-filler, time-killer, the best selection of credit

  card pill extensions with rapid-release hypo-air

  no one but addicts can tolerate.

  Only 2.5 million light-years away, lessening

  daily, and that’s collapsible

  space, of course, made of light. Just flip

  the switch and poof. We’re there.

  The space, then, the dog-run-sized length

  between the golden retriever

  and the Labrador retriever,

  isn’t so much space as time, and since time

  is breath…well. Take a deep one.

  We have all day, as a matter of objective fact.

  Slip on a glossy patch of antimatter

  and I’ve inhaled my unutterable

  opposite potential self, smeared out

  the tracing of my nemesis: Olympic

  gymnast teen me or seventh-grade best friend

  Shannon, or the cricket-eating

  self-sister with the spiny-belled name I dream

  at night and call out but can’t ever know

  in this world. Such a thing is called a soul?

  A personality? Sometimes diagnosed “possession”?

  Nemesis, namesake, nevermore.

  O funny other self,

  how I long to know you! You were ingested

  so easily, absorbed like a lotion

  in the desert. Even in the evening.

  For there are no light years. Years are heavy.

  There is only light. It never bends:

  that’s the property it mortgaged in order

  to pick up speed. But parallel lines can meet

  just like that if someone breaks the rules.

  Some criminal sharing my name

  or an alien name sharing my crime.

  The rules are there are no rules. Lingua franca.

  Isn’t the space between what is

  and what coulda woulda Buddha been,

  that same space between short skull

  and long face, that oiled jaw hinged

  for supple expression, for saying

  and blaming and braying and allaying

  and naming: I this not I that, tit not tat,

  want not waste, and yes not yes, but…

  What your mother

  tells you over and over to shut,

  to smile, first to not talk to strangers

  and then be kind to them.

  To sponsor the tail of another winner’s

  horse. To Go for It.

  To become something in this life.

  But once the gardenias

  are floating in seawater for the themed gala

  of your body, this special night,

  they are dying, bacteria or no bacteria,

  life against life, this world

  butted up against the next.

  Simultaneity aside, we are all next.

  All go to the light.

  Heavily, with our childhoods we go.

  I’ll go with my stars,

  and my sorry body, stranger

  to myself, will say go.

  The World’s Arm

  A strong, pale wind on the thighs,

  it was no seaspray, no AC,

  but cold mnemonic, a breath

  of spotless decision,

  a kind of bulk, a true surface

  thickened by foreign pears

  as if winter brought its fruit

  first to me for approval

  before it let December

  fill its basket to capacity.

  I spoke too calmly for one

  who didn’t believe in anything.

  Mouth full of pears,

  full of promises I’d no way

  to speak, much less keep, I tended

  to gesture toward a Universal

  Field of Grass, hoping to break

  as many blades as my wide self

  could in one pass. One pass—

  but we’re wasted with feeling,

  breathing funny and stuck rough

  like an IV into a paralyzed arm.

  And that’s the World’s Arm

  that can’t write anymore,

  or sign its name, or pick

  the thickness from the trees.

  My fingerprints transform

  into proboscis, by degrees.

  This Person-Sized Sky with Bruise,

  simultaneously orange and violet

  (though my eyes are closed), is

  either my inner color (that covered mirror)

  or simply dusk.

  An opaline sheet

  pulled because the night is ashamed

  to come in front of everyone,

  blacking out in joy.

  Too shy to spill its milk on the stained

  tablecloth of strangers

  as I have. When it’s finally dark

  outside, it’s finally

  loose inside and the doubleness

  of things seems too true to be good:

  my way and the highway.

  Night. It has two hands

  I can use. Its fingers in a plum

  too ripe not to split.

  I had to split it. It was so much

  itself—bloody flesh,

  wild purple skin. A fistful

  so lush it was almost imaginary,

  smelling of love, it didn’t matter whose.

  Glassbottomed

  Amplified blueness,

  that is to say, I can hear it,

  though it isn’t music

  or a voice but a self

  apart from self itself. A handiwork.

  Its horrible it-ness.

 
If only the plain brown splotch—

  my home, my head—had a place,

  a say, the way rancid meat still

  has protein. Something to offer.

  A little brown dog waves its paw

  as if to say, I know all about it.

  The it-ness. Broken into bits

  so sharp everything gets cut to

  sharp bits. Anything small has a kind

  of integrity—whole, ridiculous—

  god simply cannot have.

  I mean, where’s the magic

  or the logic in being It

  and hiding It? In seeing

  foolishness, remaining wise?

  Everyone’s mouth of music

  swallowed with salt. Oh, to be

  in those waters when it matters.