Tag: haunts

What the Angels Left

fleshactivities:

At first, the scissors seemed perfectly harmless.
They lay on the kitchen table in the blue light.

Then I began to notice them all over the house,
at night in the pantry, or filling up bowls in the cellar

where there should have been apples. They appeared under rugs,
lumpy places where one would usually settle before the fire,

or suddenly shining in the sink at the bottom of soupy water.
Once, I found a pair in the garden, stuck in turned dirt

among the new bulbs, and one night, under my pillow,
I felt something like a cool long tooth and pulled them out

to lie next to me in the dark. Soon after that I began
to collect them, filling boxes, old shopping bags,

every suitcase I owned. I grew slightly uncomfortable
when company came. What if someone noticed them

when looking for forks or replacing dried dishes? I longed
to throw them out, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like grace? It occurred to me finally
that I was meant to use them, and I resisted a growing compulsion

to cut my hair, although in moments of great distraction,
I thought it was my eyes they wanted, or my soft belly

—exhausted, in winter, I laid them out on the lawn.
The snow fell quite as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort. In spring, as expected, they were gone.
In their place, a slight metallic smell, and the dear muddy earth.

Marie Howe

The End by Emily Berry

I believed death was a flat plain spectacular endlessly

Can you distort my voice when I say this?

My scared ghost peeling off me

Distortion, she says, as if she has just made it up

And then she is quoting a line from a poem

Or is it a whole poem, I wish I could remember

My voice opens and calls you in

I don’t know if you can hear me

I said, I carry inside me the trace of a threat that I cannot discharge

I said, I want to ask you things you can’t ask a person who doesn’t exist

She said, Why can’t you ask them

If we can’t have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have?

She said, Why can’t you have everything

Well, you know, when you’re looking for a person, sometimes they appear

And a light goes on and off in the opposite window, twice

Yes, you say, that was a sign

Strange love for the living, strange love for the dead

Listen. I don’t know who you are but you remind me of —

I wish you would put some kind of distortion on my voice, I tell her

So people don’t know it’s me

They know what they know, she said

I told a story about my shame

It got cold when the air touched it

Then it got hot, throbbed, wept, attracted fragments with which it eventually glittered

Till I couldn’t stop looking at it

Exactly, she says

And then she is quoting a line from a poem, I don’t know which one

In my dream she reached out to touch me as if to say, It’s all right

How I began to believe in something

Are you there?

The wind called to the trees

And then it happened

And they said, How do you feel?

And I said, Like a fountain

Night falls from my neck like silver arrows

Very gently

                                          ADA LIMÓN

THE LAST MOVE

It was months when it felt like I had been
washing the dishes forever.

Hardwood planks under the feet, a cord to the sky.
What is it to go to a We from an I?

Each time he left for an errand, the walls
would squeeze me in, I cried over the non-existent bathmat, wet floor of him,
how south we were, far away in the outskirts.

(All the new bugs.)

I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying
a zucchini like a child.

This is not New York and I am not important.

This was before we got the dog even, and before I really
trusted the paralyzing tranquilizer of love stuck
in the flesh of my neck.

Back home, in my apartment, another woman lived there.
In Brooklyn, by the deli, where everything
was clean and contained.

(Where I grieved my deaths.)

I took to my hands and knees. I was thinking about the novel
I was writing. The great heavy chest of live animals
I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?

I made the house so clean (shine and shine and shine).

I was suspicious of the monkey sounds of Kentucky’s birds,
judging crackles, rusty mailbox, spiders in the magnolia tree,
tornado talk, dead June bugs like pinto beans.

Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack
of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles,
they found a woman’s body at the bottom
of the cistern.

Imagine, just thinking the water was low, just wanting
to take a shower.

After that, when the water would act weird,
spurt or gurgle, I’d imagine a body, a woman, a me
just years ago, freely single, happily unaccounted for,
at the lowest curve of the water tower.

Yes, and over and over,
I’d press her limbs down with a long pole
until she was still.