New York Uterus
The balloons of genocide and ecocide dangling like testicles. We are shattered, in pieces that cannot be assembled. Our songs no longer fit into the tunnels of the lizards, our half-notes parsed like letters of words no longer spoken, empty of sound, of resonance. Lost is the history whose echoes resounded in rings, blessed and gassed, holed up in glass, or hoisted high and shaken like bells—a map for the children.
In the womb, we cuddled and cradled until we collided and split.
I am especially vulnerable to scenes of collisions and splits and toxia.
Here are no seals, no medals, no chamber in the clouds, no rope long enough, no fist strong enough. The flooded hearts. The virulent. The noxia. A spread like lightning forks, like a fracking disaster, like a nuclear tide, like the terrorist trade, like fuses spitting fires.
I have the courage to turn my face away from accidents where I can be of no help. My witness useless.
Into the metropolis away from the pastoral herds, I cycle.
In this town, we walked upon a soil of civility, our stocks full of culture and the ancient tales that devolve into history. This glacier holds the art. Here is where I loved you, where we had the fallen union, and I remember our nest, that sculpture, the age of bronze.
We fell together, but we did not know it. Words camped out on marshland cannot piece together our story. Once upon a time, I thought this: our story floats. The memory like a worm.
That lover that I was? I have searched for her. Up from that well a sluice through bedrock with her in my arms, and she has grown like sludge, like what’s inside of a bubble, like jell. Grown her nothingness. She is gone to another galaxy. Lost.
What is left is me. Whom you have met again. But it is not again. I am not reborn, nor risen from the dead. There is no again.
