The script was written on fire; it was an evening of celebration. We arrived at the stone arbor and planted our roses in wet concrete. We inked our verse into softened porcelain. I displayed my larynx in panes of glass, and Sonia told one of her lively tales. The annelids rise with the sun, like a metal fabricator seals the hour with sparks. A string of tin beads. The droning church organ the children can't hear. The Chickadee warming herself in hair clippings and landscaper's fabric. The snaps of the August corn and nightshade. The fire that first refuses. And at sunset, we siphon the tea into its porcelain amphora. We dust its surface with gold leaf and pour it over glassine to soften. Is it my breath or a ghost crying the true blackness of a lunar eclipse? How far must I follow this delicate thread through the dark? I find my grandfather's draft card and seal his shirt in plastic. The rash moves from my arm to my breastbone to my temples marked with sleep. My mother remembers a rowhouse on forty-seventh avenue. Esther was very elegant, she says. The glasses have a purple film and weightless skin; stubble's in the razor cartridge sealed in plastic. At night, I don't see as well. The streetlights are shaped like stars. All I find is wires inside and mostly yam circuitry: Carubba yams, West Indian sweet yams, Creole yams dusted black with alluvial soils shoots through raw flesh, browning. I don't want to know this violent mess; the rubber band bodies twisting each other from eyelet to stem. So delicately I begin yam surgery. |
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