Sharing Lessons
I like the image of the world map. How nothing fits together absolutely, like a glass of water that slips from the nighttime hand, shatters into glass continents floating in a new flood, each border consistently gnawed, eroded, as if the ocean wants to reclaim. As a kid in the classroom, I would stare at the map and imagine all the seas I could fall into; as an adult, I think of all the lakes. A homing. Look, how one body picks apart our essential loves and the other drowns them. Look, how I sit in a rowboat and wait for outer space to crawl through its shiver-bent reflection, make a ceiling fan above me. Look, how Jesus walks towards my boat in overgrown water shoes but sinks when I don’t reach for his hand. Look, how my old neighborhoods are calling back to me with swamp-monster thick arms, how I ignore and row on as a boy in the cold, cocoons hanging behind every opportune door like body bags—roosting. How I pluck a bat disguised as a leaf from a dark tree growing through the water. How I section it into three pieces, hand it to each of myselves, and think of a time these sharing lessons have not worked for me: in which the lycanthropy of my lies no longer needed directions back to my bedroom window; in which I wore the apparel of a blind man, a book was placed in front of me, and I was told, read; in which I was born without my bones set in place. And I think of how they do work, how I can hear everything so closely now, the radio hushed to a singing whisper as I turn silver sins over and over in my washing-machine belly, wait for new war to start, to finally bring our continents back together, to split, then define, then solidify the ocean, the lakes.
See? All the ways the world
lets me back in?
See? How I turn
and say it's unfair.
See? All the ways the world
lets me back in?
See? How I turn
and say it's unfair.
quarrel : vacancy
And just like that, Time stood still
and naked in the street of the suburbs. It looked
like a rejected bachelor of some sort, its skin
oxidizing, its face folding a mountain of delicately
stroked cliffs, rifts sharp-fingered and jealous.
The hearts of everyone who looked too hard at its beauty
stopped. The streets filled with the sound of siren-red.
One victim was revived long enough to tell us
there is nothing on the other side but glass that ripples
like a gong when touched. Then Time blinked, and
the man’s heart stopped all over again.
No one knew how to stop it, so Time was left alone.
Everyone’s eye sockets became placeholders for jewels.
I remember the neighbors fighting every day. Something
about one of them having a better jewel than
the other, the mouthwatering desire to wrench out each other’s eyes.
We kept glass cups to the wall, listening to the ache, until
all at once, they went quiet.
An oracle set up tent in the abandoned fairgrounds.
She charged twenty-five dollars for the future, because
suddenly everyone was craving its taste.
Street gang boys used Time for initiation rituals.
They threw rocks at it until it trembled, turned them
into old men who dropped their stones and slowly
walked away, peace resting like a fist in their jaws.
Some birds made a home in Time’s neck, found food in the forest
on its shoulders and water in the river that ran through its clavicle.
Time looked uncomfortable, finally ready but unable to move.
It’s always the birds, I thought, causing shit for us. I took my Beebe gun
and shot them all dead, feeling proud, a savior, until Time shivered
like a pool of glass, locked eyes with me, showed me a well and, in that well,
my grave, deep-shadowed & filled with stars held down by boulders.
I dropped the gun and felt a flight of stairs
inside my body crumble. Then
I froze, too.
and naked in the street of the suburbs. It looked
like a rejected bachelor of some sort, its skin
oxidizing, its face folding a mountain of delicately
stroked cliffs, rifts sharp-fingered and jealous.
The hearts of everyone who looked too hard at its beauty
stopped. The streets filled with the sound of siren-red.
One victim was revived long enough to tell us
there is nothing on the other side but glass that ripples
like a gong when touched. Then Time blinked, and
the man’s heart stopped all over again.
No one knew how to stop it, so Time was left alone.
Everyone’s eye sockets became placeholders for jewels.
I remember the neighbors fighting every day. Something
about one of them having a better jewel than
the other, the mouthwatering desire to wrench out each other’s eyes.
We kept glass cups to the wall, listening to the ache, until
all at once, they went quiet.
An oracle set up tent in the abandoned fairgrounds.
She charged twenty-five dollars for the future, because
suddenly everyone was craving its taste.
Street gang boys used Time for initiation rituals.
They threw rocks at it until it trembled, turned them
into old men who dropped their stones and slowly
walked away, peace resting like a fist in their jaws.
Some birds made a home in Time’s neck, found food in the forest
on its shoulders and water in the river that ran through its clavicle.
Time looked uncomfortable, finally ready but unable to move.
It’s always the birds, I thought, causing shit for us. I took my Beebe gun
and shot them all dead, feeling proud, a savior, until Time shivered
like a pool of glass, locked eyes with me, showed me a well and, in that well,
my grave, deep-shadowed & filled with stars held down by boulders.
I dropped the gun and felt a flight of stairs
inside my body crumble. Then
I froze, too.
dreammineral
In the haunted house of your dream, a diamond, the largest you’ve never seen, pumps blood through its thin veins, arthritis in its eyelids. It snoozes wherever it can, however it can, snoring loudly, lively. The ghosts do not mind the noise; they hardly know how to. At dawn, light cuts through the diamond’s body and makes the place sparkle; that’s the only time the ghosts are agitated, are given a second chance at the heavenly light they ignored. When the diamond steps out of the shower, body gleaming, the ghost walls become jealous. The ghost chandelier, cloaked in dust, wishes to fall on the diamond’s neck, but the ghost spider in the chandelier advises against it, as it would only phase through, and why add another ghost to this already crammed house of ghost humans, of ghost appliances, of broken ghost glass, of cold ghost darkness, of weary ghost air weaving loneliness from that darkness? And so, the house rests, the diamond lives, and the ghosts realize what it’s like to feel jealous of blood.
Logan Ellis is a Pushcart-nominated poet, a Kinder egg of something or other, the triple-berry muffin-eating hodgepodge nunnery of wordcraft. He is enrolled in the Graduate Writing Program at the California College of the Arts. His work has been published in The Brasilia Review, Electric Cereal, ElevenEleven, The Electronic Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, among others. He currently has no plans to marry cats.