Alexandra Bergmann
The dark-eyed juncos don’t know I’m spying on them. They’re the only figures I
can follow in this diagonally driving snow. I should’ve changed hours ago. These
aren’t even my pajamas. My sleep could be the culprit. Radiation poison another.
Maybe I was hit with gamma rays and I’ll have powers by mid-day. I won’t figure
them out without going out. Then again, the cardiologist said I just need water and
salt. No matter the pinpricks of in-between channel static that preempt my retinal
broadcast whenever I stand. I’ll just sit. Better yet, I’ll lie back down. If I took up
sewing, I could make ballgowns for myself. My closet would say, “I’m sorry, but
you don’t wear these. How about some sensible black slacks?” I would comply if I
were, in fact, getting dressed. My back aches. I need a distraction. Porn might
suffice for an hour. I don’t need an orgasm. I need St. Louis butter cake, but I’ll
take the orgasm. Some folks can’t get that last syllable of organism between their
lips. When I was a teen, I could direct my mind exactly. It was all those feelings on
set who never read their scripts. I’ve lived with three kinds of Emily. In the pages.
Down the stairs. In my bed. I had a job in data collection. On a walk counting
cardinals, I kept a tally of how many times she noticed my words. You don’t need
to see the table to know the outcome.
Geosmin
I know you want to die.
You’ve joked as much
seven times this after-
noon. The indoor
extremes of cotton comforts
have done all they can.
Let me state my case
for petrichor nostalgia.
We can make headway
on all manner of other
sins, but first, why not
the gluttony of scent
phytochemicals in a storm
afford. I offer no psych-
adelic escapes except
the sensation of sipping
geosmin through your nostrils,
no higher than fog snagged
on the redwood line
of my coast. The most I can
do for you today is walk
with you and say, I loved
you before I knew why,
when I borrowed your coat,
you filled my head with
the delicacy of cypress dew.
Body plan
The logic was nonexistent, but the goal was
simple: I would inject venom into my lumbar to kill off the
nociceptors that kept nagging at me on a near-daily basis.
Research and purchase caught on several snags and
watchlists, but an old coworker who knows a guy who
knows a guy knew a hook-up for milked boomslang, but the
milker stopped responding to texts. Luckily, said coworker
always has a second connection—this one for saw-scaled
behind the star-bread bakery in Pacifica. My ex got wind of
the plan and begged me over email to consider surgery
instead. Insurance wouldn’t cover sensible procedures, so a
couple buddies and I set up a reclined office chair and wiped-
down barstools in their apartment building’s garage off 2nd.
The knows-a-guy guy brought a vial. The rest of us had
pilfered syringes from the old lab before the move. Sammy
sterilized a needle with isopropanol and his silver Zippo.
Dave had just cut himself off speed and was having trouble
moving at the same frame rate as everyone else. If he blinked
enough in a minute, he swore he could fast forward to the
action. As we counted down, he had already seen the needle
deflect off the skin of my lower back. We fiddled with the
bent tip in real time, but the problem was the set of ossified
scales forming
down my spine
at that second.
Where I met the world became
a wall of jigsaw pieces.
My limbs receded
until air displaced
where my arms had been.
When I opened my mouth to offer an observation
that the pain wasn’t so bad anymore,
to my new-fangled hiss.
The way I lie
The way I lie in this borrowed bed, I see four moons shrinking from each other in the double-
paned glass of this borrowed room. Green miniature moons in a line part the curtains and light
this borrowed night just enough that I can’t sleep. I’m thinking of the pig hearts in human chests.
The lie is in allowing you to believe that, even for a sentence, those recipients still live. But
another creature can keep the machine that is you a machine that is more or less you. More than
you. Less you. The way I lie in this borrowed bed lets the lender sleep well. I can’t shut out the
moons, foreign organs, the memory of sharing space outright rather than passing through. This is
true: I’ve never had my chest cut open. This is false: as a child, I never sliced the middle of my
middle finger to the bone with broken scissors such that I could see a substance so black it was
green and I could never eat marshmallows again. The way I lie in this borrowed bed, no one
would ever guess how I dream awake of a different kind of softness and incision. I dream of a
different kind of smallness and orbit. My apologies to the lender. I’m only an astronomer when
I’m restless. This much is false.