They should invent a machine

They should invent a machine that grabs you and flings you around a bare sterile room with a crane arm industrial that comes from the ceiling a blank white expanse. It should be able to catch the back of your shirt and toss you straight up and catch you across the stomach with its arm and knock the wind out of you mouth agape :O gasping breathing openfaced fish not a teeth only a tube to the other end. Metalblocked interrupted flow it should evacuate your air tire pump pressure. It should catch you when you slide off the arm drooling emptymouthed. It should be soft too and delicate when it needs. It should have spindly fingers at the end of the arm perfectly straight in the round thin like the tongs on a fork and pluck you from the space by the ankle dangle bloodless. It should squeeze from the head to the bottom of the feet to put you back in order and click click twisting wind up the ticking pulse in your neck. It should be safe it should be love it should throw you up and over again and never let you fall.

Swan

I'm hurrying past a woman in a long teal puffer coat when her perfume hits me: something jasmine, indolic and night-climbing. It faintly registers as sexy though I don't want her at all.  I read somewhere that the indole used in synthetic jasmine mimics animal shit at full strength but in low concentrations somewhere in the human brain it is associated with desire, somewhere deep and animalic and gross. 

I don't even think to associate the woman with her perfume, it comes disembodied and almost clinical or academic. She turns the corner and is gone. I hope someone is intoxicated by her, or finds her in her jasmine.

There is a swan I've been watching by the canal for a few days ever since I saw it biting a man's shoes on the dock. Yesterday it slept in the middle of the sidewalk, its beak tucked into its wing. Across the canal I saw two girls stop and look at it for a while. I think they were wondering (like I was) whether it was dead. The massive, elegant white creature became just a big lump of feathers, a roadblock. Pigeons clattered around it. People stepped off the sidewalk to avoid it. It felt terrible and wasteful. 

I walked by, but I was scared to look at it too closely in case it was really dead. I imagined what a swan would look like without feathers and I couldn't. I couldn't think how much volume would be missing; how skinny the neck must be. It made me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable like picturing a human being naked. I didn't stop to check if it was alive or not. I walked past and did not see it again when I came home.

This morning I saw it again, sleeping in the same way, its beak tucked into its wing. It was off of the sidewalk this time, closer to the canal in a flat patch of grass where I'd seen people pitch their tents some nights. 

Somehow it being off of the sidewalk assured me that it was comfortable. I assumed it was the same swan and felt relieved that it was alive, just a day-sleeper (apparently). I went down to where it was sleeping and watched it a while to be sure. Its breathing was so deep and steady and soft I almost cried for some reason. Its feathers did not move, only the whole structure of the bird breathed. I left once I saw it breathing; I didn't want to disturb it. 

On the last day

It swells and crashes
goes from hot heavy-pregnant wet
to cold, whipping, white peaks and things
equal to rise
lower to drop
and I keep drinking seawater
I keep sticking out my tongue and licking it
off my hands and arms
a salt-lick would they put iodine in my skin
and the girl on the beach watching my bags
looks just like me
if I sat on a sun-rock
dipping popcorn into dried salt
in the little empty tide pools 
and the fish wriggled
and the sand grit between my teeth

Queering the Map in Gaza

Diary entry

This morning I wished to be reborn and not for any genuine reason only that I'm bored and obligated. I swam in the ocean and tasted the salt of embryonic fluid (I imagine it is salty) and thought about performance and thought I could live in the cradle of the mountains in some sort of bush of purple flowers. Earlier today I was afraid of a barking dog behind a fence; I curled up inside myself and crossed the street and put my eyes down so it would know I'm not a threat. No, I could only live the life I am right now.

My friends

I like the way your face looks lit up from underneath by the neon light of the tap,
every little glittery yellow star in the dark room reflected in your beer, the panes of the windows circling, waving, wiggling when you wave your glass.

I have eaten a lemon cake with strings in my ears, resonant sliding and wind stretching the skin between my ribs--

for months when I was a kid I dreamed only of flying practice -- a bright green grassy hill, a blue sky like a default desktop background. The wind is harsh and whipping, my T-shirt some kind of parachute-- l spread my arms out and wait and breathe, feel it could happen on any exhale, l will be sucked up into the air and whirled around on a jet stream.

l become conscious that l'm doing it and then I try too hard; I get frustrated and wake up.

When I hear crickets I think about chasing fireflies and catching them on our hands,  ordinary bugs brown and sweet and harmless, crawling over our fingers, letting them fly off. Watching our steps in the wet grass. I would sleep with my head on your shoulder, but then where would yours go? I picture our hard skulls phasing through each others', our hair tangling together.

I forget I'm full of water until I see you again. 

Spring

Stained-glass dragonfly wing up close to my face tickling my cheek lands on my nose and begins to walk, its tiny legs tapping out mallet percussion across the glue of my eyes... a light trill, my elementary music class glockenspiel, you hear a little sprout straining and cracking its bulb, forcing itself up squirming into the dirt.

Your shovel breaks earth and the smell is divine, soil deep and cool and edible. I always dreamed of finding red-and-gold gummy worms writhing underneath a rock, stretching and pulling over each other, a chewy gummy texture that sticks to your molars. 

Sometimes when my brain is full of phlegm or water they are driven out onto the pavement. They peek around the balls of my eyes and ask each other how bad they think it is-- it would have to be pretty bad for them to leave-- before they get flooded out, down my face and out of my nose. And then later after everything has dried the streets are full of worm husks and the ones that survive limp sheepishly back in through my ears to start their lives over entirely.

What I mean, in plain English: I want to be cared for desperately. I need a doctor with his gloved hand on my forehead and all his charity work caught in the zipper of his teeth in his clenched mouth smile.

I would sit and swing my feet off the exam chair and keep pretending to run a fever until he gets sick of testing. And then I would say doctor to be honest I am afraid to move, because I am terrified of the ripping sound the roots make when you pull a weed out of the garden.

In the most lonely and coughing parts of my mind his prescription says on unmarked paper, baby stay forever, you are all the dreamy parts of spring... I love when the clouds make you calico --love you in every new light pattern and shadow--I want to see you become different in every season and place--I want to see you young and old and worm-eyed and unrooted. At the bottom his signature is unreadable. 

When the pharmacist asks about the signature I tell her I can't remember who prescribed it. I am afraid if I go back I will find out he accidentally switched my file with another worm-girl's, and my prescription was really just exercise, rest, and talk therapy. My head aches and I could but I know I will never go back. Summer makes everything a little less green.