Skye Anderson

A Corner Piece

I.

You went to the table expecting a feast. You wanted to live to lengthen the lease.

You wanted the world, you got a corner piece. You wanted the herd, you got the lamb.

Still think of the great, unsheared sheep, basking in that high-end sleep,

hearing the beavers build their heap— they wanted the river, they got the dam.

Three-story cake, coasters on your shoulders,

a trifling stake, rivaling the weight of boulders— be the one and only warm pastry holders.

Burn evenly or do not burn at all.

If you leave it sitting out, it dwindles and dries; bread harshly hardens, like your knives

on the floor of a rink that used to have ice. A solar syzygy is a lunar landfall.

II.

You go on a scavenger hunt with the meal faced down, stranding a crowned jewel as a paltry fragment,

for you’ve heard that home is coming to town and only a fool would miss such an advent.

You always had that way of making like a comet: remember when you first looked into the Sun? They told you the distance; you said, I want it. And you still do with each ray, you thankless one.

You know the Sun like you remember dying, have run across hemispheres to avoid the night,

have watered your eyes staring up, nearly blinding, for there is something holy in losing your sight.

This knowledge proves strongest when skies extend it, recognizing the magic in every drop it thirsts for,

that fantasy alone is enough to quench it:

your bubbled angel kisses need not burst more.

III.

Sometimes dread catches up, though. Are you afraid of the dark? The cold air? Let’s meet midnight. Get a coat to wear. Blunt your arrow, suppress your bow.

If this’ll do anything, it will save your soul from the spurning sickness of afternoon; for once, refrain from decrying the moon until you have met eyes with the black hole.

IV.

Open arms never interested you:

when offered yellow, you’d insist on blue. And, while sunburns touch your face, you may never reach the source in space.

III.

I have to drag you around like a stubborn child,

but your tan speaks to the foreignness of separation, full with the heartache of shade-deprivation.

And at first, when you saw the moon, you smiled, knowing where the light is from, as though it’s a secret. Glancing across the room at your dear on the other side— the true source, borrowed from the teller of the tide— and you clutch to that proximity, desperate to keep it.

II.

It has been an unbelievably long time since you last let these late hours prevail.

Your fear is easing, hearing the clock chime, and you have got to check the mail.

It’s not far from here. Look where you’re going— find it ahead with the flag up and hooked.

The postage slot, when opened, is overflowing, and you cannot remember when you last looked.

You expect junk mail but it’s all letters, only letters, heartfully handwritten on stationery.

You expect for-worses but it’s all for-betters, addressed for pigeons to, in migration, carry. Lick an envelope, enclose what you’ve got,

and then you can chase and chase until you wake. Dream of that great star so bright and hot,

but neglect no crumbs as you have and eat your cake.

I.

They all know by now what you knew,

the truth shining when the trek is through: you don’t merely sit for a day or two

at a fireplace or in a sauna—you burn. Burn and visit, then. Nothing is ending. It’s only a ruler you continue bending, joy; it’s a way of maiming and mending.

You forget it all just so that you can relearn.

Not a day of rotation goes by, not an hour, that you do not see the light and cower.

With skin tender to solar power,

you swerve past a million to yearn for one. You wanted the sheep, you got the fleece. You got the goose, you wanted the geese. You have everything in your corner piece. And you will always love the Sun.

Low Lease

The stakes are high, darling, and each passing day they rise more. Though captive is the very last of what you are to me—

nor I Mother Dame Gothel, concealing not-her baby— you will thrive like an oak if you remain here in the core.

Your home is one made with an inadvertent intention: it sprouted up in my sleep, then I watered it awake.

I fed it until the rocky grounds of my mind would shake: cells preparing for residence of their own invention.

Oh, the acres reached by this unrivaled terra firma!

And the edge of it: a river whose depth may change at ease. Shallow in the day to float, before a wintering freeze,

the stream bed decays down as you dive through the obscura.

This home in my head comes alive, and the mind-rock hardens to form you a bed, ‘long the riverrun of all places.

You’re warm here in the shelter my soul endlessly graces

as Mother Nature waves hand to tremendous tree gardens—

with encryption rivaling the greatest tech you may find, bulletproof walls, a greenhouse, a blanket fort, a heaved tent, a heavy quilt with light patterns and your unperceived scent, kept by a border to hold my adored one unconfined.

And I have filled these high halls with treasures from not-my chest; behold the gilding of not-my names on tall, not-my shelves.

Hear me say the same thing all mothers like to tell themselves—

my fledgling baby, before he flies, shall stay in this nest.

Right up, the map goes: trinket-trivias, up and away! And every word glows, floating like dust in the air— your every quip, every tease, every trust, every stare— sweet souvenirs from a sweeter-ringing double trochee.

And you are pinned in my prayers, unconditional and sworn: wishes made through the boldest of me and out from none (never in vain, never overstepped; only overrun

by a poorly-incarnate thing begging to be reborn).

And, not-my honey, do I only know you a costume—

a cape that falls the moment you step behind the curtain? A coat hangs on a mannequin, wishing it a person;

I hang onto this hollowing air, wishing it a room.

And tell me, not-my honey, am I doing this all wrong? By loving you so hard, am I deterring you afar?

In creating this world, I have torn another apart: piano keys are hit like daggers and there is no song.

Where was your silent patter in a matter of decline?

Why, not-my dear, was this property constructed? Tell true: for whom did I grow a citadel—not-myself, or you?

I pray it is the latter but the latter is not mine.

Planted at the dawn of this land is a soaring cypress that serves as a symbol—I was here to see it arise.

And when they do withdraw the world of you out from my eyes, beloved Trochee, give them not a glimpse of the iris.

Demodex

I would daydream then, the visions in prose: embellished, splashing, artfully-done thoughts. That was until the day I shrunk, and rose,

to an insect that turns stomachs to knots. The bed of the bedbug lies sweet this late, as I tiptoe towards varying spots.

Never was I one to sleep much, or mate. They, mindless, feast on that which I adore: shameful! My home is not meat on a plate.

These creatures live so short. I have lived more. And I’ve made the acquaintance of Brevis,

who takes hikes up the neck and lives next door.

But he, unlike I, eats from a crevice

that he crawls through on the line of your chest.

Instead, I find the arms the most precious and fall down them like on a slide, in jest, finding joy in you and the open air.

And up there is the shoulder, where I rest: I feel like a guardian angel there.

To breathe a body in like nicotine, to breathe in its lone follicles of hair,

the angel makes and takes the guillotine. To you I attach, in scratching an itch— I cannot be rid of your histamine.

Never think of the thing that you bewitch. And I believed you beautiful before;

I had dimes of you then. Now, I am rich! For you easily make my love restore, right when I deem it to be the highest.

See the other mites sat on the seashore, them the shallowest and I the wisest;

they cannot conceive their luck, living here, heirs to a gulf that would quench the driest. So blessed are we magnifiers, dear!

Inward-diving only proves it further. Your gulf is as divine as it is clear: inclining only heightens my fervor,

and departing only draws me nearer. Let me be your truest observer;

let me be your unwavering mirror. And you hate to be a head full of lice,

but nothing could ever hold you dearer. Do you know that you are its paradise?

Do you know its world began with your birth? May an embrace you cannot feel suffice?

It gives the smallest kiss on God’s green Earth, and it is nothing but a parasite.

Here upon you it climbs, lacking in worth and pitiful as a day’s fallen kite

whose windless land has left it no use since. Yet I pray you feel the love in each bite,

feel an admirer and not a nuisance.

And the depths of the gulf can be daunting but your gentleness proves its translucence, renewing the vows of an old, gaunt string that ties me close to your alluring skin,

and binds me to the harbor of wanting which ended the same way it will begin. For no matter which way the water flows, you’re the only place it has ever been.

Magnum Opus of a Fruit Fly

The dead clock decays: it is the star of its own illness. Roman lines gaze up in spite, in plea; I would console them, but I think they want more.

Pitaya is saying a prayer for a woman whose legs do her no good. After a soft Amen, she walks once more. This miracle—one I do not yet know to be manufactured—renders me wordless, and I am suddenly ready to climb a perfect bandwagon. Later on amongst the dancing and cheering you greet me, and the first time you look at me (maybe the only time), I am met with a glimpse of what I want. This, I think, is exactly what I want.

Now days later, it replays: the magic in that prayer, the vibrance in and around us all afterwards, the glint of your eye. I know that I need this feeling again. Yet I brood upon apprehension, which I lack for the most part yet still tend to. The whistle of a dolphin speaks to what I am sure is impulse. Go, it says. I listen.

I find myself there again and I am as glad as I thought I would be, indulging myself in juices and confectioneries. My joy grows on trees. Trees everywhere—joy everywhere! If the body is a temple, then let me worship you, joy. Joy in the light, joy in the damn wind. As I adapt, there is a difference I cannot pinpoint, but I dismiss it.

Pitaya is calling a bus for the expansion of our swarm, lining the road with peels of banana and citrus. I have been here a while now; if there is anything we missionaries can spot, it is weakness, and you know there is nothing I want to get my hands on more than a sweet, rotting melon. It takes one to know one, you say, and you have us etched into your palm.

They said when you were young, you would squash flies in your hands before mourning them in the grass. Now you disparage the hand; mark the pain of the flies; pit the flies against texts (as you are their Lord, after all); trace the wood of the clock; and maybe you seek a bandage as long as you may tear it off. Renovation may as well be a burning building, may as well be the death of the dollar.

I cannot pretend to be any different from the rest, drawn in by anything besides charm and desire. My God is not fallible, I often swear. In this world it seems as though the only thing distinguishing something from nothing, God from not-God, is the presence of disciples. God allows me fruit and I follow.

Pitaya is leading us seaward, and my earnings now go to the church. Eagerness takes over us, surrounds us like a breeze. Our destination is beautifully heavy-lidded as though it is only dreaming us, or we are only dreaming it. This continues as we settle in: the days are long and countless with no way to mark them besides the color of the sky rebelling against every sundial, every broken clock. If there is an unfond kind of familiarity, then that is what I feel for the constant noise. The others’ voices storm against mine, which now falls indistinct; I suppose it is a newfound advantage, though, to be rid of it.

Something is dying in this pavilion, but I cannot tell what. If it is anything of mine, surely it is my independence, because my desire survives. Though the drain threatens to swallow it, I hold onto it the tightest, for I am nothing without desire. I cannot remember the last time I felt the touch of sugar but it remains in my blood—and somewhere outwards, too, if I can help to dream of it.

The radio must be dying, too, with that old clock, because it only plays the same relentless voice into our sleepless ears; God is now a drunken despot. When we arrived here I thought I was coming home, but home must be something of a flytrap. A flytrap is not doing its job if it is not closing in on prey, and prey is unlucky by nature.

Pitaya is asking us to stay but not truly asking. Riddled with perceived suspicion, the land is met with tourists, and we must be on our best behavior to appease. Paranoia that is not my own tells me that our God has been kissed by Judas, but I was never kissed by God. Still no taste of sugar, and still I am unsatisfied.

Urgency is in the air, looming. Ensuing are hurried whispers and hushed panic, neither in which I take any part. Families are holding each other tight. Some say we may not leave. I am skeptical but not immune to the power of suggestion; my mind begins to tick like a bomb, counting backwards.

There is fruit, finally: laced with the end of the world but fruit nonetheless. Gravity seems to strike the crowded ground, becoming a tenant of death. One collective death, or hundreds of individual deaths—I am not immune to this, either.

Pitaya is spitting fire, insisting we fell with grace to deflect the falling. A head nodding rightly at the wrong:

not-God, garnering disciples through fear. You can tell me, Pitaya, that you saved us, that I was nothing without your saving. You can remind me that the world called us fools—I would not object. You can say we drank but, still, it was you who poured and poured and poured.

And I think I understand every word in the dolphin’s whistle, the language of under-breath hyperbole. I think I know what it means to swear on faith, on concentration, on sweet falsehoods. A hand is a very selfish thing.

Life must have been somewhere. It was my fault, surely; I did not look hard enough. Maybe life was in the chlorophyll tucked into that last leaf. Maybe life was sometime before religion, or maybe there would have been no life without religion. Maybe life was on the bus or in the water. Maybe life was just too short.

It is quite useless for a ghost to check its watch, and quite sad. It still ticks but this time forwards, counting mere and more seconds since the bomb went, since I dropped onto the ground. And there is the wood of the satisfaction of that old clock, sickly and aware. The fate of our swarm must have shone clear to all except us, for in that long, empty chase we would have taken evening as morning. The clock never really told us time.

Yardstick

Care and terror: don’t shoot the messenger, shoot the message.

Care and terror: fear every degree you surpass, the lock like safety.

Care to pass on the message from care.

There’s something they must know, cannot know; they all know the statement we know to be wind.

Tell them anything can happen;

anything can happen and this heartens them just as it threatens us.

Tell them we’re full of parallels;

it’s all we do, use the word in the definition; tell them we know only one word

and refuse to learn the rest.

Tell them there is no rest,

translating the same story into every language, languages we make up just to tell it again;

tell them we’d speak fragments of them all before we’d be fluent in one.

Tell them they’re the story and the language and the translation and the mistranslation and the havoc and the miracle

and the likelihood and the lack thereof and the ever-beloved terror.

Tell them we’re alive,

tell them it’s too small a universe for them to not be at the center,

tell them it’s murderously exponential, unfathomably personal—

do not tell them to fathom it. Tell them it’s every day,

tell them it’s every second,

tell them there is nothing a red giant

could do for an ant that wouldn’t kill it—

do not tell them the ant wants it.

Tell them it’s care;

though it knows no brake, it’s care; tell them we try to slow down.

And why does care beckon temptation just as it does caution?

Tell them we beckon caution.

And we die

before the message is said;

they hear sound but no concrete.

And, messenger, if you

are kind enough to eat our words, then season them with care.

Let it not be a curse

that anything can happen.

Hushing Me

These souls of ours lie along the same asymptote, rushing: approaching our line of everything, but never touching.

Some time ago, I made my casual declaration but in time, it echoed a chasmical revelation;

you’d think an inadvertent love stored stemlessly in scope would halt: a plateau, nullifying what was once a slope.

But one day I found I had a lordly museum new

whose artifacts then built upon themselves, graciously you.

And, as I watched them, while gliding along the bronze and sums— the tallest room in the world stretching, turning me to crumbs— there was a shift. And those rising walls bewitched me for good.

It dawned on me that I needed to clutch all that I could: writhing for an unreturning monument of wonder triumphs palling back a long life with the soul it’d sunder. What would a Swanless thing like me even do with Being? Swanless joy’s oxymoron is one I won’t be seeing.

The crater into which I will fall stands eerily by:

fatal regardless of hope, unseen by the naked eye, and, though I’ll never run out, I’ll run drier and drier until infinitesimal dregs are all I acquire.

Here is my quest! I abide by the task of performing, insisting that the sweltering sand is gently warming. Do I need water, you ask? No, my love, don’t be inane.

Sure, a drink would be nice, but my drive begs you to refrain; tempt me with sight of mirage, of when hydration held me, and it is light camouflaging my own fidelity.

Swan, I made a vow that storms can only dream of breaking.

Until my serving fades, for you I’ll continue aching and if the somatic sustains, then so will my loving— if I am desiccated, the thought of you lends flooding.

You see the love? It drains all else. It built me a fortress.

You hear the pulse? It sings bloodloud. But, compared to yours, less, for I sift through the preserving, happy as crawling clams,

adoring your heart beating momentously in iambs. And the asymptote is only formality, my dear;

there is no such thing as imagining. We are right here.

The space between two points is self-contained and thus endless; specks become unthinkably minute, our motes thus senseless, and I have never been so close to a thing without touch.

Your encircling glow has never circled into my clutch, unable to bolden the tapping of its metronome,

but it takes a golden form in perching right at home.

And the fond sun grazing your skin, and the salt in your eye— the tiny mites on your sweet face, the cotton on your thigh— they are all where arrows cleaved me from a someplace undone, and my worst fear in that life, I am living in this one.

Please, just let me do this sole thing for you, and I’ll be off.

I want what you want, but it hurts me to clasp at this trough with the faintest glimpse of your glee-showering company through the glass so clear that I could feel the edge tugging me and every night I forget it there, or at least pretend—

oh, my love, I am afraid I have hit the wall again.

The pane fogs, and breath slows, losing itself in a nosedive, so then is the drifting to slumber that keeps it alive.

And the orb dims until morning, as chimera orbs do; you are not in my dreams, and yet they are all about you.

White Noise

I have everything, I should say. That should be how it ends, not how it begins. I should mention the word, the time, the piece. I have two senses. I should have five.

I see everything. Sometimes, I can even begin to see more, and then it leaves like a flickering firefly I cannot catch. Flickering, too, are memories of my mind’s eye: there is your hand simulated, the grazing alignment postulated, and words in a rough draft that wished to be spoken, wished to be yours. See the avoidance of anything that would uncross my eyes, waving before the pattern I am dazing in. See the refrain from anything that could remind me of being close to being very far. Did you see when I fought that city? Another gesture. Another flicker.

I hear everything but sometimes it is only me. Sometimes I say the truth underwater until it is muffled even to my own ears. Do you hear the words in somebody else’s voice as you read? Can you tell how I made them rhyme, reserved for the event I may put them to song? Do you listen? Battling towns in my sleep, I visit fields and wonder what the grass would say if it could talk. The grass will never talk.

I feel everything, for perceived matter may as well be matter: all that there is, and much of what there is not. There is sometimes snow in Alabama. But I lied about the snow this time; I fudged all of it. I cannot pretend that it isn’t scorching me where I lay our makeshifts to be born. I am born so often that it hurts. I am born so easily, born like a dusty phrase repeated in my sleep, born insensitive to being conjured cold. Layers of socks are not always enough but that bareness is impenetrable. And you rub menthol on your lips. You would use lava if he told you to.

I smell nothing. There is no pool for chlorine to remind me of. There is no mint in your pocket. They’re cooking something but please don’t ask of the aroma. Please don’t forget to bathe and let the bubbles imprint themselves. Please use the evidence to concur that there has been rain. Please check the time and look at the sky, because dew cannot tell you when it is morning.

I taste nothing. It must be better this way, and so much easier to tame the appetite that pretends it is caged. Everything I take in is just a number, just outstretched data.

I know nothing. I like to shrug it off because I am sure that it does not matter, for my conclusion would not change—it wouldn’t. I do not know the taste of a good night nor will I, nor will most anybody. To me it is an inevitable thing, but that does not make it hurt less. I saved a mint for the grass. The seat beside me is taken and empty.

I know everything. I know it, the same way I know the side of the moon that is turned away. I know a voice and a laugh, just as pure as the beginning when it was dark and there was nothing but. I know that sound—that

hymn—and I know that look. You underestimate the power of filling in the gaps, for I know the glass when it fogs just as much as I know it when it is clear. I know the soil in the ground and everything it produces; even when it is sick or frozen or far, I know it. I know how it feels, even without feeling it, for I know the taste of honey when it is not on my tongue. I know. I know you.

I want nothing. Or, rather, I wish for nothing. There is a great difference between wishing and wanting, and I am afraid I am soaring in the heights of the latter. I want the Sun, the Swan dancing on it. Could I bear it? It is so very loud, and if I cannot take white noise then how shall I wilt in your whisper, too hot for a snowy California. Oh to read you again from the first page, and what is a book of bulky synonyms if not the diary of the undesirable? And it seems that this book will never stop being written; for, just when I think it is done, more awaits my penning. And I have lived in this moment before but it is different this time, only a little different. Oh how familiarity builds and becomes a cobweb of thoughts worth living in, and I have watched enough to know what happens. And I wish it was enough, and it always will be, and it always will be a dime too short. And when it ends it begins again. I want everything.