She had only had her driver’s license two weeks when she totaled the family car. Darcy’s father had to rouse a neighbor in order to borrow a vehicle to come retrieve her from the scene of the accident. Her best friend, Lydia, had been taken away by ambulance.

I called my wife. I tried to explain.

Theta waves, I said. It’s all about theta waves. They’re more longitudinal than alpha or beta waves.

What? my wife said. What are you talking about?

What Hair Does

“I’d trust Jane with a pair of scissors . . .” I was cross-legged on the vanity bench aiming to slingshot my mother with a garter belt.

She looked up from the sewing machine and peered over the top of her bifocals. She had on a stretched-out, once-white bra, and a dainty roll of pale freckled skin lopped over the waistband of her half-slip. “You’d let anyone with a rusty kitchen knife and a DustBuster at your hair! Thank god those bangs have grown out.”

Fingers
My Piper will break your heart with her new gap-toothed smile, and her flapper haircut, and her tiny bitten fingernails. When you see my Piper in front of the Toasted Oats, spindly-legged beneath her summer dress and her red rubber boots, her brow crinkled in concentration as she runs her nimble fingers up and down the grocery list, you will want to gather her up in your arms.

Homo sapiens have 78 organs. Homo sapiens have 660 skeletal muscles, 206 distinct bones, and 50 trillion cells. Homo sapiens have human skeletons. Homo sapiens reproduce internally through sexual intercourse. Homo sapiens have a head, a neck, a torso, two arms, and two legs.

I bent coins with my teeth, and they broke. That’s what currency can’t reconcile, green stacks and time, its escapements, the gleaming plates, the missing letter. A bicycle comes down from the attic in time but in time for what? Love spun in the mouth?

You are sprung from the angle of inner event

and rise through the hydraulics of ventricles

like a birdcall in a storm drain

Ahead of the vegetable cart a horse drops

a hoof on paving stones, the clop equivalent

to a gunshot and a hooker

in Prospect Heights in the guise

of a Civil War widow has a heart attack.

In the equinoctial bargain

between dark and light late

in the day she pauses

and, sitting on him,

listens to the storm

“The news from everywhere’s a gone bad deal

And the Priestess of the Dreams says

It ain’t kabuki Babe, they’re losing it for real…”

Here in Finland they say Yatkuu Yatkuu

Keep on Truckin’

Yatkuu Yatkuu whatcha gonna do…

The news from everywhere is weird to bad

Yatkuu Yatkuu whatcha gonna do…

When I was a girl I collected Hummel figurines, troll dolls, and the Madame Alexander dolls, a hobby with a significant sticker price range. At every major holiday a relative could take her pick, buy something low end or go berserk, depending on her circumstances—my gift to them, the easy child to shop for. No judgment from me.

Light hesitates to fix, to position itself

between night’s huge twin mammaries

spewing their milk across our universe

and crusts and ridges of our desert roads.

The sodium streetlights down the avenue

Were vague globes where the dark turned orange,

And the orange dark. The avenue deserted,

The buildings all abandoned, or soon to be,

I drove, I can’t remember where, or when,

“I suffer from vertigo”

— Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

I recognize the look: neck tucked and still,

shoulders hunched, back rounded into a shell,

and the eyes held level as the world swirls

I came across a house inside out.

I walked through all the walls of the rooms.

In bed, I found a black-bearded man

with jasper eyes, his neck in a noose.

Forest Service Road on 6 didn’t come up.

You and I quiet, grown up together,

no questions to ask each other. We turned

on what we thought might work, a brown dirt wick

to the trees. I thought of the Cascade Trail,

her sweet bebop a backdrop to floating white silos

out the window, hoodoo ghosts on the Osceola stop.

Past the old car graveyard, then an orchard, dirt road/

black cow/black cow/how do we get around?

So much country, how do we even know where to go?

Translated from the Czech by Deborah Garfinkle

By the tracks, a dog

climbs into the rabbit’s skin. Frost

lifts the countryside with the chain pump’s

snapping, the countryside

O maker of paper and dams

formed after minerals of time,

teach me to adjust to this bed,

varved histories and sensitivities.