We have spent fourteen days in the new apartment.

During the evenings, my mother stands at the kitchen counter and cuts packing tape with safety scissors. She empties boxes and begins cataloging her belongings according to their worth. She re-opens envelopes holding birthday cards, wedding invitations, notes of congratulation and bereavement, handwritten letters. Sometimes she’ll call me over and read select bits of them out loud. That’s from Pamela, you know, from the company. This is from my old psychiatrist. Billy Kelly from Birmingham. Granduncle in the Canary Islands. Look at how this starts: Dear Carmen, your little girl is beautiful… The names and words bring me the nostalgia of familiar dog days, of lawns and tiles, drives and forests behind apartment complexes. Often they come with soft images and smells rather than concrete memory. Tina’s protruding blue eyes, the carpet around a fireplace, quiet. Sometimes, if the memory is a good one, if the sender is a good one, my mother smiles. She will even tip her head back for a moment, eyes closed, losing the sick tension, for once. Then my mother puts both hands on the paper and tears it in halves, and then in fourths. She offers no explanation, tossing the pieces in the trash as she does the empty cardboard boxes and the sweaters shrunk in our new washing machine. It was hard not to flinch, at first, but I have learned.

We have driven to IKEA twice. The first time I was struck not by the amount of stock or customers, but by the number of babies. Infants held against the breast, the back, in arms, sleeping in strollers as a mother and father debated over sofa cushions. They looked up at the paneled, light-filled ceiling with steady and unthinking devotion. Did they mistake it for the backdrop of the hospital where they were born? Did they return to that sudden and pivotal time of blood, humidity and love? Did they start anew?

On the way back, my mother drove fours hours in the dark. Mi cerebro no reconoce el cansancio de mi cuerpo, she said. My brain doesn’t recognize the tiredness of my body. I craned my neck, looking for her expression in the light of passing automobiles, but that curve of cheek and steady hand could belong to anyone. I stared at her as a young child would, searching for a mark to know her by. Where are you, mother?

The second time, my mother tried to make the same return trip on one fill of gas. As the needle dipped close to empty, my mother called to me. Her voice can give the space around me form and structure wherever I am – even when I am curled up in a car, caught between a dying radio, black mountains and the poisonous nighttime. I took off my safety belt, something I once nearly slapped my brother for doing, and wrapped my arms around the seat immediately in front of me, the seat my father once occupied. Should I stop? she asked me. We are close to empty. I knew that if I told her to stop, she would. Instead, against all proper judgement and reason, I said: go. You can make it. 

My brother has cried once. Don’t believe it, I whispered to him. You know the truth. He allowed himself to be held, but only for a few minutes. When he lifted his head he was calm, but not expressionless. In his face, in that small face, I found the still and unassuming bravery I have needed for so long. I have taught my brother the alphabet, the difference between a diphthong and a hiatus, multiplication of fractions. Now, I try to teach him to survive, I try to teach him the truth, only to find that I am the one who still needs teaching.

We fight, my mother and I. At first it was often, but now it is only occasionally. We argue with one another as angrily as ever, but we do it while sitting at the table, drinking breakfast tea, or while washing the dishes. These healthy, domestic scenes give us a sense of order and responsibility. Sometimes we forget we don’t want to hurt each other, and we fall into the old roles. I am the lithe and disdainful villain, and she the towering specter, baring her teeth. But mostly we are good. As simply as children, we have made peace with one another. Even the bad guys have something to protect.

I think of what I want for us often. I picture us taking the subway to the movie theater, the three of us standing in a circle, shoulders touching, packed in close together by the weight and substance of strangers. We buy stale popcorn and orange soft drinks, we rush up stairways, we arrive a little late but nab perfect seats. Quirky, heroic characters, rolling streets where teenagers meet to construct secret bases, soundtrack that lilts and booms at all the right places, killer lines spoken by poor delivery men and gunslingers against bucolic scenery, deaths in the arms of the schoolboy who swears revenge, absolutely no romance – we see the film that my mother will remember as being “beautiful”. We take a taxi cab home, and my mother is talking and smiling, she is laughing at the bits from the movie my brother reenacts. Every once in a while, she turns to look at us in the backseat, and I can see her clearly, even in the dimness. I recognize my mother, my true mother, half a century old, hands touching her knee, her face, smiling and shaking her head: the best of the scores of women she has been before and will be. When I recognize my mother, my lofty skepticism and system of cruelty leave me, if only for a short while. When I recognize my mother, I am reminded of the worth of this day, of all days. No, I do not live for her. But I do live because of her, in more ways than one.

The moving men and my mother position a bookshelf slightly to the right. Why don’t you put it in the center? I ask, standing in the doorway in my pajamas. I want that space for flowers, she says. I think of the flowers in our old apartment. They died from neglect in no time at all, the wooden flower boxes rotting in the rain. My mother makes a sweeping motion with one hand, gesturing towards the entirety of her home, all the walls and children who have made her their caretaker. I’m going to fill this entire place with flowers.

I’m learning to read Japanese; each step across the page slides cleanly through me, sun cutting across the undergrowth. The characters fill me to the brim with the sticky reminder of their shape and meaning, stuck to the nape of my neck like the odor of spoiling summer fruit. I stand over a desk in the clouded glow of early morning, tracing their forms with a fingertip. Hiragana, katakana, kanji. I thread them together and run my tongue through them, and they are as new and tender to me as the the birth of the first moon is to the insecure god. I want to own and preserve these characters, cup them close to my chest; I want to mutilate them, too, test their breaking points. Indecision takes root. I remember that boy from high school; how the only thing I could tolerate less than his sadness was his joy. Someday I will be sitting on my haunches at the beach, dipping my hands into sand, writing him a love letter onto the body of the coast that the sea’s blood will soon take away.

My father doesn’t approve. Why Japanese? he asks me during our telephone conversation, his voice ground into pulp by some faraway satellite. Anxiety breathes deep and pure into my stomach; I press my forehead to the window glass and I thank God, not for the first time, that he is not here with me, and that he cannot see my expression. I look too much like my mother when I am upset.

Japanese at nine o’clock in the rain, footsteps up the sidewalk like the drip drop of a bar’s painful piano, my lips twisting at the language as though insistence could return color to the dying leaves of my thoughts; Japanese when I find myself on the floor, crying, folded up, creases and edges pinched to a close. Japanese because when all else fails, at least I have the frustration of a liar’s love to keep me alive through the change into the shattering season. Japanese because I am unhappy and there is no one left to blame.

I come up with a story for each character. Sa is a ghost, cooling touch and grace, wiry frame, wound up by childhood death. Tsu is the soft-eyed and slow-smiling boyfriend I’ll never have. Hi is a town near the seaside, done up in pastel and gold, where mermaids come to be buried. Ku is the secret that would break my dear mama’s heart.

In response to the first draft of my paper, my professor writes: Your paper has some emotions, more thoughts, and many, many questions. On the one hand, I like this structure, as I’ve said. On the other hand, the high ratio of questions to emotions makes me wonder whether the questions are protecting you from an awareness of feelings.

I have to laugh. Oh, the transparency of my doleful and doe-eyed deceit! A few thousand words and two weeks of class, and this man can see into the fleshy glass of my sinner’s heart. The questions are protecting you from an awareness of feelings. Damn straight they are. Bless the questions that keep me from feeling.

Na is a good girl who loves raspberries and spelling bees and dies of alcohol poisoning at nineteen. Shi is an orphan in charge of a city’s courier system. Ka is a white cat with the gift of speech and a duty to mankind. Chi is a fleet of transport trucks on the highway, going a thousand different ways, to opposite sides of a country. A is all I want, all I have ever wanted: a little house, by a river maybe, a good kettle, and someone warm who wouldn’t mind holding me when I’m tired.

Learning to read Japanese reduces and simplifies me, stripping me down to a few elements, as though I were a chemical experiment in the hands of the scientist, a clunky metal some lab technician will cut into with a diamond knife. I sit and forget everything about myself (a great feeling, the greatest of feelings, for a monster like me). The look of the characters, the sounds they carry in their curves, the way they fit in a sentence, inside my mouth. I cover each of them with the flat of my hand, and then slowly reveal them to the light, trying to say their names as quickly as I can. They don’t promise me more than exactly what they can give, but there’s a warmth to them that indicates, perhaps, the possibility of things to come.

In Japanese, someday I will: read a letter, talk to a cat, ask for directions to a town where mermaids go to die, listen to the advice of a ghost, buy a kettle, seduce a sweetheart boy, greet the conductor of the train that will take me somewhere (somewhere I won’t break my mother’s heart or disappoint my father or cry in the dark or run myself down into the slick pools of thick tar I mistake for rivers). Somewhere faraway where it snows the whole year and little houses aren’t too expensive and the locales smile often. Somewhere I can save myself, questions or no questions. And then maybe the scales will fall from my eyes and be replaced with stars.

I am traveling. On the second floor of a train, knees pressed to my chest; I have not slept in two days, my mind is a terrible place.

The trees are barely visible in the swollen dark, but thin branches spread up and out, gracing the curves of my peripheral vision; they tremble a little, a colorless, sleepless parade spiraling out along the tracks. The train is an incautious and indelicate creature, shaking hard, making disconsolate sounds. My face is dirty, and my hair lies in a dry coil at the base of my neck. Sweat dotting the insides of arms, coffee stains like animal stripes on the sleeves of my down jacket: it’s easy to see where I have been, the symptoms and saviors of my life are all about me, visible, deducible. I’m a victim at the scene of a crime, silhouette traced out in yellow tape, what’s the cause of death? And what are you going to tell me when I peel myself off the hardwood floor, scratch at the fingerprints of blood at my collarbone and ask where the nearest subway is, if I can go home now?

I’m not getting any rest tonight, that much is certain. So I pile my bags at my feet and keep watch, as wide swipes and swatches of land come and go. Patches of city, blurred out by motion and the gray morning hours, as though partially erased by a fidgeting and forgetful goddess. Spots of yellow-orange light flooding warehouses, parking lots, silver trucks. A factory, huffs of smoke, expanding and retracting in the air, like blood flowing down the tar roads or rainwater tonguing lazily at rock, just like your legs stretching out from underneath the sheets, curling around the piles of slightly wet laundry at the foot of your bed. Train tracks clot and congeal, dipping underneath bridges, around lakes that shine like oil spills in the night, skimming the surface of the planet, taking us along with it: anywhere, everywhere.

I don’t know where I am, sometimes. I’m caught between worlds, pinned underneath a membrane. Living feels like an out-of-body experience; see Emma walk, see Emma run. Someone I don’t know is walking around in my clothes, and I hang from traffic lights, watching them cross the street in the old jean jacket I took from my mother, in my black slacks and chapped lips. I won’t grab at their shoulders, yank them into an alley and steal it all back, I won’t pull my fleshy, stretch-marked skin over my knees and talk with my real eyes. I don’t feel safe, or trustworthy, not yet. Is this what growing up feels like? Is that what growing up is (deciding: I am dangerous)?

Cities split into suburbs: neat rows of pastel-colored houses, lawn ornaments. Then the sidewalks disappear and green-bright, nut-brown fields whiz past, lines of buds tended by old hearts in wife-beaters, blessed in the springtime by the bees that lay low and silent now, pressed into the cells of their golden hives. Boarded-up convenience stores, iceberg blue water towers, red barns: a little chewed-up at the edges, but all the more beloved. These towns don’t warrant a mention on the map, but there are men here who will be born in puddles of slick blood on cotton blankets and who will be buried near the fringe of trees, caked by cold and dirt, underneath Midwestern petunias; they will live out the entirety of their days in homes that are more unknown to the rest of mankind than the outlying strips of the universe.

It’s seven in the morning, now. I’m eating an overpriced chocolate bar, rolling sugar in my mouth, and my head lolls against the seat, and I am fighting sleep. The train turns a corner and I see the river; the first river in over a year. It hits me hard in the face, a fistful of gunshots, gold dust. I never realized that those threads and layers of water, strung out across the bowl of the land, could mean so much; my heart grows in some indeterminate but definite way. The sky, rubbed raw, is softening slowly; there is sunlight coming through the creases, cracking the ribs in the curvature of the Earth, soaking in like ink through paper veins, like time oxidizing faces, fire through the cover of trees.

I am in a moment of my life and I can’t decide if I like it or not. I’m awfully confused. But, all things considered, this is a pretty world to be confused in.

I remember a good song and tap it out on the carpet, I finger the ticket stubs in my pockets, I watch warehouses, men, rivers and it reminds me of the places I have been, the people I have been in those places. I have been the dollop trollop, I have been lady disquiet, I have been the corpse under your floorboards. I have been the songbird, the murderer, I have been the child lost in the forest. I am dangerous now, but I have been safe. Where do I have to go, to be safe again?

I am traveling. I have not slept in two days; my mind is a terrible place.

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It is a landscape of a song: greens and yellows, lulls like hillsides, crags and cliffs as notes strike and shiver, the sun in the mouth of a singer that would foretell their deaths. They listen, Henrietta’s weight shifting until their thighs are touching ever so slightly, and she can smell butter and wool and salty sweat and throaty, musky something-or-the-other (Roy). And suddenly the song has new associations. It’s not death, anymore. It’s a room in shadow, and sitting, and touch, and eyes closed and listening until the music is all gone and then looking up into someone’s face and smiling, smiling.

PAGE 27

And she shows them her hand-ax and tells them stories of golden robberies and nights spent under the stars, when they took from the rich and kissed the poor on the lips, and taking blouses from clotheslines and wearing scars like tiger stripes and battle wounds like lipstick, accessories after the fact, proof of living, of living greatly. And Henrietta grins and pokes fun at gang methodology, at the sloppiness of their structures, at the ill-timed plots and too-close getaways and Penelope rolls her eyes and asks are you jealous, do you wanna join, do you wanna be our planner, our strategist our bloody fucking timekeeper? It’s a joke but Henrietta says yes, yes, yes. And Penelope gets up and knights Henrietta the engineer with her ax, laying the handle parallel to her neck, just above the shoulder, and she whispers all hail Henrietta, general of the Lucky Dragons before dissolving into a fit of laughter.

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And then the universe will take them and remake them. The heart of a star out of bicycle parts, the viscous swirl of a newborn galaxy out of the body of the continents, a glimmering planet out of the red streaks in Henrietta’s hair when she stands in the sun, a square foot of space dust out of the curve of Toru’s cheek, a meteorite out of the plastic bags collecting at the bottom of the ocean. It’s barely any consolation at all, but it is something.

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There is lays, the barbed lattice, exposed, layers of blood peeling off, distance and days of time, draped over him, mixing in with milky warmth of his black eyes, drilling into a lifetime’s worth of wanting, understanding; all he’s been meaning to say, emerging, some maritime naked goddess stepping out of a grey-green pool, cautiously, purposefully, dripping, shedding. Henrietta listens to it all as though watching it happen, as though his loneliness occupied space in the room, as though it shifted the gravity of her world, pulling her in, unfolding before her (she wishes she could stab it, kill it, or else clasp it close, keep it safe, and the conflict grates against her, wound like a bond, a chemical link that not even a millennium on Earth could not destroy). He keeps going.

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“There’s one other bit, too,” She leans in. There’s a theory between his brows, a string of variables in the soft threads of his dark hair, a list of environmental factors hidden in the heart of his hands, where he shakes, like the newborn surface of the Earth separating, like the switch in seasons traced out in the swiveling of the sky, like the poetry that is a pustule rather than a prayer, it hurts and harms him, the way her eyes bore and search him; one last trial run, one run into the ocean, one final experiment. “One thing I haven’t said,” she continues, purposefully dragging it out. There’s a luxury in that: there is no time left for them, but she can keep him here, hanging on the edge of truth and pain (the pain that accompanies truth, the truth that gives pain its value, shaped in the form of her smile, crawling closer). Her fingers come up to his jawline.

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“What do you think it’ll be like?” He asks her, as she travels from collar to cuff, peeling away cloth. “Will it hurt?”

“No,” she says, reverently, “No. You won’t even realize it’s happening. One second you’ll be here, and the next you won’t be. Like falling asleep.”

“Falling asleep,” he repeats. “Will there be anything before? A flash of light, an explosion?”

“Oh, you’re so melodramatic,” she says, laughing. “That kind of stuff only happens in movies.”

He rolls his eyes. “You say that like you’ve been through this before, but even you can’t know exactly how it’ll go down.”

“I can make an informed guess based on evidence,” she says, arms curling around his neck. Now that time is going, it’s so much easier to make these movements, take decisions like pressing her toes to his ankle, her fingertips to his ribs (count them, count the bones from which you were made, the bones you now reclaim before the universe turns you both into dust, again). He smiles and the density and temperature of her heart increases by at least a thousand percent (pure mathematics) and she groans a little (I’m a goner).

“No,” she says, “it won’t be a big deal. It’ll be quiet and it won’t hurt.” If the universe hurts him, she’ll come back in the next one, she’ll tear it to pieces with her teeth, she’ll pin it to the ground and break its back.

A pair of young women came to calligraphy class today. They stood up to introduce themselves: slender, rounded arms, soft sweaters, pleasant voices. We practiced writing earth: pronounced chi, thick lines and threads of black, flecks like kicks, dense and hard. One of the women stops behind me, steadies herself on my shoulder, leans in and takes hold of my writing hand, guiding my strokes.

Her touch is all over me, gentle, and suddenly I cannot breathe. I feel like I’ve been robbed blind, like my inner organs have been removed and replaced with seawater, dark matter, heavy liquor; I am light, I am lightless. My ribs open up and invite it in, and there are branches around my waist, and blood up to my neck, and I’m overwhelmed with it, staying power, saving grace, movements like the wind on rooftops, because she’s touching me, her slim, cold hands are on me, her liquid-smooth, heart-soft palm is on the crushed metal of my shoulder blade, her fingers are resting in the gaps between my knuckles, like warm air rushing to fill an empty space, and she’s telling me that the fourth stroke ends in a stop, not a curve.

It’s been six months since someone’s touched me.

I need to control myself; I can’t control myself. I assumed this unease was temporary, but now it’s getting too familiar with me, softening the vertebrae that care for the frame of my body, licking at the falling walls of my mouth. I can’t control myself. I can’t control myself.

Fire, honey; liars, money. Put me to sleep; set me on fire. I’m so stuck within this life that a woman’s hand is enough to rip me apart. These hours I live are not whole; these places I go are not homes. What am I living, where am I going? I CAN’T CONTROL MYSELF.

Me: earth when it is dying, bruises that are flowers, empires of leaves and dog days that shatter, dust and dust and want and want. I was going to be a hero, but why would that be, when I am made of the stuff the galaxy wouldn’t put in its stars? I sit on my bed, dark outside, back to the wall, and I look at my hands, where I saw worth, once. Now I only see weapons.

I go to sleep praying that, during the night, I’ll change into someone better than this. When I wake I take in a single breath, my eyes open like gunshots, and I know: nothing has changed. You can’t control yourself; who would ever touch you.

ARIES, TURN FERAL: You’ll be more domestic animal than humanoid; oily blood and salt fish will be more yours than maple sugar and liquid sunsets. You don’t just break hearts, you eat them. Everyone likes a little tenderness, yes? But they think love, and you’re thinking chewable.

TAURUS, BLEED OUT: That blue-black night when you accidentally drop your briefcase on the subway floor not once but twice, don’t you dare take the short-cut through the yellow wheat fields home. Those Capricorn boys don’t care for you, they will cut your hair with butterfly knives and sell your clothes to housewives.

GEMINI, SKIP TOWN: There’s a spot behind the burger joint, you know which one. When your Pisces mother kicks you out, walk the two blocks there and feel the onion-sweet, beef-thick air in the dark until it snags underneath you; pull, pull. The fabric of this dimension will dissolve at the acid of your palm and perseverance, creating a hole two feet across, into a new universe. It’s just big enough you to jump in headfirst. No, I can’t tell you if you’ll be any happier, should you go.

CANCER, ACCEPT IT: You’ve got no beauty, but you will be lucky. You ugliest, worthiest of queens: rise.

LEO, MAKE LOVE: If you’re going to kiss him, do it at the pulse point, the throat, first like a wolf then like a married man, and keep at it until he forgets his mama’s name. Good. Get a tattoo afterwards (might I suggest a lion? No? Too obvious? A dragon, then.) If you’re out looking for a quickie, consider picking up an Aries. They’re biters, though; beware.

VIRGO, DON’T GO SLOW: On the day the city floods, hike up your skirts and run. You can’t cheat Death, but you can beat him up, if you find and catch him unguarded (his favorite victim, a sweet-tempered, curly-haired Aquarius, was taken during a storm; so now Death sleeps during rain. All villains have something they’d rather never remember.)

LIBRA, WANT IT: But don’t say it, don’t touch it, not yet. Some things must be courted before they are killed. Wait. Soon you will sink your hands in, run your tongue through. A warning: wanting is a kind of cheating, sometimes, and even if you get away with it, that won’t make it worthwhile.

SCORPIO, SPIT: Onto the sidewalk, and then into the fire, before you start up your brew. Eye of newt is a little old-fashioned, how about the heart of a Taurus?

SAGITTARIUS, WRITE: Last month’s paycheck was cut in half, and your blouse will disappear from the laundromat (Leo looks better in it. Sorry.) It’ll be alright. Sit at your kitchen table, half-naked, and finish your stories.

CAPRICORN, BE CRUEL: You are hungry. So feed.

AQUARIUS, COME HOME: Count your wounds and gather your things. You gave it your best shot, but it’s time to call it a day. Don’t fall asleep on the subway; don’t run the risk of a Libra’s love. Your body is demonic, but never rotting; can the same be said of the side of the angels? Those bastards are falling, every which way.

PISCES, IT’S OKAY TO CRY: You’re still here, aren’t you? Yes. Yes. Yes, you are. Say it with me, and then repeat it: yes, I am.

My favorite days are like earth after rain, rich with soft soil smell, a little warm, a little damp. I make tea but forget to drink it, and the smell of it, heavy and sweet, fills the room. I spent a Saturday sobbing, once, and the Sunday after dying of laughter. It served as a good reminder: putting on clean jeans and making it outside, that’s heroic, sometimes. My heart is a silly thing, half-formed, still catalyzing, but it’s still my heart. I am no Achilles, no Alexander, but I don’t mourn it, this mortal that I am, these places where I am now.

On bad days, there isn’t a prophet alive who can help me out of the darkness, but my mother’s face, blurred almost beyond recognition by an Internet connection strung across the Atlantic, does the trick. When I look at her, I remember how she never cried the day I left home, and I now realize that was the greatest kindness she could ever have showed me. I’m realizing a lot of things, as of late, and they make me want to punch myself in the face and kiss a stranger, in equal measure.

My body, this year: the back of my ankles dry, the curve of my wrist warm, some parts of me like peeled oranges, yellowing wheat, husks of cinnamon, belly flab, short legs, acne on my chin; I should get more sleep, I should eat better. It’s hard, and getting harder; nobody ever told me that. Even for the stars in space, life is nothing but resisting inner pressure and external gravity, inward and outward forces. But I think life can’t be measured according to difficulty, along a spectrum of extremes. I am not better, I am not worse. What I am, where I am now: that has yet to be determined.

I am nineteen in two hours.

There’s honey in her hair, and, on the corner 0f her mouth, sea salt. She stretches like a tiger, when she wakes in the mornings. Her smile is a knife, bitter and tragic; her smile is a slab of butter, warm and fragrant, dissolving. Her hands are villains on the run; her hands are suns from the spring months. Her skin is softest at the crook of her elbow, where her blood hums, pomegranate red, and on the drum of her belly, where her stretchmarks glow, milky silver. Her heart is a cliff, iron ribbons and deposits of metals along the edges; rocks between her ribs, for each time she’s cried without comfort, flowers in her lungs, for each time she’s danced to no music. Love is the hardest work, but she does it gladly. Eyes like trees in childhood, bites of sugar; voice like song in the tundra. Sea salt along her spine and dotting her temples; a gun at her back, underneath her shirt, loaded with bullets made of honey.

I examine my body in mirrors. In a year’s time, my hair has grown longer than it’s ever been; near the ends it feels like old hay, thick and unhealthy. I run my hands through it and think: this is Medusa’s hair, when she is cleaning herself in seawater at night, running across the white sand, her snakes with their eyes half-closed, dormant, shedding scales dried out by salt. Under the fluorescent light of a hotel bathroom, my hair resembles a horse’s mane, caught and collected against my neck, tangled, dirty; but during the evening, when I spot my silhouette on the wall, I see no hair, only fur down a wolf’s back. Prey or predator, girl or Gorgon; I still haven’t decided which I am. I am pulling at Penelope, undoing her work, ripping my hair from where it’s been threaded with silk and perfume, into her tapestry. I am running away, on the shore, hovering between water and land, my body flipping, switching: sweet, gristly, tender, crippling.

My mother is consoling me; she holds me, she lets me rest on my head on the hollows of her collarbones, my hair falling over her arms. “My God,” she says, “so much hair. It seems like a curtain, more than hair.” I think of actors in porcelain masks on a stage, appearing and disappearing as a velvet curtain rises and falls. For some characters, I bare my canines and carnivore’s nails;  electric and vicious, leaping up to kick flat in the chest, splitting the braid of blood that knots hearts. For others, I slip into yellow moon eyes and milky mouth; demure and gentle, so loving it’s as painful as any wound. Kindness like my monster Medusa bathing in the dark, to save the fishermen; cruelty like a hero, under the sun, with a shield of mirrors, putting a sword to her neck and swinging. They both have their own evils.

I’ve learned that a necessary consequence of living is the disloyalty of the heart; but my spine will always be mine. My feet and teeth, those too. And my hair, of course: short, long, unwashed, clean, wrapped around my body, pulled across my face. It springs from me like Aphrodite from the sea. Whatever I am, carnivore or carnation, moon or monster: I cut my own hair.

I’m in Romulus, Michigan’s cheapest hotel, sitting cross-legged on a queen-size bed in a too-small tank top and old underwear. It’s my last night in America.

The past eight months have been forming a callous of iron and red mercury around my shoulders, melting and dripping down my back, straight as an arrow, like a cat of liquid mineral with its diamond claws stuck into me, like a river of lava that erodes, digests the green mountain. I can feel it, with its hands and jaws around my inner organs; it’s pulverizing them, crushing my fleshy insides into a pulp that sloshes in me when I move, slowing me, dissolving me. I’ve been crippled, do you see? But my outward appearance is the same; the result is both a feeling of destruction and a feeling of falsity. My blood has been thinned by toxic and hard metal, monsters with solid gold eyes are running their teeth along the marrow of my bones; but what do I have to show for it? When I’m asked if I’m alright, I have to answer yes, yes, of course, because how could I ever prove otherwise? Where are my thickened scars, where is my silver gun, what is my war?

In the evening, I do up my laces and walk out the hotel’s sliding doors; my hands are in the pockets of my best jacket. I take small, measured steps, pouring my liquified heart out, millimeter by millimeter; it pools in my shoes, leaving red footprints along the sidewalk. I walk half a mile in one direction, and then I walk another half-mile in the other. Strips of tar flanked by concrete, a Hilton, a Holiday Inn, a gas station, the highway, airplane hangers beyond. All around me, people fixated on the road ahead, holding onto steering wheels, doing security checks on jets and puddle-jumpers. I think: You know. You know, Emma, you could keep going. You keep walking through the fields, past the highway and the hangers, cut through suburban backyards. They wouldn’t know you were gone, not for days. I pause, hovering, on the border between the end of the road and the undeveloped, blank land ahead.

Hey, God? This is your child speaking; my name is Emma, do you remember me? Do you ever think of me? I’m here now. Did you know the things I’m capable of are incredible? They are. God, did you know the things I’m capable of are terrifying? Oh God, they are, they are.

I want to open myself up, break open my ribcage like a nut, like an oyster’s shell, and scoop out my collapsed lungs onto the pavement. Pull out the threads of my arteries, uncoil the sausage-thick guts, pick at the phlegm and acid of my throat and stomach walls. Tip myself over until I am drained clean. It’ll feel good, so good, to be empty; it’s like when love is returned, becoming your shape and home, it’s like waking up with wings that open in the daylight like a flower. I’ll seal myself shut, my body wiped down and made anew, and keep going. And though I will be empty on the inside: everything else can grow.

It’s spring, today; so let the seeds of wildflowers take root in the warm coats of tissues leftover and occupy the space where my lungs were. Let the air lick down my throat, through my burned temple thorax and settle in my calves, like some small, soft-eyed animal. Sunlight and stars in the back of my neck and down my back: a new spine. Let me make a circlet of wet soil and stolen blood, like a quietly determined school-aged girl sowing daisies into a crown, and hang it close to my throat to quench the worst of my thirst. A layer of sweet-smelling yellow grass to replace muscle and fat, to keep me warm on the nights when I suck up campsite fire and store it where my heart was. Snake skin and bird feathers, river water and clay, a new shape, a new structure. I’ll lower my head, eyes ahead, and run, quick, slick, across the ocean, salt accumulating in the hollows left by my intestines, sea anemones and pink, porous, breathing coral giving me new bones; the reflections on the water traveling from the soles of my feet to the foot of my soul, patterns and color washing away the last of these months from me. I’ll be a self-made angel with a halo of rose thorns and lilies, a natural android with magnesium-rich metals, veined crystalline circuits.

I’d be better then. I promise. I’d be new, that heart of fire and those wildflower lungs don’t need anything but the air in my legs and the sun on my back. Gods and men, keep your hands and your miracles to yourselves. Write my old body a pretty eulogy. Say: She is made in her own image now. Then lift your eyes and watch me run; watch me rise.

I am this bad summer, slung sticky, and red-hot, across the new artificial grass framing the iceberg blue pool; I am the pink moon, hanging so heavy, as though close to splitting open, ripe; I make you pity the young sunbathers, the stars.

After the poison, before the antidote; cold-water current in a glassy lake, washed in colors of tiptoeing nighttime, licking the curve of the world, the last of the sweet orange late afternoon as it rests, stretched, soft, smooth, over treetops; tasting.

You are this telephone pole, at the end of summer; you are the zebra crossing, under the moon. Sunbathers will reach to steal stars before I can return home without feeling the shape of your memory, close and colossal, soaked into the porous material of my pink-rind life. You are the breath between glowing pomegranate seeds; you are the air in the well of which there is no deeper, clogging with that wait, that want; you make me pity the best summers.

After the poison, before the antidote; center of the desert, the deserter, running only to find you, mirage of cooling green, waist-deep and expectant, ripe, your pretty fingers and long, bad mouth, you, reaching; taking.

Your eyes are ink; I write in black iris. Your hands are flowers; I write on black iris.

There’s a nest of swallows under the eaves (Spanish: golondrina, wings spread thin as leaves, cleaved from the woodlands and cleaned by sea air). Far-off: a cruise-liner, blurred and milky on the surface of the water. The inside of my mouth is soaked in salt, swollen like a fig.

A few years ago, I remember a storm, on this beach, in this house. I lay on the mattress, quiet as the lights went out, like one of mythology’s silky sacrificed girlies. Later, my mother called me to her, and told me to look (Spanish: mira); I remember sticking my head out the window, where she had pointed, and turning my face up. 

I will never leave you behind and I will never let you go, someone tells me in a dream, with such a blend of effortless tenderness and thespian heroism that I can feel that sugary, fibrous love on me, on my body, for weeks after. I wonder if I’ve resigned myself to living like this: conjuring up warm but invisible lovers and other false idols, breathing the sweetness of their rose and amber touch and lips, always the miel (English: honey) rather than the hielo (English: ice).

Even when I lived across this ocean, across the full flesh of these waters, my old heart still could not help but struggle to keep you down. You, with your ultramarine torso and fingers, of all my possible ghosts. The eyes and hands I write with and on; they are your hands and eyes. Though I may, and I will, leave, the shape of you will never be displaced, only rearranged. That’s the last tragedy of first love: it is solid and tactile, infinite, exquisite, but angled so I know that it never loses its teeth.

She names herself each time. She is Sphinx, once; her back to the door and a knife between her pink breasts. She is Rose, once; at the bottom of the lake, arms a circle around her head, blossoms in her green heart. Butterfly, then Beulah, then Beast. A prostitute, a priestess, a pirate. Her bodies are always perfectly formed, glowing and new as spring’s first bird, summer’s last moon; she is born with silver coins under her tongue, feet and hands like the opening lotus.

And yet, each time, she cannot help but feel displaced, formless, somehow, like a shifting tide, a faint memory owned by a fainter mind. It is as though certain parts of her were taken while she was still clay and never returned to her. As though she were Galatea, or David, and her sculptor had given her body unearthly beauty but the wrong weight, all cool grace and no substance, possibility becoming fantasy.

Often she tries to understand what she needs so acutely; in the dark, she closes her eyes and says to herself these parts of me that were taken, they are a little like the smell of apples, a little like the layers of the ocean, a little like the cure only touch can be. It’s like trying to remember a painful dream and she is never comforted. Apples, ocean, touch? She doesn’t want to be a poet; she just wants. Neither her thoughts nor her voice can give these parts that she is missing life, but none of her desires are stronger than their absence. No pain like that pain.

Whether she is Gelsomina on the rocks of Gibraltar or Mata laying seeds in the valley of the dead, she knows, in some blurred, quiet way, that she has arms and a mouth but no light, nails and teeth but no real eyes. A half-made spirit in a silken body; white-gray marble princess melting into the sand. She is the shape of a river after rain, spilling over its banks, losing blood to the dirt in bitterness. And yet — even when her waters leave her for the hunger of the trees, she is still the river, tied into the bowl of the earth and the breastbone of the heavens, and she will empty into the oceans of Aphrodite and the groves of Athena. She will come back, again, and she will take any body, any name, until she has what can only be hers.

Cymbals and then a green gong, and lama’s voice at the end of each verse is low and full; his is the sound a mountain would make, if mountains sang. The day after, at lunch, I tell him how nice it was and he smiles a little and says really? and I think of how secretive magic can be, even to its owner.

Some mornings I walk into sun, others into fog. Lama holds one of my hands between both of his own and I wonder if he sees the blessing that it lays in my heart, that umber organ growing clearer and clearer with each day. Such a simple gesture, but it’ll feed me for another year. Lama, alone in America after lifetimes in the white-crowned Himalayas with their familiar, flowering fields and faces — is he fed too?

Golden Buddha with his lapis lazuli curls, open palm turned out, facing me, facing a world. Anxiety’s ax has long been cleaved into my shoulder blade, but it has rained twice since I’ve come here and though I am no freer, I feel cleaner; underneath the ax, the silver of my blood shines, again.

During the ceremony of Mahākāla, Lama spreads his fingers slowly and makes a circular motion with his hands, finishing the movement by resting the pads of his thumbs against his forefingers. I’m reminded the film I watched last year, alone in my college dorm room, about Japanese funeral rituals; I remember Daigo, the young protagonist, how he’d traced a dead man’s face, so slowly, with his palms, in a still room, before covering him with a sheet. Watching Daigo on the screen, his hands, I’d been filled with a strange, gentle sweetness in the pit of my chest. Now I feel that same sweetness in my heart, light, but physical, insistent but impersonal, and I recognize it as purest love, so small, quick, instantaneous, so close to unbearable, catching me off guard and then lingering for years after as rarefied memory in the depths of every bone. Lama’s hands, Daigo’s hands; the red, blue, green and yellow divine, the white body, under the sheet. Hands, hands; moving, circling, with that infinite and unconditional tenderness that men reserve only for their gods and their dead.

Billy puts his arm around me. It’s so dark I can’t see two feet in front of me. His car, the surrounding mountains, the sound of crickets, the stars: these things define the space around me now. I’m shaking, not so much that it’s immediately perceptible, but enough to know that I’m not prepared for this. I am neither the many-armed god nor the body with closed eyes, not angelic or animalistic, and Billy’s hand is at the base of my spine, moving up my back to the strap of my bra.

I don’t want to be touched, but I do. I don’t want to be touched, but I do. I want to be touched with reverence, with emotion. I want to be touched like I’m wound into your heart, like I’m a wound of your heart. I think about it all the time. Solid, and warm, chemical, touch like talc, touch like titanium. Hands, hands; moving, circling. A typical person goes through three-hundred-and-fifty thoughts a minute, and I’m thinking sudden rain, fingers, magic, name the closest stars, name the five kingdoms, name the boy I loved wholly once upon a time, crop rotation, touch, fluids in the brain, touch, blood, touch, touch, romantic by nature, skeptic by choice, touch. I want to be touched like none of it ever matters.

Hands, hands; moving, circling, with that infinite and unconditional tenderness that men reserve only for their gods and their dead. I am neither, and Billy’s swallowing hard, and his hand is squeezing my shoulder.

When I was a child, I went to an exhibition at a local museum that I’ve never really been able to forget. Picture this: A thick, black curtain, a dark corridor, a door that, when opened, leads to a wide, high room, so large that I cannot remember where it ended or began. The room has white walls, and it is filled with prisms, of every shape and size, hanging from the ceiling, reflecting light, producing color. I stretch out my small hands; I do not touch. I walk through it, slowly, but fast enough that the whole thing is over than less than fifteen minutes. I’m telling you this because I’m trying to distract from the truth of the matter, which is: I want to be touched, but I never wanted Billy to touch me.

1. This is my sense of self-worth. A dog in the wintertime, skinny, sitting squat on the side of a country road. A dog, alone, cold, still and wide-eyed as the snow comes down.
2. This is my pride. An arrow, honed for hunting. An arrow, sharp, laying underneath the last layer of skin, straight, alert, at the juncture where shoulder meets heart. A hierarchy of needs, and desire is in a crown.
3. This is my capacity for love. A stone, small, flat, entirely colorless but infinitely textured. Just touch alone, the weight and temperature of it in the valley of your hand, is enough. No eyes or mouth, no music; the line of your fingers against a stone in the dark of a windowless room.
4. This is my self-awareness. A morning like a mirror, clear, over the fields of a careful farmer’s sunflowers. The view from the school bus, head heavy with the truth that is all pain.
5. This is my weakness. A frame of wood made to look like gold, and a series of ill-fitting paintings of paradise.
6. This is my courage. A wind, a coat, butter cake wrapped in tinfoil. A painting of paradise.
7. This is my ability to adapt. An opening to the ocean, occasional rain stippling the surface, and underneath a dove-gray blue whale, mid-song.
8. This is my ability to trust.
9. This is my sense of self-hatred. Hitting the tar road at seventy miles per hour, hands on the wheel like guns pointed at dogs; hitting the water at eighty miles per hour. Crawling up the rocks, driving home. Getting up in the morning. Doing it again, again, again.

SONNET I PRE-SURGERY

These elements exist to complement, and you to choose
your life in this. That farmer of atoms with shells like onion skin
stands along the soil of your body on the gurney. Your eyes laid loose,
softened with saltwater and milk, opened, like a flower in a bowl, petals on rim,
by his row of scalpels. The blend of sweat and soul as your heart is popped
out of its socket, the small lump replaced with a silicon pump. Trust
that scientist with his diamond knife, carving a hole in your breast,
fitting you with a submarine gun in your belly, red-ringed. Such
a pretty little thing; your rosebud Kevlar mouth. You are no less
than the first and last hero, but who can you save? In this bitter maze,
learn that love, and running away, are one and the same.

SONNET II VICTOR THE INVENTOR IN LOVE

You are not tall, but tall
tall like the honey-toothed spring, its baby-blue maw
seen from your doorway, that long fall
you’ve broken in three places. You are not small, but small
small like the hand holding up the weight
of the cavern of your love between the trees.
The body which is your body first and
a weapon second, would you let me in
to rest for a while, to undo you strand by strand?
Oh, oh, will you, sweet girl, be mine?
And which of us is the doctor, and which Frankenstein?

SONNET III AFTER KILLING TWELVE TERRORISTS AND CRITICALLY INJURING AN INNOCENT

Arms, all daylight dirty and burnt day lily, fingertips
their snapped stems. God, where are you
now? Here in the pool of dirt, in the leaves of my lips,
counting out what is left, and how of much of this is true?
This, the life I have drawn and quartered, out
of only love? Let me go, please, let me leave where
I can cover my eyes in these dunes, these
bodies, bodies. How many fates are known,
how many white doors but red keys?
Me, arms cut, hair shorn,
Only I can find my form.

What kind of atom string, wrapped around what kind of carbon core, what kind of beating brain and nebulous heart, what kind of moral code, what kind of mantelpiece photograph, what kind of flower in the desert, what kind of desert in flower, what kind of person are you?

I’m the kind that can’t be taken anywhere, not with all the tankfuls of gas, not with all the love letters. I should have been a vegetable garden, this life, drinking in sugars from the soil; instead I am the kind that won’t call her mother back, the kind of Persephone that has to teach herself to love pomegranate. This life, I should have been a tankful, a letter, siphoned out and measured, sent somewhere; instead I am the kind that keeps her eyes open, and hides her burning hands.

You’re just a nasty person, he says, and I laugh and answer, easily, painlessly, did you just find that out now? What kind of promise, what kind of practice, what kind of purpose?

What kind of death, the kind that dries out, sweet-smelling, on the windowsill or the kind that is taken out back, and pressed into the surface of the river, what kind of morning in bed, what kind of alarm, those four bars of a love song, or your mother crying, what kind of kind, kindness, what kind of person are you?

I’m the kind that has been yelling come here. I’m the kind in warm clothes, at the side of the lake. I should have been the first, the second, the third; I should have been the third, the second, the first. This life, I should have been the kind of person that is a room: open the door, set down your bags, come here, come here. Instead I am the kind whose hands are still burning.

You are not the cooking pot in the yellow linoleum kitchen. You are not the carp, not the bowl, not the honeydew, not the tortoiseshell comb. You are not the phone pressed to the ear, not the slowly blooming rose. You are not the light, not the supermarket parking lot, not the shirt sleeves. You are not the bow, not the arrow.

You are not the exit to the maze, you are its walls. You are not the walls in this well, you are the rising water. You are buried, dug up, buried, dug up. You are not the door, not the window. You are insoluble in vinegar, in mercury, in gold.

When it is daytime in the Midwestern United States, it is nighttime in your garden. When there is time for the heel of my hand, there is no space in the silk of your arms. When there is space in your heart, there is no time in mine; when there is space for my heart, there is no time for yours. I am sitting outside, on the steps, and you are in my swimming pool. You are not the sugar, not the smoke. You are not the house, not the fire.

You are not the paradise, you are the rib. You are not the rib of this body, you are the eyes. You are shot, reborn, shot, reborn. You are not the gun, not the flower. When there is no space, and no time, for either of us, there is always the yellow linoleum kitchen, where you stand, mitts over hands, watching the steam rise from the cooking pot.

It’s easy to get lost in these worlds, where the waters begin and end, and the shore is a thin layer of gold, sinking where my feet are, like the mattress dipping under your weight.

If they made boats as solid as your hands, if they made oars as gentle as your hands, if they made sails as tender as your hands; I’d never leave the salt sea.

Pull apart the clouds forming above the dinner table with your fingers. These days are spread like lace, intricate, delicate; these days are made of telephone wires, with your voice at all ends.

A body, a sound, a breath, a belief. Wipe off the yellow desert spread like butter over your walls. Remember me, when you are in pain. Remember me, when you are in pain.

Not everything is made of circles, not everything has a center, not everything is provable, reducible, soluble. But your magic has made me believe I could pour the oceans into a sauce pan and boil them down into a blend of syrup, fossil and glass.

If they had made my heart as solid as your hands, if they had made my heart as gentle as your hands, if they had made my heart as tender as your hands; you’d be drowned, and I’d.

The curtains are down, and all compasses are pointing here, to your bedroom at  the top of the stairs. Your room, with its clouds and deserts, and you in the center, in a velvet-lined chair, knees pulled to your chest.

Not everything is full, not everything is whole, not everything is soluble. But my youth is still yours to use. The moons in my mouth, the seas in my sauce pans: I sold them for bus fare here, from water to land, from room to room.

Remember me, because I am in pain. You are asleep in your chair; wake, find me here. Look at how badly I have broken myself, only to see you again.