a heavy evening rain rose as a loaded fog,
cloaked us like a dimming theater light.
grateful for an excuse to hush under the guise of proper manners
we sat shoulder to shoulder, our eyes focused safely in the distance,
unsure exactly the show to follow but knowing with certainty
that it was starting.
just for the fun of it, i turned your smile over in my lap until it softened,
bated your breath,
sparked flint against the base of my own spine.
i fancied an impossibility
that this moment was inevitable, found myself shuffling through versions
of the vastly different people we could have arrived to it as.
after all,
what were we but shoe boxes full of trading cards shelved at our childhood homes,
each bearing our face with different uniforms, records?
what more had we done to reach right now but closed our eyes, stuck our hands in, and plucked one out?
i thought
how easy it is, to burn a box of cardstock.
the plastic coating would add an edge of stubbornness
clinging to its former form
before giving way
curling into a puff of black smoke.
-
electricity.
-
din.
if a forest of family trees fall
and we hear every single beat
is there such a thing as sound, after?
is there deep sleep,
good judgement,
wise investment?
is there trustworthiness,
reliability?
is anything seeworthy any longer?is there music?
singing?
or only the roar of an Amazon slashed-and-burned,
of ancient Redwoods a hundred meters high,
toppled,
roots splayed to the Heavens –
all the Wonder in this Natural World
scorched,
rotting,
silent.
-
the present charles robert leslie 1845
-
revive The Bride.
(i)
even as a murderess she held a certain nobility -
never brought a gun to a swordfight,
never shied from loudly announcing herself
a knock
a streak of yellow
never accepted she shouldn't be bestowed something priceless.
and so i believe there is a Beatrix Kiddo
whose killer maternal instinct could reconcile the fact
that everyone is someone's child.
but that nature requires a nurture
where there are no triggers pulled tense against their springs at a church service,
no old men curling baby hairs behind ears as
some unbreakable vow
some staked claim
no learning lovers can destroy one another with the press of a few fingertips.
there will still be unresolved injustices - it is the world, after all.
but if Beatrix Kiddo is to be more merciful
so too must her circumstances.
(ii)
even under softer stimuli,
when she's activated?
i still imagine the room fades on the periphery.
she strides into some third-world streetside dive, whipcracks echoing off her heels,
nears the throat of the lead she's chasing and draws her Hattori Hanzo -
a finely tuned, custom-crafted, Japanese steel
pen.
her adapted method of exposing what she knows to be the truth
slicing fearlessly through the silence
direct eye contact
directer questions
digging up all they've buried
pressing the barrel so hard the ink bleeds onto the next sheet.
the result - a venomous, front-page skewering;
she's found a way of dismantling someone with her fingertips in this timeline too.
Beatrix Kiddo reformed
will not roar or rampage her way to revenge,
no.
she will be precise,
she'll exact it.
-
to think Jesus flipped tables.
it wasn’t the surety of the rising seas
nor the screams of mowed classrooms
so it sure as Hell won’t be the sHelling of the land we collectively call Holyno
somehow
we, top-of-the-food-chain
we, super-predator
we, brains deeply outsized to bodymass – seven times more than would be linearly predicted –
we still have further to push into the deepest homegrown pits Dante never imagined,
still have further to fall from biological grace than this.endearing the way we let lions keep ‘king of the jungle’;
patronizing almost, with a brain-to-majestic-mane-and-fierce-teeth-and-flicking-tail ratio of 1:550.
did you know when lions feel their territory threatened by another pride,
they’ll try to kill their young?
crazy. the wild takes no prisoners dude.
US either
we just use the adult size bags to keep it simple
fits every bodyto think
we sit here
and watch children die on our handheld 6.1′ OLED displays
picket in support of every mattress having a gun shoved between the box spring
time countdowns to the permanence of each centimeter of oceanwater
to think
2,000 years and a stone’s throw from here
Jesus flipped tables because capitalism had set up a few booths in His Temple
and of the many things He may have known for certain
the snowballing of men’s sins was one of them.
musée 