Phantom State
As an orc, I slip like a ghost through trees,
my brother said of playing
World of Warcraft. I climb to the roof garden
nestled under the water tower.
Hello, my mother says, tucked into a
cumulus curve. What’s it like up there,
Mom? Sweets, we’re at the tip-top
of the world. Vanishing points everywhere.
I hear my father say, Now my remarks
the other day were rather
historically directed. But it’s the
Apple Music app my cat accidentally
turned on while stepping across the keyboard.
I think it’s a sensible way of beginning,
by recognizing the possibility of sheer
nightmare. I am still trying to loosen
my right hip, something to do with
muscles knitting together again like a
family. It’s an open question why my
body resists. This country has a history
of violence, but not a tradition of violence,
my father continues. In Texas,
a woman is forced to carry a dead
fetus to term even though it could kill
her. And you wonder why there’s
no horizon in any of my art? my mother
leans back on her cloud and puffs
on a Kent. My brother is bent
over a computer 204 miles away.
Rootlessness is not so much a betrayal
as it is a logical extension, my father
shouts. Of what? I ask. I can’t hear his
answer. Only, eventually, You were
fourteen and still a very little girl
physically and emotionally.
Which reminds me of what my mother
told me: don’t rely on a husband
to support you. At a certain point,
my grandmother refused to eat anything
much but chocolate. She walked up
and down the inner stairwell,
the fire exit. Her daughter put her away.
My unborn child appears
from behind a tree. His eyes big.
He winks and says, As the jelly jiggles.
Slips behind the trunk. Evaporates.
* * * * *
About the Pen
I say, I have no ink. Empty, it is empty. Stained, the cartridge.
I am empty. The skies — orange bursts against a midnight sepia-blue
like a Rothko, but this is war. Or more particularly: oil terminal blowing up,
flames spinning in the dark smoke like Catherine wheels. CNN flickers across
my devices — pulsing indigo-violet waves — and location-mapping tracks me
within six feet: shoots me linked advertising. I still have pencil nibs, I yell
at my screen. The wars continue, no matter. The discourse? Empty.
Words fall about my toes as if a vacuum bomb detonated, all the oxygen
sucked from my animal skin. Just one big mess, letters everywhere, overlapping
languages penned in dense script I can’t read. My poor education. What do
you think, I ask my rescue cat, of the state we’re in?