Eugenia Zuroski

Are We Dead? No, We Are Just Inside the Moon

                                                after Roland Emmerich

Suit up, my dear, and don’t

be cross. The whole planet warbles

its mnemonic cantos by day

and we were starved, oh we were

starved for sleep in the bog of history.

No one wrote down how

you like your toast (“soggy with butter”).

No one took note

of how you wax, you wane

the way solids melt then unmelt

when the temperature turns, and with it,

the tongue. I have watched the city slink you

into action: all spine, like an eel

gliding, gliding,

no feet, no dreams.

It was tiresome, frankly, each peachy orbit

around task and event—

I longed to lay you the full low breadth

of your skin, drape you broadside

over each star straining

to be a sun. “Tomorrow’s a new day,” you say

or some other noctambulant mantra

setting a course through nighttide

as if to claim each breath drawn in darkness

for future earnings. Oh we were

starved, and trilling so shallow

the tune of “a life worth living.” Let’s go

nowhere. Sing your molten song.

We are the stones that make flesh glow,

radiant crumbs of doziest earth.

other animals 

a creature tasked with being

understood will find itself

under glass. in that moment,

remove your phone from its carapace

and ask it, scooped out so nicely,

something tender:

is the heart, as the song says, a muscle

or an animal conspiring

from its cavern of flesh

to hustle feeling

from digit to cell, quickening

each character to acid in the vein?

and what if we preferred the quiet

to being split, continually, like

eager fruit? once there was a bloodletting

and, throughout the house, glitter

in the woodgrain. the lethargy

of the bees in the henbit out back

sketches a theory of labor

in the age of open questions.

they are smuggling the sweetness

of your neglect, while you mistake

the dove’s yes, you

for a call of kinship.

“now twitter, my heart”

                                                                                                                        -after Lorine Niedecker

the house is a nest of braids of brushes of stacks of books of wires of tin bowls, apples and brown spots spreading in perfect circles          i send pictures to show how beautiful it is the quotidian galaxy of rot in the palm of my hand in the palm of yours      the commonsense way each seed makes itself a reaching thing when sun meets water meets dirt    good morning, little miracle, squirt squirt    snail in a jar, still alive, squirt squirt

but the phone is full of hopeful images of beings that “didn’t make it”     and the cardinal in the neighbor’s tree—it sings its laser beam i’m alive here, i’m alive, its affirmation resounding with still       collect the split shells of robins’ eggs because things are born relentlessly under any available terms      “robin” is a false name in this place, a robin is no robin here, and it sings, it sings

the choral season for warblers      the leaves thrusting through high-strung light   

this too is a trill under the breath while dusting the desk lamp or folding the clothes: a song not about life at all but simply a hymn to the impossibility    of being here     and being still