We were known by our calipers. What whites of eyes
gleamed our way. There was a lack of cartilage. Stalwart
we were even as the walls had ears and the bullets were
greased in beef tallow. How little they knew of us and how
our children spent their days in the baobabs. Our hearts
were more ancient and their bullets pierced no fruit in the
fall.
Peel back skin from each snakebite. Pry the panther from
the canopy. Whistled and the children dove for the
mountain, the ravens alighted. We called their hair raven
and knew their old mothers. The snake passed by and we
had our orders and what we called our machetes. There
was a familiar size to the jungle. A soft thatch to the village
and an absence of history. Amid the underbrush we were
fascinated and our applications approved.
There was the matter of the lions and I filed away. From
under the canopy birds emerge no more. Took me three
days to descend while each minute grew nearer. The
ravens warmed to my eyes. The rats stood before me but
they had to go somewhere. From this angle it was hard to
say gypsy moth or mosquito net. On my soles they’d marked
me with the ash of the baobab. To my lips I raised hell.
To decree it was a sin. Bats sang out one weltanschauung
and the aqueducts slackened. Main Street whiffed the
scent of the senator. I deployed shoulder blades against the
wall. In this economy housekeepers heap banknotes by the
toothless children, candles debase themselves, the cows
thinning. In the field by the red light of the cardinals there
was no lasting measure. How our knuckles ached with the
pace of our knowledge.
To call it night went over our heads. To honor the chill lips
of the sahib we warmed up our old bones. Coming as a
release to the lions. The moneylenders came round. I was
making eyes. I was in no state. Even the pensions waited
for dark. The spices went under. Something entered our
collective trauma. Someone signed John Hancock. To close
the door against any state is considered a crime.
At the corner store buying our last cigarettes the past
abandoned us. The dolphins named every last bison. The
cell phone was set to explode only on overuse of this
emoticon. The streets returned to normal. The
schoolchildren received new fake mustaches.
I’d made my living in artificial islands shaped like luxury
rafts. After communion the coffee scalded us and this
looked nothing like our blood. Cows commenced dying
from within. In labor the derricks shimmered and the
horizon was a wash. We never expected these birds to rise
from the waves.
We called bullshit on mushrooms and what do you know,
zucchini clouds. Poets reinvented the pastoral and
switched the fence on behind them. I apprenticed the
children to the cockroaches scaling the skyscrapers. Soon
they would translate: an eye for an eye for an eye for
Hilary Plum is the author of the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (FC2, 2013). She is co-director of Clockroot Books, and with Zach Savich she edits Rescue Press's Open Prose series. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Western Humanities Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Modern Language Studies, and Berfrois.