Issue 7, Winter/Spring 2009

EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE by Amy King

The phone sings,
the door knocks,
the government wants their money,
my IRA shrinks its last ball,
I am stuck at the bottom of alert
that is only a test
of what?  My wills,
my steel, my permanent enamel?
My memoir remains afloat in a sea of skunk
even as I sink my teeth
into Jennifer Baszile’s.
What should I tell you that you don’t
already think
you have the right to know?
The dog’s tongue is a spongy mop across
my middle toe, which is a lanky thing
meant to prop me up against
gravity’s slow-motion heart.
I too have a slow-motion heart;
everyone has already married,
borne babies, executed
their enemies, fixed their failures,
had their fights,
mended frosty fences,
torn the radiators
from their non-working lungs,
replaced the lightbulbs
with fireflies and retreated to caves
of this smell into that hand,
pheromones and glycerin,
shaded beds with grapes to feed you,
the lightning dims,
I’m on your knees, pressing backward,
doing things
I’ve never watched like
houses in swollen grass, this sloughing off
of perfect muscle
tones so that I am seen in tallness,
flowers and soap
from my future death bones,
the song of all decay and niceness
to presently tap your shoulder,
take your hand
and rub this tongue with the scent
of your head,
your heart, your lips, but
no such love is simultaneous,
fleeting forward while God’s little mice
gnaw beneath the wooden
four poster bed, the fields of water lilies
set adrift with handmade paddles,
even if this rubble is
drowning buildings
with memories of men
leaping from flames, diving into
the grip of eyeballs,
foods that fill every pore
still trying to hold onto—I mean,
we’re all these things,
all of the time and, at least, never, but
everything happens at once.
Born without religion,
birthed by the doorways of war,
new honey brews,
is always love-making, and no one asks
if she can keep some hair
for the casket
and let this body grow down
among the weeds of singing water legs,
anxious to telephone
the world the same without me here
or with you still in it.