Issue 7, Winter/Spring 2009

THE GILDED ZERO by Amy King

Only open homes & woods & pansies’ blue ledges
can lead the zero with his only arms
to embrace himself in open fields for all to gape upon.
He unbuttons steel-gray sheets, a knotted coat,
bares himself, his hole, a vision
as framed by the marker that is
where his body blew and left enclosure intact,
skeletal innards enough to make moviegoers ask,
“Has anyone finished themselves yet?”
I haven’t.  I swim the lagoon, take note,
The babies are barely dirty,
their armpits smooth with a silky soot
kept weighted in apartment cycles like
we keep moving in boxes for thunderstorms,
and the railroad leaves a dancing behavior
absorbed by every second thought,
escaping through the socket that was his mission,
his body incomplete, to help us
to the maidenhead of Niagara, a target awakening
the chlorophyll of trees,
their tongues the densest forested canopy and a floor
thigh deep with root rot we sleep on and fold
into growing-whole sheep what becomes of the lot: 
night’s zero hour of what is & isn’t, till death, not us.