The Door to The Body is a Mouth
A door that doesn’t
open is a wall; a maze
without a turn is a corridor—in the body,
a follicle. On the face, a nest.
Hatch, she said, and I
hatched. After a fix, John
described my torso
*
as an orb—orange, gilded, nested within
my fur-covered body. He leaned
in close to say I was a body on fire,
hung upside down on a backyard swing set—
black as pitch, he hissed. Pluck
and burn; snip the thread
guiding one body through
its labyrinthine self.
And through the instruments,
*
electricity thrust into me. I imagine
just her fingers
walking my face’s subtle and changing turns—
snipping and snipping these
threads, so I will never
find my way back. Unlike myth
this is one way of falling in love:
wrapping my body in plastic
*
shoving a needle into flesh; swallowing
a pill is another way to fall in
love. Late at night and driving
without headlights
down a county road, I am falling
in love with my body’s potential
to fold over itself, John downshifting,
*
a request in the brain revolves.
There are no lights
when I tell him by guiding his hand
from the gear shift to
the hairless spot between
my legs. As if that could be
translated into cis-English.
As if, I am surprised
*
when he pushes his fingers into
the spaces I used to occupy
my body like
architecture—a corridor, a turning—how
to make a room is with an incision,
a plucking and the weeks of scaffolds
of the microscopic
contractions. I don’t know
why I believe John
*
will not like the future
corridor of my body—he has
entered me—except for his
cessation, a temporary
pleasure. For hours,
I sat feet in gynecological stirrups
while each hair was plucked
and the follicle burned, blood
*
vessel cauterized,
for days the cherry on top;
did John not notice? How
electrolysis happens is one hair at a time.
My absences, the hours I held
myself in a cellophane cocoon. What
tonguing turned larval, nymphotic. Spun
*
chrysalis. The door to the body
is a mouth. I open
mine and peer in. In a dream, a nest of hair
plugs my throat. My teeth,
like hooves, scrape it back
and forth, until each thread is torn, shorn
until I can breathe—I tell
John, and John pulls his face
*
down, so I can see into him.
His wet flesh
pink and puffed and drooping
down from his eyes. His lips
contort into a frown. It is brief.
He puts a bag to my face and says, Breathe
in; it’s time for a ride. And then we are
in love jittering down
*
the block—my hands fold
and unfold, my brain a bit
of current flowing through
the world’s face.
Is it painful, he asks when I come
home, chin and jaw swollen,
cheeks leaking blood and pus.
It is painful, I say. I do not say how much
*
I love the feeling, the results.
Being in pain
is my final way to fall in love
with my body, its eventual
and irrevocable turning.
*
John turns on
a film. A man explains how much
the villain’s henchmen love
pain. Without malice
he details their ecstasies—
we believe him, the feeling familiar enough
like two glittering eyes at the end
of a dim corridor
*
turning the heart into an animal’s.
Rapid pump. Adoration. A substance
can be taken several ways—the mouth of course
the muscle,
the skin—how very slow
it is to absorb a drug
through the skin. I sat in the darkening
parking lot as the numbing
cream spread
*
autumn over my body. My best friend
says the needle tip is solid gold.
The body does not see it as foreign,
she says and for the next hour she
makes her point.
It’s soft and pliable. It follows the follicle,
*
its coiled corridor. When she pulls
it out, the gold glistens with
the smallest drop of blood.
Miniscule jewel. Pollen
stuck in bee fur. Love,
the urge to look at the marks she leaves
the face turned
into a hive of itself. And John
*
missed this detail between
my legs, all the details, the days
and months he spent
contortioning himself on the kitchen floor.
The streetlights licked his back,
his scapula’s odd
angle. It plunged into the divot
his ribs made along his spine,
and I said how good it all felt to be out
*
in the world. For men to see
me and tell me
I’m the best dressed in the bar,
to explain that they are not
hitting on me—they point
to their girlfriends—they say
they just needed to
tell me I look so hot. I look
far better. What do you have—
they point
to their crotches—they admit
they don’t know what I was born
*
with but I am still beautiful. Love,
like scissors in basin, a mint placed
on the tongue. It gives
its light
like a speeding car
tearing through the musculature
of an unsuspecting calf,
like an arrow, a dart,
the long spike it makes
as our favorite drug
*
seeped into us. In the dark,
facing one another, our faces
blurring as the radio detuned itself. Partial
is the best way to fall
in love. In another life
John burrows his hands
into me. His torso twirls its
elaborate labyrinth
*
and I thought this is love. The needle
in my thigh, love; plunger depressed,
love; the hands sheathed in black nitrile gloves
rubbing a tincture into the wounds
they caused, love; the way, in the film, a scientist
says adieu to the large creature he kept caged
his voice’s insect rattle, love; the final gear—
how it tunes the motor’s spinning into a high
pitched whine I feel throughout me as John
says, No one dies in car wrecks anymore;
his head turned to me, eyes barely open. Also
*
that’s exciting—your surgery. I wait
for my tongue to leap back
into my mouth.
John’s hand eases its depth
and pulses as the night falls in
love with our car. I pretend to
climax, and we both pretend
I do. It is autumn
in my body
and then winter. It is snow
*
in glass tube—even snow
can be lit on fire, inhaled;
even snow can hotwire the body’s
meek contortions, can be the bit
of electricity that
defines the body’s place
in time. I can hear the hertz
as my friend’s golden tip
moves up and down my sideburns
*
burning them into red. And
I feel the hertz through my lip
into my teeth. I say
between zapping, only a skull
can smile, but this is not true.
When the face melts from its armature
and the brain’s yoke completely
drips from the egg’s
empty shell and the eyes
witness the shelling
of the cities of nerves
*
within them—it becomes clear the skull
does not grin. It is
just a skeleton
ready for its date
with eternity.
Without lips, a smile is impossible.
My best friend pulls mine taut
and burns me over and over.
On her radio, the desire
of a pop star worms
its looping into me
*
like a follicle, like a hair her
manuals describe as distorted
or John’s voice
in a car after a fix, the LEDs
in the radio’s display clamoring
for attention as he goes on about
the reduction in car-related deaths.
John rotates the wheel right then
*
left, lets the car drift through
the long flat rivers
between streetlights. The city just over
the horizon was falling in love with itself,
and we were
looking for a home’s quiet
skeleton. We needed
to increase its corridors with our fists
and hammers. To pull a metal wire
from the recess and melt
*
its casing until its tip gleame
like a syringe
or gold. We lit these houses on fire.
We had enough. We saw
what was stolen, placed
patchwork, across
the city. Love, the massacred
fawn in the center of a grove
its beating heart
pornographic, cupped in my
slicked hands—love, the dream
I return to most. The mists
*
that flow out of the woods’ open maze.
A man in a black apron holding out his hands.
The skull, beneath the face,
chipped and marred, will never
return to the state of its birth.
The calf on the outer belt road—
its awkward fumbling
opens for the speeding car’s chromium tip.
In the dream, the calf
reassembles. John is smoking
the snow in his glass tube
*
as the house we tossed collapses
into its flaming. This
the perfect way to fall in love—fingertips
removed, the brain cauterized
with chemical electricity, tongue
like a heart in the hand—how bleak
it is until the engine turns over
and the road shows its stomach.
Our country is beautiful
in how it can turn the future into a maze.
It etches our names into our skulls.
