In Accelerated Silence by Brooke Matson (best ereader manga TXT) 📕

motion

For every reaction an equal

opposite contraction

Don’t pretend you’re not

a part of this

You called me here

to burn

You called and I came

willingly

lit

like a birthday wish

Your auric

little miracle

Your magic machine

I clapped my hands ignited

every color until the trick

backfired  /

until

one dense atom

spun in my core a thin

spider

of iron

and so began the collapse /

compacting mass / the glorious

punch

of gravity

Your word was my death

sutured within me

MAYBE

Who is the You in your poems, he asks, because it is capitalized. Do I have to know? I haven’t been to Mass since Death (capital d) entered the narrative and sent my heart palpitating with rage at nothing in particular, because who can be blamed for unexplained cancer? You need to figure it out, he says, as in dissect the pronoun. In middle school, my classmate refused to dissect a grasshopper, the exoskeleton limp on its aluminum tray. She came to class the next day with a grasshopper formed from clay, each appendage painted in immaculate rainbow colors. It glowed on the teacher’s desk, hovered above the lesson plan on its stand, a vibrant idol outsizing all the dead ones put together. I suppose that was her point. Now my point. Am I avoiding the question? Our universe may be one of many in the Multiverse (capital m)—may be as in maybe, as in somewhere on the spectrum between yes and no, one of several enigmatic answers the Magic 8 Ball we had as kids offered from its dark indigo fluid, a tiny triangular phrase bumping the window in its belly. One day ours stopped answering—something about the buoyancy, or maybe one of us just shook it too hard.

NEUROSURGERY

I’ve imagined it many times and still it jars

like a fist to the jaw. There will be music

despite everything, you quoted, and yes, my pulse

quickens, even now, at Zoë Keating’s electric

cello, enough to need tissues.

I imagine it so often, it’s as if I saw

the surgeon, swathed like a priest, drive the saw

into your skull. Like popping the seal of a mason jar,

he unhinges blood and bone, exposes the grey tissue

of his trade. The nurse presses play on our music

as instructed (cue the cello); nerves bathe in electric

oceans; the pulse

of cello strings drop like plumb lines through the pulsing

Z of the heart monitor. I believe you hear it. But that saw

haunts me—some real Frankenstein shit. Where’s the electric

bolt of lightning, you’d joke, but I can’t laugh. The jarring

raze of its serrations cleaves the music,

cleaves my tissue-

thin bravery. I have learned time is a flexible tissue

and the muscled pulse

of your neurons strums its own shining music:

our first kiss on a darkened street; the seesawing

oars of kayaks on the bay; whiskey sipped from jam jars

on the Fourth of July; fireworks glowing electric

as you rise between thighs, electrified—

years of time folded tightly in a cortex maze of tissue

where somewhere, my body wanders through synapses that jar

and flicker like Vegas highways, pulsations

of neon in contiguous, cursive constellations. Tell me sawing

stars from the sky is impossible, that music

can’t be severed from melody, the cellist from the musical

oscillations of her instrument, the wild electron

from the nucleus it loves. Say there is not a saw

for every bond. Say that our minds are not lanterns of tissue

paper, easily torn. Your pulse

holds you together a while—a fragile jar

of stars humming their music in the dark tissue

of space, an electric dance of neurons. Like hope, they pulse.

O trade me a saw for a spoon, that I may scrape the sides of that jar.

EVE SPLITS THE APPLE

We were given so much—the entire field

unbroken by boundary. The colors—

you should have seen them: black sheen

of the beetle, indigo silk of the river rippling under

the tiger’s flat tongue. What I’m trying to say

is I knew nothing of law

even as I spotted its blushing throb

fastened high, like the sun to the sky.

Or maybe that I loved its red

as I loved the pulse inside

his chest, my ear pressed to his flesh on nights

we held each other on banana leaves, his body

moving over me, moving against the rheumy

field of stars. I loved its orb, its warmth,

and its waxy shine—even as I tore it from the limb

that bore it, split the sphere

on a stone, half its sugared meat

for each of us. I didn’t know you can break

against laws. He smiled when he saw

what I’d brought, brushed my hair behind

my shoulder as he took my gift.

Even before he bit, I foresaw his jaw

fall from his white skull; the doe

slit open by the puma, her lustrous muscles

flayed against the grass;

saw the leaves departing,

scarlet, from maple trees—then

an ashen fence of rain, a flood. Even before

he swallowed. Before the sword of light

severed what lay behind.

BROADEN THE SUBJECT

In kindergarten the teacher asked, What kind of things are red? and arms rocketed toward the ceiling with apples firetrucks roses. I raised my hand and said, Anything can be red, like a sweater or a crayon, and Mrs. Curley’s face fell and she said, No, things that are always red. But my favorite apple is yellow, I thought, the same frustration as when my friend tells me to broaden my focus, to think about moving on to another metaphor, and maybe I am a bull anchored to what hurts, charging sentences at what I cannot understand: a cluster of small hands firing into the air like flags, symbols of how the world ought to be. I ought to let it go—maybe. I return to red red red because I cannot let it go or turn my head the way most people focus on the positive—flower not blood, pomegranate not wound. Maybe I am the narrow hot line at the edge of the visible spectrum, inching toward invisible, bordering on irrelevant. Understand: anything can be red, usually when someone or something splits open.

II

LAW OF THE CONSERVATION OF MASS

i. Big Bang

Maybe there was a word—

a short, single syllable that fell

like a long-traveled drop

of rain and shuddered

a seed of light

into a flock of starlings,

wildfires of wings.

How long till matter

clotted like drops of mercury

into planets and moons and stars,

into a pulse

and a brain that believed?

ii. Trinity Test Site

The bright plume

that blossomed from the ground