Jim Pascual Agustin
The Man Who Wished He Was Lego
His hands would be yellow
and forever curved
into a semi-square “C.”
Designed only for quick
and easy snapping
of pieces meant
to fit. His shoes
would be the same color
as his pants with no zips
or buttons, no pockets
for slipping in notes
that could be shredded
in the wash. He would need
not worry about the shape
of his head, or haircuts
and thoughts for that matter.
And best of all, his chest
would be stiff and hollow,
far too small
for a heart.
Do Millipedes Bleed?
The bathroom sink reflects
a clinical glare
from the white light bulb.
Close to my toothbrush,
a dark shape
thicker than a string,
curved upward at one end.
My hand quickly tries
to reach for something,
a comb, a slipper,
anything to flick it away,
perhaps crush it.
Then up close I see
it is hunched over
a drop of water,
drinking. Tiny feelers
waving back and forth
in a gentle rhythm,
minute legs, thin
as the hair between
my knuckles,
quivering.
The Photograph
Stripped of leaves from the planet’s change
of angle (scientific calculations can predict
the end of such a cycle), the limbs of this tree
appear no more than frail, black streaks
against the grey sky. But for the birds.
With folded wings they have chosen to adorn
the branches. It is not the first tree
to be so starkly dressed. A friend on the other side
of the world shared a photograph that looked
nearly the same as what is now before
my window. Echoes of the same rhythm,
only composition and lighting differ.
The image remains longer in the retina, a memory
reinforced, perhaps more intensely remembered?
Would any photograph chanced upon,
then lingered over, become just as embedded
in the mind? That it, too, burns? Here, with the click
of a mouse, I browse: a photograph of two soldiers.
One on the ground, the other holding a rifle.
Afghanistan’s range of mountains never looked
so violated. The grass that clings to the jagged
surface appears dry, dead. The colour of the soldiers’
clothes, like soil before rain. Both of them wear green
vests, for bullets and provisions. The one with a knee
close to the ground where the other lies
is smiling. The lifeless one has thicker beard
and no helmet, his shadow touches the sling
of the other’s rifle. I first saw them on my old laptop
screen three years ago. I see them again
on another machine, just as frozen.
Science Fiction 1
“Yes, please,” her last words. Ears
waiting for the flick of the switch.
The thick glass plate between her
and the man she trusts won’t allow more
than a dim red glow. Chamber of recycled
truck container. Crusts of rust on the stretcher
stolen from an abandoned clinic. Energy
saving lightbulbs with darkened tubes
like fingers burnt in a power outlet.
In a split second she will no longer remember
a loved one’s last embrace. That is her hope.
Throb on her temple, beating
of a moth. What comes next
is always a surprise even for the man
who has done this too many times.
Recycled Chandelier Tales
“Trust me, I’m telling you a story.”
—Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
1
Held up by spiderwebs
more than an iron ring clasped
to the ceiling, I burn
with the last lightbulb
that may bring an end to this.
All past existences
down to ash and rubble.
2
I was a trinket in a box
for the emperor’s twenty-seventh
concubine. I had three eyes
of rubies and a diamond.
I felt the grip
once of love, then no more
than lust. Until the people came
to set me free, so many voices,
so many feet soiling the chamber floor.
3
Dreams always end in darkness
from where they came.
My skin was not always white
or tinged with rust. I was red
with the blood of infidels.
Then of believers. Then of my master’s.
I used to cut the wind,
sing as it gasped in pain.
I remember petals coming down,
and thorns. Always something sharp
along with the touch of velvet.
4
I am electric. An abomination.
Spiders weave more stories
than I can remember. They taunt me
with their clumsy legs, their non-geometric
traps that catch nothing
but dust. They obscure
my view of a painting that was hung
for me to illuminate. Someone
spare me this existence. Crush
the last lightbulb and stab
a candle in its place.
I was meant for grandeur.
Not for this. Not this.
Jessica M. Lockhart
Scylla of the Alabama
Scylla’s taking more
to men
than she’d ever
care to admit.
These days you’ll find her going through a few.
I saw her in the river once,
playing at ancient catfish—giant,
grotesque, ages-long whiskers mingled
with lights reflected from the bridge
all distorted, all crude and reconfigured
something elses.
All slicked and reforming bodies—
the fish, the lights, the water,
and us on a fish fry party boat,
eating them all.
Mapless in a Recurring Landscape
Everything is like this:
Air, brown cloud line, old
water stains on linen.
Life in sepia
dust-bowl, derelict.
I’ll ask the tumble
weed where to go.
I’ll ask the sage
what I smell.
Where is the yellow
page. Where the faint-
print words.
Thirteen Ways of Looking
after Wallace Stevens
1.
When in motion, attend
to the still.
2.
Out. For glinting yellows,
deer by the road.
3.
At a half-empty glass
as a drink.
4.
Behind you.
5.
Down. Watch for pennies.
Pennies are m
oney, too.
6.
With mirrors
surrounding your head.
7.
Relax your eyes
and a picture pops out.
8.
Scan the tuna salad. Leave
no scales.
9.
Up, maybe
at a blackbird.
10.
Use binoculars. Use microscopes.
Point great lenses to the sky.
11.
Never at the sun. Never at the face
of the holy.
12.
At the news. Would you
look at the news?
13.
Seeing the crowd, populate it
with persons.
Things to Remember
The crunch of gravel under
sneakers at 6:30 in the morning
when the pine trees, even
the school buses, were gray.
The way the mailbox was always empty,
and a raised flag meant we would
meet later in marshy woods where
an old shack no one built fell
apart a little whenever we weren’t looking.
The long route to the county school where
whites and blacks were pretty
much equal in numbers. How we liked
to think we were enlightened, but lived
on the edge of town for a reason.
The ditch that ran up to the road,
perpendicular. The one
we called the Amazon,
when the Alabama was
only the river. How Selma is
a place of water and rust and blood
and ghosts. Dad’s fried deer.
Where the blackberries grew.
An empty trailer lot with no old
shack behind it, ancient Amazonian
tree stumps. A dull bus driving by
in gray morning.
Lost: Alvin the Aardvark
When Mom finally moved I’d forgotten
that toy, and we tore up the trailer,
because you can’t sell or relocate
wet pressed board and punched-in walls,
but when I saw it—
I’d had a plastic anteater. It rolled,
and it clicked, Velcro tongue
shooting out at blue-fuzz ants. I remembered orange
about it, and green. I remembered the mud
beneath us, how the water leaked and ran
below, through the floor.
I can’t remember, though, how it got
there, the anteater. I’d never go
under there with a toy:
Spiders and snakes settled the damp, the cold
aluminum skirting sometimes soundtracked
in the paw-scrapes of infant cats and dogs.
I’d crawl, flashlight in hand, toward the weak
yelps of a newborn litter. But not with an anteater—
When the wide trailer split, saturated particle
board shred open in mash-up of creak and hiss,
it was revelation:
the mud, the dirt, five-gallon buckets and beer cans,
a crooked Stonehenge of half-buried
cement blocks, rotting softballs, and among the brown
and gray, the orange.
Fifteen years and still
bright, undamaged polymer, but sticker-eyes
peeled, strange blind plastic creature,
the wet smack of suction popping,
anteater removed.
James P. Leveque
Three Films of Jean Painlevé
Our Sins in French
(Les Oursins, 1958)
Between morning yawns on the end of the jetty, divers, stripped
to the waist, waiting for the sun to kick off the sheets, burnishing lenses
and pointing out promising shallows, feel the water wet their toes.
Fishermen settle in with the haze, cigarettes dozing between fingers
stained and scratched. Their quiet French has a way of slipping around
the corner, striking down an ally, leaving a song to be remembered by.
Our sins grope the bottom of the ocean, scouring the silt and gnawing
rocks with five teeth arranged as a star, until the tide is pulled
away by the moon and the world is reduced to a dozen litres
of brackish water while the colors are wiped clean by the light
from a camera that can’t but look for trouble. Our sins keep an eye
over their shoulders, fashion shivs, and don’t trust how your voice pitches
up when you talk to them. And they pass away into their white
brittle skeletons, become their own headstones, landing themselves
on a desk, in a glass case, curios from the dead and the damned.
Most will land in a net, the fishermen grabbing a few for breakfast,
cracking their shells, and barely contemplating their bright-
yellow glands before taking their forks and digging in.
Hippocamp: Vivisected
(L’Hippocampe, 1934)
As if every seahorse is an oyster, growing a pearl in its gut,
able to swallow every slight, every irritation and annoyance
and wrap its own self around it, bathing it in slight, pink stone.
This bladder in its chest shines from finally being released from the lockup
of fishbones, split down the middle and spread wide like a Rorschach Test;
“What do you see?” “I see a dead fish who gave its life
for my longing to see the inside of a dead fish.”
The unborn eggs are hardly alive as scissors bring light
into the father’s divided womb, clip by clip. Under the flash
and whirring of the camera, there is a mild suffocation of celebrity.
Interrogatives
(Voyage dans le ciel, 1937)
What is the angle at which time lies down,
with a heaving chest, rickety pulse, and shaky knees?
How precise must be the calculations to detonate
the sun onto the page in chalk and acrylic?
When one eye is closed and the other opened, does vision, pitched
from sun to tower to hand, eventually lead back
to the vortex in the head and the brainstem?
The questions ride a hand-held Pegasus through plastic models,
the moon and Alpha Centauri suspended from visible wires
and wearing their genesis in glue and cheap paint.
Was the vegetation on Mars edible? Did it rot faster than ours?
Who placed the gemstones around Saturn in 1937?
The questions are embarrassing celluloid manuscripts of the mistakes
you can finally admit to after the sparks, water, and ashes
have taken all relevant parties halfway across Europe and America,
after time answered your letter before you finished writing it.
When the editing room light is switched off, and your sound engineer
stretched his neck, blinked, and put on his coat, did he hear
your voice through the microphone describing other planets
instead of the cars and conversations on his way home? Was he compelled
to look up to the speckled ribbon of stars between the buildings?
When you talked of loneliness on a tired planet,
were you describing the scratch and static when the needle hits
the record before the music begins?
From Pandemonium
The wind is a brief b
enediction in the street, undoing scorch and sweat
yoked for weeks around the shoulders of the underemployed, sopping up
the grime of work and not enough work, from the pissed-off pavement
to shade’s providence, on a café patio, where it’s the absolution of gin and lime,
where water cites its Freedom of Assembly on the side of a glass,
where sensualists drink to the bikers and their 80 decibels of Layla,
and where the rarer features of a passing ’41 Olds are enumerated—
“Hydra-Matic transmission,” they say, “advanced for its time”—
alongside the drawbacks of psychoanalysis or Keynsianism.
A static vanguard we are, glossing the foliage of signals and feedbacks
as it speckles the sunlight with a constellation of meanings, deciphering,
like adepts, from our windows above the flagstones and the courtyards
to anticipate the hot breath rising from Pandemonium,
exhaled from the gutters down the street toward the yellow glow
in a street lamp and then, further down, another lamp, and then, another…
The music is a riff for aluminum cans echoing in a dumpster,
the rattle of one loose shopping-cart wheel and the muted creak
of bedsprings through thin walls, a sigh unexpected by its own mouth
when the printer spins out another article called, let’s say, something
like Jazz and The Real: Coltrane, Mingus, Monk. But we still hope
to hear that movement’s horizon and its Tempo Rubato,
let the pale sheet of pre-dawn fend off the day for a few minutes more
at your computer, initiating countdown on the following message:
Dear Sirs,
After much discussion, we recommend these few steps so that you might adapt
to your new lives: claim less luxury and wake at half-past 5;
learn to pry open sleep and reheat the remains of yesterday’s coffee;
get a little Spanish under your belt. Take some comfort in the fables of the princes
of Greece and Russia, recalling their Westward escapes to New York, Baltimore,
and Montréal. In downtown, there was an archduke, a descendent of the Tsars,
managing an ice-cream parlor named The Winter Palace.