by Niamh MacPhail
Through the Body’s Bramble
Arcing over geography and a sea I can no longer bear: the abject abstraction of loss. A body aches.
Beautiful things of spring: touch a dark cord: blessings tethered just below the frost line and its filmy iris.
Counting anniversaries: forgetting eleven each month. The body slows, slumbers towards the next shock.
Deep below the crust, magnetic poles torque us like puppets. Humans flicker like ice flames along the planes.
Earth has its own plan: we are its moments. It bursts on with or without our grieving. A red-winged blackbird lies dead beneath the pine. A truck trailer bangs along the road: everything a roaring motion.
Fire too, tangos with air in a bedazzling splendor, then fizzles to ash, returning to air for a final dance.
Grief, like Earth and planets, has its own course, sifting through the body, a bitter lung-clog, it slogs through the body’s bramble.
Hours, not ours, mark each failure, not a forward motion, but synthetic stops in Akasha. Another form of human waste. Insert the battery. Press the start. Run ‘til you can’t.
Intimacy, incremental or instantaneous: also immeasurable. Star bursts along a thin-edged continuum.
Jagged lifeline / worn off my palm? The fortune-teller held the back of my hand for a moment. Said she couldn’t find it. Another medium said I’d live to be really old. I’ll take an average.
Katzenjammer Kidz, one with the sky for a forehead, race across a cartoon landscape, filled with four-color, moiré-esque hope. What did Grandma’s child-mind find there?
Love is a phantasm. A conjuring. A written thing. A memory. A once-burning. A retina receives through its cones. We are moving particulates floating in the vitreum. Between here and there.
Managing life in pandemic: Alone. Jobless. Without you. The deer ate my garden. Every tomato plant. I wander in dirt-stained socks. You should be building fences and mowing the yard. Each cold night is a new marker. Each hot one, a British memory-ache. I don’t miss your pigeons one bit, incidentally.
Nothing is the place we met. Companions in the abyss. Nothing was your God on a shitty day. A clean, well-lit nothing, Hemingway wrote. Nada-nada in chorus. His nothing has stayed with me like a tick.
Open your throat, your Gemini heart, your windows. Let out the burning and I’ll watch. Keep my mouth shut. Do something right. Take something back. Stop fucking up. You’ll be alive.
Pioneers of grief. Each of us, in turn. If we miss this passage, we might be lucky fucks.
Queer grief has its own rainbow flavors. When suicide. Curtains rain down. Doors close. The phone does not ring. No blips on the cell. Three brass monkeys cover their orifices in turn. Grateful for this nothing space in which I self-actuate, like in those self-help books. Amazing Gays: a popular gospel we sing.
Ribs: Adam, insecure, pretended to birth Eve. Male persuasion. Denial. Suspended disbelief. And just ouch! Who penned this one? Pandemic: another what-the-fuck moment. Your mask is infringing on my rights, said the Adam to the blues. Who owns the air, by the way? Is this negotiable? “Creation” is political, as are N-95s. I know you, Max, would’ve masked. You were so sensical, except when you weren’t. Our births, too, were political acts we owned. We birthed ourselves, didn’t we? As if we could write our own stories. Then you took yourself out. Like you knew.
Shiver, lilies, like your first morning has come: planted for Grandma near a porch long gone. You know how short a day is. Yet you return every year, even without my love, an encore to the drooping peonies, whose fragrance still overwhelms me. The deer didn’t eat you.
Tell me something I don’t know. Anything.
Undergarments: I should have stolen yours, but only took what was given. Thank you for washing our clothes. They hung on wood racks in your home like tired ghosts when you died.
Vixen and a contradiction. Fishnets. Birkenstocks. Nihilist. Catholic. Hitchhiking to your own twin cosmos. I love you, Max. I miss every bit of you.
Wuthering Heights, your gift to me, lies pristine next to my bed. I finger your inscription and feel you near. Your favorite book. I bought a used one and tore out each page, one by one.
X-Rayed hares with wounded hearts spilled from your pen onto Bronte’s mess. What might we understand in the inking and movements of our hands, where we conjure our gods through our wounds? I’m sorry, but I cannot like this book.
Yarrow grows wild along the road: tea for grief or skin treatments. If I could only distinguish it from Queen Anne’s Lace. You used to listen to the music on a skincare YouTube to go to sleep. You were so funny, Max. Happy about people improving their complexions. Tomorrow I will find some yarrow and steep tea and drink you. There’s much to be lost and found in the ditches and weeds.
Z – do you count the protons in a single nucleus? Or just let them be? Can you hear the small sound in its spinning?
Find work by Koss in Hobart, Cincinnati Review, Spillway, Diode Poetry, Rogue Agent, Five Points, Spoon River, Chiron, Lumiere Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and many others. They also have work in Best Small Fictions 2020 and work forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite’s Punk Anthology. Find Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 or at http://koss-works.com.
Niamh MacPhail (she/her) is a writer and musician from the West of Scotland. She has just completed her Creative Writing dissertation at the University of Glasgow, and her work explores themes of pleasure-pain, materiality, illness, and the boundaries of discomfort. You can find her socials at @niamhrmac.