It’s said a white mist clouds our limbs at night and
flows down the intricate sometimes treacherous coastline
of our nervous highways shrouding our brain
as fanning in soft corals it forms a clean, shapeless
cement into which dreams must etch runes
to ease the grip on conduits long-flooded,
obsolescent ports and secret refineries
without burying vital streams or
draining reservoirs we might yet tap when we’re
sure we’ve reached the end of the road in our bodies
and happen to clamber upon that random blasted concrete
face scrawled with the whole painted over-
lapping histories
and at last we see
the correct order is not order a blood-caked braid lying severed in the dirt is
grandmother to unfinished basements flickering with
nightmare TV on mute
and so lost in our dreaming we
bead into milk along the marled seam joining us to ourselves
and drip sap onto petals of the tiny gland that keeps
vigil like the numeral over the door to your room. Morning. Glyphs
writing themselves in steam carve swift glorias into
sun above the previous tenant’s dying raised bed of flowering thyme
and tomatoes I’ve enjoyed sitting in my high window
watching rot where they fall yet water in the spirit of the
cruelest kind of faith. Sensing no other real option exists I live here
and tell myself I have choices
alone on the edge of a marsh going scarlet
and echoing with shots of backyard militias who punctuate and
parse thought into discrete silences. A fly who will not survive this
news cycle is hurling its body against the green-lit windowscreen separating it
from its life and I see myself you anybody among us
fighting what we refuse to believe until we’re shocked stupid
like a cow or neighbor’s puppy or
the frozen-wide OH of the one sitting opposite
last month when a woman dozing woke in the pitch of silence
during closing-doors at Atlantic-Pacific to fingers pinching her crotch.
Look, I have uncrossed my legs, risen, and calmly beat my fist
once against plexiglass designed to separate me
from electrified track black tunnels for centuries
and I did that not for dramatic effect but
to test publicly the strength of my images: salt-tolerant reeds,
blood from rock, and the habits of certain quails who
are prior to man and nest in waters ancient and originary.
Waters older than fire.
Why do you call me survivor, when I do not survive?
For I am coral grandmother tomatoes a fly
I am salt-tolerant reeds
I am blood from rock, the habits of certain quails
electrified track black tunnels for centuries
and I will live
and I will not die again.
–
Kerry Carnahan is from Kansas. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review and Bear Review, and she has a poem forthcoming at the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.