IN THE CITY WHERE THEY PAVED THE ROADS WITH OUR TONGUES AND TEETH
#1 of Poetry
after Daniel Borzutzky's "The Performance of Becoming Human"
There's a body
In the body: the teeth of a piano
Someone has stolen the rest of the piano
If our body was stolen would you run from what stood in its place:
ivory keys and claws and pinions and beak and talons and fangs snarling shrieking tasting
Would you take the dagger we bought you as a gift and drive it into our chest beside a pond with the ducks watching, waiting to see if you shred us like a loaf of wheat bread
It's better for the ducks, you say
You and you and you and you and you, all of you
Listen: My back molar dropped from my body gently as tears in this old city, its undercarriage black as the coal in the bottom of your throat
The sun hasn't set there, on that tooth yet. The sun listens to the desert rouse to life with all the resentment we hold at our nocturnal cats
We would be nocturnal if not for the rattling in our chest, if not for how big the world is
How can we travel all over this fractured and split world with this fractured and split body and think our problem with it is simply the scenery
The scenery, we lecture to no one, is where we climb into a landscape painting, flaking off paint with our mandibles, burrowing till our little tick legs are the only thing sticking out this skin
Today we dug a burrow in our backyard. Dogs staring as if we were a deer browsing the rusted wares of a flea market. Neighbors staring as if they needed to drive a dagger into our chest
We think and think and think and the dirt under our nails spreads to our palms, our wrists, up our limbs--gangrenous this rot we dig and dig and
We dug a burrow and hid our bones to chew on later, to hide our body and all its blisters
We are not being metaphorical about the digging
When your body is a sled hauled by a team of dogs, nothing is metaphorical
Accept me/us as I/We are or leave
We have nothing else but the hilt of this blade blossoming from our ribs, the rotten tooth hidden in our burrow
Its opening the arms of a flower reaching outward, wailing for embrace