Thankless at Dawn

Between us and uncertainty the net hangs, large enough for all. It will not let another honest worker fall. Not ever again. You have your call, your place in the picture. You have your part--and if not, then you're just a bum at heart with your cardboard sign saying "all out of luck". We simply hurry past you, but do you hear the clicking of our shoes? The sound that safety makes. That is the sound of the future's machinations. Oh, you who live dime to dime. So many pockets, so little nerve. We broke our hands to pave the streets you sleep on. Oh, we're patient and we're thorough, and we're due to reap the fruit, and we'll end this hard life coddled in the roots of heaven's grove. So, you want what's in these pockets? You want what's in these pockets? Don't hold that breath, because there'll be no charity. Yes, we're the phalanxes of the dawn, lions without charity. We are the phalanxes. We are thankless.


34th: Ingrid in DisOrient

Many mornings she'd feign death in the snow, so I'd wake up alone in the nests we'd dug and uncurl like a scab, my palms and knees sinking into this mess as I crawled to the spot of color in the distance, all anchored in white, trailing little girl tracks, where I'd find her enamored, half-buried, presented with less than a doll's shade of skin. She'd lay retextured with blue winter dust in the shape of a cross. Her hair cracked when I brushed the inhuman pastels (I can feel a rake on my back . . . ). "These baptisisms in frost. You've really got to stop these baptisisms in frost."

Oh, the humor. She chokes on her laughter. Explosion of motion from which she ascends with a head-dress of crystals. She wriggles away after shoving me, and she points--oh, the humor: "You're as quick as a mammoth. when will you ever learn?" Something reminds me that I should be smiling, but I know that those beasts are as gone as the books they were in before books were extinct. This way, the mornings would start on the slopes that we'd steadily hike. Two shadows on the ribs of a slumberous globe in the freefall of desolation, far from the camps, following our eyes through DisOrient.

(That damned girl bit a hole through the tent where the other children were kept. The sound of skipping feet chipped away at my ears, and in those dark days I never slept. I left my snoring bunkmates to retrace the little-girl tracks just as a sandstorm swelled to scrub out the landmarks behind our backs. And as I panted, bent in two, her giggling was magnifying through the cave, opened like a peacock tail. I thought I saw her change. She's still so strange.)

"Hey--You're millions of miles away again," she says. "Thinking of the time I lured you from the camp. Remember how you mumbled? Lonely like a man born on the 32nd of the month." Her eyes don't shrink in the cold, they keep warm by burrowing through my skull, but I think, if she left me alone, I'd freeze solid. And we've trekked too long now, too many seasons spent digging our beds in the biting snow--me in earnest, her with a grin--to pretend she could fend for herself. I sometimes think I would be dead if I'd stayed in that tent. I sometimes think, if not for me, she'd be food for the pig-nosed dogs. Maimed in the mud. A doll as stiff as ice. (There's that rake on my back . . . )

I dream she's floating in the planet's core. A foetus rising up through snow. Her eyes are open and reflective, projecting a show: Squadrons X the sky like crucifixes, barges sailing over land. Morning comes and I will find her interred again. "Ingrid, must you insist in tempting fate? You might convince your tiny heart you're really gone." She smiles; the blue of her lips is alarming: "Fate's got no grudge with me. I'm just a twirling little girl."


The Baker of the Bivouac

He worked waist-high in a white cloud. He never saw the end of the crowd around his house, and no one saw him sleep. He wore his rolling pin down to a finger-bone-sized dowel, let out a howl as he wrestled with the dough. A sign above his dutchdoor read, "Unleavened bread is the diet of the dead, the wafer of waifs." His oven spat out crumb and crust. Apricots with black wounds, saw dust, sesame seeds--he used anything to make the receipe less bland for us. And though the flour made him cough, he tried to please our senses, so we stayed off his fences and formed a spiralling queue. We stayed polite; we didn't bite eachother (just our tongues). We starved in a civil way, digesting shoeleather and dew while he raced neck and neck with famine. Our hunger pangs stabbed and dazzled. The old ones croaked; the children choked on gravel which they chewed like cashews and pistachios. What is scraped off the pestle, what is scraped off the mortar hardly fills the canyons in the enamel of twenty-eight teeth. Sacks of grain imploded like our unused, shrunken stomaches. The stuff we needed our angelic baker kneaded, until, at last, the shop went cold, the blessed smell of bread dispersed, as did we when he emerged, gripping a serrated knife. A powdery palm print on his cheek as though he'd been slapped by God. He murmured, "So sorry to report that there is nothing left. The only thing that can break this fast is death." We stared, a halo of the hungry surrounding this man who'd fed us so well. Every breath caught in constricted throats. The baker hovered there with no escape. Then he carved himself out of the black and fruitless landscape.


A Bride for the State

snipers plucked the traffic off the street. all the way to the church, no one on the curb. nothing but a black fleet. boxy, built like bison. flags on their hoods, flexan one-way windows, a hide of kevlar. and she was in the middle car. still so young and featureless, and her face would still be round for years. but the gown was all exuberance and lace--a star to the eye, as white as money could buy. the guard sitting opposite leaned in. smiled and tweaked her chin. "can't complain, at any rate," he said. "daughter of the chairman, married to the state . . . ." that seemed to say it all. but the girl didn't hear a sound. the baby-blush was flushed from her expression; she now matched her gown. they rolled on. the wedding would be soon. a preist, a pen, and the groom? sprawled out in every house, every base, every single heart. and as the fleet careened, invincible tires screaming at every turn, no one saw her dress caught in the door. it flapped like her own bloodless flag--a beacon of distress, a signal to the peepers, a surrender. but no one saw it. no one, that is, except george.


Little Lost Postcard

Isabella bought a postcard for thirty cents. It was an arial of the Golden Courtyard: paths and arches in the garden lined with clever track-lights. The Roman Candle Fountain, a hot ulcer centered in the frame--the corona of the age. It impersonates the sun in a nova stage. And the gilded inset was an etching of our President. Beard and mane, banner with his name and the usual pedantic Latin: "Mercy Is in Heaven and Rest Is in the Grave. Here, We Do Our Work at Any Cost," (Witten across a glaive, and all of it in gloss.) Isabella could not resist. She wrote, "Perhaps they think that Heaven keeps their stone walkways swept and their hedges trim," addressed it to her friend Jacques--whose house was now a smoldering pyre of black--and sent it out to him. But the postcard did not go through--the Censors scraped the gloss off, huffed it like glue. They saw stars. They scorned the message, used it for the ash of their cigars. In an ominous office, they stubbed a glowing tip right on her postmark, cursing and coughing in the darkness of some ominous office.


a demonstration

lecture lights recede. we read "a preview of the smash" on a screen. signing off, the grid says shhh. swiveled in our chairs to face the tripleglass, we're poised above the lair of the frankenstein they said was yours and mine. from a chute shoots the sub-sublime, he lands down as a wild X. trapped, he wrecks the decoy cage that trips the flip, deploys the fleet of buzzing, tooth infested trucks --they catch him in a second, lance his eyeballs to his tonsils, tie his guts in little knots, stack his spine-- these creatures we're told are yours and mine. then our soulless masterpiece billows out of its carapace and sucks the remains through the snout in his brow. they tell us it smells virtue, but they won't tell us how


Carman

when the air was good, she was green. the lion boys would wax her to a sheen. call her beatrice and pose on her hood for pictures. measle patterned, she merged with the earth. only sank an inch under all the cables. wore the tallies on her door proudly --the company kept score: grease deathheads for every lucky shell. they broke a bottle on her wheel well after winning the first two wars. i know her inside out. i used to work her belly for a paycheck, in the hangars, on my back. afternoon naps in the shade of her armored hips. and when she'd shrink down the runways, dancing in heatwaves, i'd twirl my wrench. wish her many kills. now, the rubbers gone. the metals red and raw, porous as cotton. gnawed in the open. rotten. windows etched from within. glass is alabaster, shines like abalone. oh, beatrice. poor girl, propped there so lonely. being slowly digested, losing her anatomy. she sticks in the fucking muck. but water needs fetching, thousands are buried alive, and i'm winded. i'll keep her filters drained. i'll wipe off the rain, the lemon juice sent down from heaven. wrap her up in burlap, never let the stuff reach her engine. i keep her running, she keeps me on the run. there are screams on the east horizon-- toss the eighth tank. our haul never ends.