Emily Pittinos
Orphan, Lissome in the Dust Storm
I am, as often happens, next to me. I ask me what I’ve done.
As often happens, I am in no mood— the truth-telling, un-tender gestures of the perfect stranger.
I loathe talk. I imagine footsteps on the moon as a thousand blown-up texts.
But the world does still exist—the original rose darling that I once liked so much:
its many remarkable colors; “homes” and/or “nests”; possibilities I very much wanted;
The hope is very, very; many, many.
To sustain on what remains, I act engaged. I walk, pretending
I am a tide, a bright note, wind endlessly unfolding the earth.
at some point, I’ll rediscover interest; at some point, I’ll discover doing; at some point, I’ll become involved.
I will rise an eighth of an inch over a kind of field— flowers: a still blizzard. This lie goes to my head in a whirl of carbon.
[she-place]
Yet another waking: the bright-bright of the broken day shocking with its tint of “but what then?”
Before she woke, a guinea hen roosted in the meadow brush of the mind, and beside the meadow brush, she was the hounded vole and the digging, her hours coated in a crumble of chase, chase, chase.
Beyond this scene: the switchgrass winter-blonde in the gulch, and the fog cut through into portions and parted.
In the meadow brush, her parts dissolved into the winter-summoned stream, winter summoning steam from her warmest parts, and her resolve.
Who does she become once torn into morning, suddenly, or at least it seems, so known and bound?
and became it.
Razor light. The feast of air-taking.
In the meadow brush, she carved a figurine of herself
This next dawn: a becoming so common that she can’t, or won’t, step through.
[she-place]
A man with two heads stands too tall beside her. Her body is not a balloon, blowfish, silk sails aloft.
In her chest, a rabbit kicks and kicks at the heart. She imagines fur, pink with blood.
This is fear, she thinks. I must be afraid.
But what is this tangle of attraction, the thrill that fear lights up, the breathlessness she recalls of groping in her earlier darks?
This is not fair, she thinks. This is not fun.
But also, it is.
When she looks away: the crag of barren rock, the pepper tree reaching through a mirage.
She steps to the left and reimagines the sand as a sea at which she is alone. In a goblet, she muddles bulleit and mint and smashes the poultice into what refuses to heal. Stepping onto a tugboat, she rocks every droplet.
This bobbing is a sickness, this whirling a meal.
[she-place]
I project my gloom on all things and take (affectionate) pity on the mirrors they make.
i.e. the iris in a trick of light becomes:
a. daffodil imposter b. bearded dragon belching fire c. lady in saloon frills d. cloistered velvet e. sordid easter sunday f. first blush before the prickable spindle g. wonder unspooled from the sepal h. midnight siphoned from the ether i. deadly night shame j. milk maid with a past k. blood on the petticoat and/or l. snow lynx, snow leopard, snow seal in heat m. stork impregnated by science n. ruptured ovum, blown fallopian o. wound on stilts
[she-place]
Today, she spends all afternoon on her knees, freeing the potted hydrangeas and replanting them beside an herb garden growing wild with chive. Some sadnesses are unspeakable.
The dog vomits, sniffs the widowed pillow, vomits again. At twilight, when his black fur turns him phantom, she rises from bed, narrows her eyes to find him digging, his snout deep in the flower bed, all her slow work unearthed.
[she-place]
All day, she watches I mope inside with the lights off.
Meanwhile, the nightshade sways, untoppled by its skirt of tombs. Meanwhile, the tufts of foxtail sprout new frill.
All day, I thinks of the day as magicless.
But cornflower springs from concrete and builds a spiral staircase as it goes. The moth tizzies. Does it have a mind? If so, does it know how little it will live?
She does believe you can be too prolific— bridal irises extinguish; raspberry babies strain from sidewalks; the pink haze/fog of switchgrass is too paralyzing to weed.
When neat whiskey goes sloppy, the day does drag on so.
In the garden, a lady slipper, and the twilit lanterns of sunflowers cracking open. The candelabra of bulrush shrugs toward sundown.
She spits ice cubes, and they melt to darker blotches on dark stone.
Her mind would be empty if not for I’s woe, the relentless on and off of an air conditioner, cicada, katydid.
What a tinnitus night is.
She’s had her fill.
She departs through the hum in the overgrowth, the fidgeting greens.
[she-place]
She claims cicada names: redeye, greengrocer, double drummer, yellow monday.
She floods her sound box for every hour but two:
one to rest, another to admire the adequate bride she makes of the world.
This screenshot was tweeted by Tulsi Gabbard along with this message: HAWAII – THIS IS A FALSE ALARM. THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE TO HAWAII. I HAVE CONFIRMED WITH OFFICIALS THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE. Photograph courtesy of MRD First Response.