The Tatters. Brenda Coultas

petals

      quietly foxed or bat claw unhinged

      cut from mussel shell or bone

      buttons lie underground

      Walking through coals into a city within the fire

      entering the ember, encased in a protective suit

      to bring out handfuls of what that world inside burning wood is like

      Flame in the air, gas fields full of devil’s spit yellow eye of methane

      When the flame is in the air and the night is eye & thigh high paper laid on an ember browns then flames

      Walking inside the flame, or an ember of heated talk opening doors poured from the long-necked bucket or dug from a shallow seam

      Standing in the doorway of an ember

      the door is a passage that my friend leaves ajar

      Walking through embers: a marriage with its pleasures of heat and light

      and the pain of heat and light

      stoking the fire inside

      Oil pumps in a corn field

      Satan’s fires

      burn off the methane

      Freestanding coal shack & packed trailer parks of burning coals overflow the double-wide with its cathedral ceilings, whirlpool tubs, and master suites

      The landfill handed me a ball of paper, a washed-out small boulder of print. I cracked it open and read “Danny Kaye performing live.” And I thought, How long has he been dead?

      Like the midden of books and papers stacked by the bed, make of it what you will. I put my rage on top to cultivate later, the midden of paper and print, headlines and ink, mixed pulp from long ago industrial and urban waste will topple and release a flood of ivory and soft grays and blacks

      Dust tops the PC, dot matrix printer, and typewriter in a thrift shop

      The Apple in the barn is boxy and hard

      Cords long gone

      Plastic phones turn a palm into light

      The inside awash with take-out containers—driver’s seat cleared of—cigarette butts, newspapers, plastic forks, spoons, and knives ready to go

      The captain’s logbook was inked heavy with stamps. I ask the long-dead captain, Is it like a wax cylinder or like tree rings or like grooves set in foil? Is it Thomas Edison’s talking machine or Bell’s telephone? Is it an echo chamber of the ocean or a talking drum?

      There were the sounds that I couldn’t carve, the blood I couldn’t catch, dust fell, sprinkling itself over the glass cases of artifacts, over baleen piano keys, carved dice, combs, and mirrors. In his log book I silently entered how the whale’s eardrums are as large as a child’s head (how each is painted with a frisky portrait of a man and a woman.)

      I carve an animal into the logbook, cutting through a hundred pages of sea notes, of sightings, of oil harvested and rendered. I cut through accounts of the sperm whale’s death throes, of harpooners who froze as they closed in on the chase. With my pen, I carve another animal into the book. A tooth out of a tusk. Baleen into corset stays. Press breasts and penises into bone, I make fine canes for gentlemen.

      Underneath the childhood clothing, grade school valentines, and schoolbooks my mother stored in a trunk, what shows? An arm? Toe? I like to stick my feet out. What gives my presence away? A rumpled sheet under the blanket? A barely perceptible ripple.

      Sitting perched on letters and newspapers, under the mattress, tables, and on chairs and inside shoe boxes

      Bread box

      Of the other books

      Leaf press

      Prayer-card holder

      Toast tray

      I store neatly pressed handkerchiefs and hand fans embossed with bible verses and funeral home ads inside an encyclopedia

      Press a green spider into the book, cross-eyed and alive and already very flat

      Press in a dream of living in the deep blue of space, like the planet earth. The earth, an eyeball of the galaxy

      Press in deep blue space, a blue ball of light rotating through the black inky void around a larger system, a bigger star, a blue milky marble, moving.—Out of an ember cooling and firing again—gravity of milky puppy breath—milky marble home.

ANIMATIONS

      Coloring the glass with pee or peering at a blue dense enough to be alive or to influence a human or inhuman action, the feather death crown is a spiral, and in automatic writing, the spirals grow smaller and smaller before any actual communication.

      Spiral, a tornado wind in the pen and on the page

      Pressed glass hen on nest

      girls in frosted petticoats

      white darning eggs

      clear radio tubes

      cobalt eyewash cup talks of sand and heat

      speaks of tinctures and rubs soothing as a salve or as beauty

      the sand grains talk of rock and water

      The feather crowns say, “There must be a better way to signify heaven or salvation.” Those who gather crowns keep them under glass or in their best candy boxes and pass them on as evidence of afterlife.