Krysia Jopek

The brain wanted to be skin that healed quickly.

Skin wanted to feel abstractions like hierarchy or revenge.

Stars wished upon falling humans.

Someone waited at the bottom of the stairs to catch the subject of the study.

There was talk of hostages during awkward dinners without salt.

The sea existed on calendars that never traveled.

We knew so much then, it hurt to sing.

Long paragraphs had cadences that went missing.

Flesh clings to its skeleton because the years chisel.

The old woman fell, and the stars couldn’t return her.

Small robots have taught themselves to play soccer.

They don’t manifest any addiction, anxiety, or despair.

When they vote for a leader, some will learn to paint.

Others will write poetry about unknowable human gods.

The mouse in the wall found the hatchway that wouldn’t close completely.

The house is on high alert because of other tragedies.

War etched itself indelibly.

I don’t recognize myself in the wind.

There’s nothing suitable for binge watching.

It could be just another yesterday.

Someone said that on Thursday.

Seven bluebirds line up before winter in a dream play.

A hundred blackbirds leave summer lawns with swoops and reordering.

The package never arrives with any conviction.

It’s preferable to stay awake and let sadness sleep.

Sadness dreams of the missing subject that slid past singing.

Skin uses all its energy to heal.

The brain dreams of skin.

The moon is venting tonight.

The clock sticks to its rungs.

You’re swimming underwater toward something prehistoric.

Climbing a hill that doesn’t go anywhere through cloud.

No one visits that many miles away from the setting sun.

One hand can still fold and clap seaweed or some other green acquisition.

Sun lost in the grass.

Lungs breathing a song no one quite remembers.

It’s become passé to claim stalemate against yourself.

The kingdom always wins.

Tomorrow the moon hides behind entwined trees and chattering bats.

Buses filled with mannequins slip through the rain.

It’s October again.

Friday maybe.

This letter won’t find a stamp.

This phone call won’t discover your labyrinth of stairs.

Only some of this matters.

Only some find fortune in paper cups.

If you’re lucky, the coyotes pierce your dreams with wandering above ground.

An estranged friend calls with hidden bounty though you won’t answer.

Something about a picnic in a forest of litanies.

It wasn’t always like this.

Libraries on fire with lost magic.

Homes pulled inside out by conjecture.

You’ve been meaning to articulate a flight that’s not ridiculous.

Toward the catbirds moving south.

Articulate a better plan.

The hammock left in the basement, so you can measure properly without summer.

Without leaves wrapped in your hair.

On the postcard, there were miracles written in cursive.

The moon didn’t lose its back.

Cicadas weren’t dying.

Summer had been a symphony of abandon.

You found something worthwhile.

Something that makes hide and seek with a new self obsolete.

Something worth mentioning.

Some of the dead keep growing old with us.

They watch us breathing green light after a storm, playing word games none of us wins,

paying dues in a strange currency that fell under the sea.

The loneliness was too painful to own in those inner rooms larger than intimacy,

windows swollen with a summer that didn’t matter.

Surgeries left inner scars.

The mountain erased itself during conversations not critical to stepping forward to a new view of a sunset that didn’t need us.

You were too metaphysically tired to want anything.

The old woman dropped all her medication, and the blue moon didn’t write back.

The wind braided itself with leaves and light; emerald dresses of angels quivering against September sky.

Cars hugged roads that may or may night be winterized.

The teenage girl in a wheelchair, before dreams lifted, could fly.

An old man transposed childhood.

The birds had been thirsty all day.

The heat, a less important character than time.

You needed to find your way back to the dream under the sink to tell the girl you couldn’t go with her.

Someone might need you.

Someone might decorate night with your absurd dreaming.

The dead say it’s not too much.

It’s not a case of addiction to melancholy.

The answer was under the boat.

The questions were soft tentacles tethered to no one’s watch.

You watch for someone who knows you, who folds the map to your location on the tired grid, faded rivers.

Planets are whispering to stars.

The birds are leaving.

If it’s not enough, maybe wait a day.

Maybe stay until Tuesday.

When the rain becomes us.

When rivers dream new fish and mountains.

The garden, a micro-wasteland: cracked ceramic and glass; peat moss gone amok with ice, tangle, and quandary. Mourning doves thread dirges into blackbird noise; the blue jay cry, a semicolon.

Let’s pretend to be yellow, he said—the yellow of daffodils; we can somersault through crocus, primrose—without any definitions for sorrow.

I bought tickets for the monorail, she answered—so we can live inside a different city where pristine snow glitters under quaint streetlights, where passer-bys dream in poems without any answers.

I’m disappearing, he said—studying the palm and thin fingers of his left hand. When the ice shifts the sun, I can’t form human sentences, remember the passcode to myself.

Blackbirds are stuck in my throat, she answered—mourning doves nest in my unwashed hair. The blue jay is a semicolon between cities where I could have loved my breath on the mirror, your hand on proliferating, turquoise doors.

It’s true. I’m a con-Artist. I can’t pinpoint on the calendar the day–or on the wind-up clock, the hour this new identity coalesced, grew into its genetic paws. Strangely, I’m not one iota ashamed. I daresay I might be off-the-chart titillated by getting away with items at the bottom of the shopping cart I didn’t see when I checked out at the register with an AI-robot half-cloned from Mykie. I think but can’t remember; the driving away with my takeout food after presenting a dead debit card for payment; dining and dashing because of a make-believe emergency phone call about an ongoing, quite boring family crisis. And then there’s the overestimation of money needed for a sudden ridiculous, requisite expense for which my rich mother begrudgingly writes a check. Hey, I’m not a corporation. Well, at least not yet. Why does the sun cost so much? Isn’t rain free? Nope, nothing is free in America—no free lunch without strings attached.

Every story has a beginning, so I’m searching for point A. What was the first sign or premonition of this new fun game, one lacking conventional rules? I guess I was creating my moving red ethical line in the sand. There are those who follow rules and those who invent them, and I’m one of the latter, so I am being true to myself, and living a life well-examined. Even now, I’m gazing into my reflection in the picture window, searching for clues. Those new lines at my jawline, my sinking eyes—there are signs.

Perhaps I had been acting out beneath the surface of the days, turning my inner pain inside out away from my skin—or perhaps this is an attempt, ongoing, with proliferating layers and iterations leading toward an invented justification. For too long I was playing chess with existential demise, checkers with corporeality, chess with death. Yes, I’ve borrowed that dangerous game against The Angel of Death from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. My dreams are A Glass Darkly, also a Bergman film—but for me in black and white while my brain travels in color to stamp its passport: Iceland to see the Northern Lights, Cabo San Lucas, Florence, Nice, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, ancient Persia, Greece, Egypt. No one should blame my brain for my new existence as a con artist. It’s all on me, I can assure you. It was merely ART.

Unhinged from the ceiling, the gray moth was wind-scatter by Tuesday—then nothing left.

Not even a frame for a sentence-shed.

Last winter’s bicycle spokes catch a hand.

Everyone in a hurry to take the remote—until then.

Orphic chords scrambled us through artery-streets in need of better armor.

Behind the TV, I’m growing pieces of music—shaken in a paper bag.

We could live on the same channels during commercials, eat the same cereal.

Now that we’ve grown new considerations for purple, for melody—for the play.

The theatre: misplaced and fuzzy.

One adjusts and can lurk be at the bottom of the issue—the fairy tale lesson of the castle and boat.

Don’t be afraid to go alone, sorry for your tragic becoming.

Whom have you told?

Bruised humans are playing shipwreck-bumper cars to feel something, hurt someone.

One is razoring shins with trousers rolled by the carousel’s sad-brown-eyed ponies.

The scent of iron can satisfy like a fact.

Lying on a bed of raven hair, Eurydice drowns images of a hand that didn’t pull her to the surface.

Look at what we’ve done to each other while no one else was looking.

Spear fishermen risk slicing their backs on barnacle-laden rock that claims the disappearing shoreline.

It’s all prehistoric—the need for slowing everything down.

Cacophony unfurls the sea’s lapis lazuli, collects declarations that might or might not be expunged.

The cardinal husband and wife may have gone missing.

They only live two or three years, one of us said.

It’s not your fault the winding bitterroot choked out their apple tree.

Next year the old man will chainsaw the branches and trunk in perfect increments.

It’s recommended that you stay behind the dilapidated barn with the nervous horses that might get thinned out.

Until you hide the rental car, devour the elixir that could sequester you in scriptures, temporarily.

You’ll regenerate completely, eventually.

Like the four-arm pink starfish Eurydice stole from the sea.

It’s not a four-leaf clover, the ex-lover said. 

There’s no aquarium here.

The bath where I read Plato should suffice.

Where will you bathe?

The sea, of course.

Indigo nights with opaque moonlight.  

The gelatinous sea animal’s house detaches, but there is always a new friend.

The Book of Elucidation abandoned because there were too many pages.

Press this number to become curious again, enamored with nothing but stage—

not your obsessions, possessions, aggressions—those meticulously-ingrained habits.

Press this number when you trampoline uncontrollably out of your skin.

This number if you’re feeling particularly psychotic.

The sky is untangling its grammar.

Intricate sentences will be diagrammed before erased.

We must go quickly.

Pack essentials in your torn knapsack of copious notes, your fanciful observations.

That manuscript you may never finish.

No promises.

Hurry!

It’s dangerous—and stunning.

Whom have you told?

Night moves the clouds; swallows the stars we’ll name for the dead while drinking cheap whisky. 

None of us owns a flashlight, wood for a fire, categorical convictions.

The hours before sunrise stretch infinity, spin us sublime—

no longer overwhelmed by how limitless we’ve become.

Eurydice falls asleep in E Minor.

Unlike the alchemist, we wouldn’t give up our families—sell food for magic.

There were many worlds within the world and outside of us, dimensions of sorrow.

To measure all of them might take eternity’s windfall, truculent knowledge.

Thirteen Egyptian bulls carried the fallen troops—transformed almost everyone.

The stories became us, pages we’d sell for more bee nectar, more Himalayan blue poppies.

My mother looked in the mirror and became rain.

The house grew wings last night.

In his sleep, the beloved spoke the talk of strangers.  

A boy traded his trove of baseball cards for clarity.

The pillars of some worlds would crumble.

Some days drew forever into themselves.

The papyrus folded into an origami starling that couldn’t fly.

The lies professed were to maintain a semblance of normalcy while those around us schemed to sell the country.

Orpheus barters his glass lyre for an acoustic guitar; electric didn’t suit him—so he can woo Eurydice back for eternity.

He strums his tapestry of poetry while silver birches drape frayed ribbons of moonlight.

Eurydice never wakes up.

Every tragic hero has the epiphany that no one can save him but himself.  

Orpheus sat and wept—primal sounds under temple stones.

It’s better to ignore displays of inner lives turned inside out.

No one ever knows what to say.

The spotlight tightens around Orpheus’ neck when his guitar-playing arm is shorn.

Note: those who visit from the underworld can’t bleed.

Some say the gods were jealous of Orpheus’ heart wrenching songs.

The writers look worried.

Most of the Chorus remain calm.

Picture-window memories can be cleansed from mud and bloodshed while we wait for our subject to settle down.

Filthy blackboards thrown out definitively when the new story boards arrive.

A hero from a different tragedy carries Eurydice without waking her,

back to the afterlife before the deadline.

Redemption has its costs.

Consciousness can reset over new chasms we’ll learn to navigate.

Someone should reassemble the assemblage of melodies, sequenced shards—

attach frenetic syllable-phrases to decrescendo.

Remind us what we lost, what was carelessly forgotten:

all that longing for something more.

sinuous, serpentine, spongy,

soggy, drowning under water,

not serendipitous,

not a sinecure with a quick fix,

not erect at my unstrung cello,

not perpendicular at the untuned piano’s yellowing keys

the cat walks across at night

emboldened with the power of creating noise, not melody.

through the neck, the incision to scour decay’s long-fingered clutch.

cadaver bone from a bank somewhere and its own bone shards

beseeched to regrow,

re-bequeath composure

when the second foot lands on the stained carpet

from the dreamworld.

in time for the masquerade, only half tragedy.

look at me, I’m not dropping the martinis

I’ll pretend to like.

decompressed, letting its recalcitrant grasp of nerves go.

now I’m outside the body,

hovering above myself in the sky’s bold cloud-whispering.

the planes fly right through me.

the Arctic winds don’t cause any shivering.

Everyone slows down and locks the rearview mirror when the ambulance arrives.

Demise crosshatches the body’s sleeves.

How funny I look without skin.

Lacking the memory of other cells, the cell is lonely.

Inconsolable, the violas slip the page.

A gamelan can be ordered on Amazon.

Rumors perforate.

No one called once I gave up color.

It was an exercise in inflection before I straggled here.

Metaphors and allegory atrophied.

I lost my hypothesis, so I opened the divine with a can opener.

I didn’t want to spoil.

A new language can’t be created overnight, and I was tired of being a pronoun.

Burdens design their own burdening.

The one who overdosed stopped looking for God.

There were questionable assumptions.

The cornfield collected us in silk.

Sleep doesn’t even know.

Idiosyncrasies reproduce exponentially.

I’m stranger than before.

He said you’re a sheet of glass in a crowded city.

He said bring the small turtle because it knows how to hide.

If we see each other at the border, don’t say anything.

War can’t explain daylight.

It’s your right not to watch.

It’s more difficult to play dead than you think.

Tell the children they’re statues but can’t sculpt their own until the game is over, until they return to school.

Tell tomorrow you’re not as selfish as yesterday.   

Protect the unrolled parchment from incendiary material.

Things here don’t hurt so much.

Grief is a different color, and sadness doesn’t own a house.

Strangely, one arranges another.

I raised my hand to ask questions, but everyone left for happy hour, somewhere less confusing.

I’ve forgotten how to spell.

No one will find me with autocorrect.

The field of dandelions is clover—the lover, over.

Events take place in ellipses.

The afterlife smells like ghosts, an echo in syntax’s wire cage.

The ghosts advise, go slow down the corridor, climb over your missing feet.

The day job had the subject scathed, losing stage.

Here you don’t need your stolen teeth, a lucky rabbit’s foot, all that trigonometry.

There were kinetic misunderstandings—a fallout of composure.

You should have changed the batteries in the fire alarms.

Someone more qualified will complete the laborious paper chain.

There will be semantic delay.

Plato, what did Socrates say?

Hemlock was his choice.

We’re going somewhere—trains with no passengers.

The breathtaking panoramic scenery—volumes of photos no one prints or saves.

At the next stop someone might say something like Bedouins read stones, pitched stairs escalate, or the mannequins split our dreams.

Leading a camel to water doesn’t make anyone noble.

Even if we sing in languages we can’t comprehend.

At the next stop I might feel like going home.

At the next house, I may mean everything I don’t remember.

1 dancer [hazel]

I slept in the Book of the Dead and woke with parchment scrolls blooming tired magnolias from my unhinged mouth.

Lugubrious cellos attempted to climb me back to the mud-encrusted, brick floor–but I panicked.

When my thinking can trace some semblance of surface, I might explain.

Some will pigeonhole verbose.

If I erase, the Dreams of the Dead multiply.

I wanted to go there but I can’t remember—to be with someone lost in the field of wildflowers—that disappeared when I touched a memory that confused the horizon.

The address of the doctor who promised not to cure me but to hide the symptoms—humanize me—was on a paper I lost when I tried to shuffle the lost bits in order, remove the jokers from the deck—forecast the future with stones.

There was a discombobulation of format—the margins ate what I was trying to explain—those hours that blurred the green of early summer.  

I didn’t mean to ruin your parade of secrets by dislocating the afternoon, burying your toy soldiers in dust after you shrouded each in a beautiful sentence.

I couldn’t remember—the name of the song I wanted to hear on the radio while I drove chasing dusk beyond the tallest pines, rotting barns, and small houses.

Because my brain couldn’t connect the dots it used to—and the notes fell off the page before reaching my mouth, weakened from not speaking—I hinged twilight with a paper bag of confetti, jilted syllables.

My hands cracked even after the singing that couldn’t will away the poison I touched while cutting down the pink and magenta peonies I was to bring someone like you—that wilted in the car while I grocery shopped for silence.

I spotted you in the shadows of your poem—and the day before with your flashlight at night between stanzas—trying to illuminate past the bookends of Sunday to Saturday.

I couldn’t say you were afraid with certainty—with the clarity of one walking to an altar built of believed promises.

The movie I was making to excise unpleasant emotions, offer catharsis—eluded.

It was supposed to be in the far distance of old black and white movies and photographs—but kept jumping into color.

Shades of red—fallen rose petals that filled the screen with silk, the cardinal dead in my hand that bled red even after burial, my misplaced, surfacing exasperation–orange embers that burned past February.

Resilient stigmas imbued the purple of bruises, small violets that grew into dark irises, fading into blunted fuchsia.

I wanted to tell you—we could exchange shoes, hats, faces—in the film of forgetting—for a day, maybe a week—that the disappearance didn’t have to hurt so much—that we’ll float this time instead of drown.

There was a melody that punctuated the soundtrack—what we used to want against dominos falling with civilization’s house of cards—the first thought on the breath defined by dreaming.

Thoughts were tangled in my hair I was afraid to wash—that I would lose myself in a painful refrain; the humbling—an avalanche—beyond any first responders.

It’s been so long without a pen or keyboard—my fingers have gone idle with something like melancholy.

I was meaning to write an explication of the days of invisibility—how I stayed up to save myself from falling.

Nauseated from caffeine, I walked a mile just as the birds began singing to usher daylight—to the blind widow’s house to read her love sonnets—but she didn’t recognize my voice and wouldn’t open the door.

I was on my way somewhere else—somewhere I can’t remember—to join a crowd of bystanders, to blend in and not be the subject anymore—

because some meanings were self-fabricated, embroidered (in) syntax—differential, at best—and it looked like rain.