A SONG / A WHILE

           
They wanted a certain kind of adventure, but they did not get it. The adventure that they wanted was a ship that set sail from their hometown, going from place to place, bringing with it a kind of being alive that just doesn't hold. I'm sorry it doesn't hold but sorries don't make a does. Instead they got a big dark wood dotted with campfires, one of them at each, maybe two if they were very lucky.
     One of them got a bean bag heart. One of them put her arm out the car window and waggled her fingers in the wind. One of them went into the ground and then came out again and wandered home and the joke was he was dead and it was funny because he was dead. One of them fought fires, actually and without magic. One of them ate a whole cargo van in pieces and finally felt good. One of them swam with the dolphins, once. One of them stayed home and was sad. One of them grew small animals in the hollow of her chest and let them go, saying Goodbye, goodbye, I'll eat you if I see you again, goodbye. One of them was a wanderer and a nervous something and a drunk and a fuck boy and a soft boy and a man and an and and an and and an and one of them was me. 

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A POLLEN / A POEM

The baby got born wrong. No one cared to say it to the mother. After all she'd been through, we felt she deserved to see the baby her way, tell the baby's story as hers. The pain faded, the baby thrived, the world took little notice of another creature, strange though it was.
     When the doctor said the baby was healthy and that they could leave, the father winced. He thought of his wife, that night he found her on the rocky shore of the lake, her soaking wet and shivering. Before then he'd always thought of unclothed bodies as naked, a word that told it like it was some pedestrian and idiot way to be. She taught him better with her body, the completedness of it in moonlight.
     The horns were velvety nubs on each side of the baby's forehead. They weren't a danger. At nap time, the baby would reach up and hold them, a faint smile on its lips. The father watched the baby often while it slept. He didn't know what he expected to see. Something of him. Something for loving right.
     The baby grew, and it grew.
     Once, the baby yawned and a bee drifted from its mouth, tracing lazy arcs through what was the father's office. The father was there to see it. He watched with dread as the bee jounced along the wall. It was silent as it went and slowing. The father was anticipating something but didn't know what. The bee settled onto the changing table, splayed its legs, and died.
     The baby began to cry. The baby clutched its horns and would not stop crying. The piercing staccato of that. What it is to be this kind of alive, when the bee first leaves you by its bumbling.

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A BOY / A BLOOM

He showed it first to another boy at school—sprouting from the crease in his palm, a little leaf, a three-petaled flower. Of course the other boy tried to pluck it. After all just a boy. He snatched himself away, cradling the bloom like you might a flame in the wind.
     He kept it hidden at home, the way little boys of his age start to keep secrets. Locked doors and huffing descended on the household, hugs slid out from under and the twisting embarrassment for the fact of having a mother. A life is unique every time it happens. This much he was sure of.
     The way of a secret is to grow, so it was only some weeks before there was no hiding it. The bloom snaked around his forearm and burst open at the elbow, a many-petaled chrysanthemumming starburst of a blossom.
     What else: they tried to kill him. They pinned him to the floor and pummeled his kidneys. They knocked him to the ground in the halls and shin-kicked him under lunch tables. They armlocked him and dug into the skin at the root and tried to pull the plant out by its fleshy plug, but it wouldn't come. It had grown up and in. It felt to the boy like they were pulling on a wire connected to the deepest parts of him. It felt awful. He doubled over as they pulled, puppeteered.
     He was taken out of school. The isolation made his difference bigger. He cried alone in his room while the vine of himself wrapped up his arm, thick with leaves now, become tougher now, become fibrous, pliant, woodish.
     You cannot hide a boy, a body, forever. A body is always pointed toward the world. They found him and chased him through the suburbs, and as he was running from them his sprout snagged on a wrought-iron fence, wheeling him around and toppling him. He cracked his head on the brickwork. The boys ran off. The blood pooled, a blood that slicked and spread, that kept coming, that was nothing magic, that didn't even have the decency to mean something.

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These pieces are part of a chapbook I wrote all in a rush this summer while the town I lived in was near to burning down from a forest fire. Everything seemed to be at an ending, and I was there too, breathing in the woodsmoke and panic. I hadn't written anything at all in a year, but I walked to the only coffee shop in town every morning at dawn and found out there was all this stuff I suddenly knew how to say. Sometimes being alive makes no sense at all.