White Nightgown. Megan Gannon

See, a doorknob

      drifts down, and one by one the hundreds

      of china cups upright

      for how far, falling. Hours,

      now everyone moves

      gracefully; now we have some place

      to put our dead. How many

      pressures their bodies get used to,

      the slender necks

      of bottles, emerald, intact.

      Without air, they hardly know

      how wetly they’re under us,

      how the verdigrised currents

      churn sediment, cracking

      watch-faces and tugging laces

      loose. In the dream-

      coursing that clogs ears,

      the greeny-grey where

      metal drips and ball-gowns

      bloom, whatever wounds

      they’ve acquired washed

      white, skin-flaps

      sealed like fishy lips.

      Selenographia

      Some of you is lodged,

      must be,

      somewhere between the sea

      of serenity, or the lake of sleep,

      or the marsh of sleep, or the sea.

      Particles of solar wind, caught,

      some whisker of skin fishings,

      I don’t know.

      I hope not

      the sea of cold.

      There was so little of you,

      barely enough for the buried

      crystalline drops we know now

      are there, hardly

      an ocean of storms.

      Honestly,

      I know there’s an eye

      brightening even when its full

      waning’s waned,

      albedo of coal,

      light of ice,

      but I can’t feel it.

      Fingers caught in the classroom

      door’s heavy hinge, how your sound

      tore through me,

      knocking loose some stray ovum,

      sea of crises, sea of fecundity,

      risen and hovering,

      not every sound keeps traveling,

      some stay, like stoned gall,

      bay of seething, straight through

      to the bay of the center.

      When that shriek descended

      to the newly kaleidoscoped car,

      many-faceted geodesic dome that propelled you

      somewhere,

      sea of rains, sea of vapors,

      I was no known sea.

      How the word

      for indigo churning with its back to us means

      noting all along at a certain distance.

      Now complex eye.

      Up there, the air’s so thin

      it can’t be mimicked, even in our best vacuum.

      Down here, it’s the weight of two boots

      on my sternum. Must you

      keep orbiting at this

      mean distance?

      What doesn’t descend,

      shouldn’t. If I hadn’t heard

      even some of the words, you wouldn’t.

      _______ you _______ Kyle?

      He was ________ in a car ________.

      I won’t accept this moon illusion—

      a thing’s not bigger riding the horizon.

      There’s only so long I’ll let these

      high tides pull.

      Are you there, Kyle?

      He was singing in a cartoon.

      You have fourteen days

      before lunar night turns to lunar noon.

      Have you heard, Kyle?

      He was hardly in a car ever.

      I’m still ringing through loose strata.

      Laika needs a lullaby and you

      used to pet my dog’s soft ears.

      Shade

      Fingernails under wallpaper

      scratching sound like palpable

      air, scatter-pattern of hands

      behind your headboard, the face

      you’re sure—a third floor

      window, the peripheral whisked

      looking in—what don’t you

      believe? A boy the color

      of a lightbulb cowering

      in the corner of an old

      hotel or rounding a wind-licked

      house in full flee. Not eyes,

      not corpuscles or corpses. The stain

      of shape. The sand-scrubbed

      rubbed-thin trace of veinery

      pressed into stone. A violence

      so shattering, his body not bulwark

      or ballast enough, the spirit

      jerks loose and imprints itself,

      releasing his huddled, focused fear

      like dust from a hung rug.

      Skin icing over nerve, you want

      to believe feeling evaporates, leaves

      nothing, not even

      a wet mark. Emotion a scrim

      like early morning mist or just morning

      touching bodies in their beds.

      The Dead, Dreaming

      In this half-gleam

      we don’t

      sleep, but glisten

      continuously.

      Where the light

      might

      —we catch, sheet

      lifted and bit

      in the pin.

      Does it concern you, this

      being of one body?

      Consider

      hair, how much of it

      is wind, how the wind

      tatters