from Startles

Startles

The land of magical thinking forsakes thought for desire, a flatter sense. Days I want to think I drive the car; only at construction sites can you see the road’s peeled skin, mud and pipes. As a child, I had a clear plastic doll filled with colorful plastic organs. I could take her apart and put her back, admire her pink intestines, her gray lungs. Like a jar of pickles, she seemed immortal, though they both got misplaced in the end.

The inside that is outside lacks air. The outside that is inside escapes the brine, the bitterness. It’s all compromise, but we’ve forgotten how. The diagrams on fliers apply to other procedures. The joke begins when a literature professor walks into a room where engineering diagrams have been written on the chalkboard.

Whatever the process is, she follows it. An IKEA bed frame instructs you on your grief. There must be five stages to both, though only one is clear cut. Instructions on how to meditate offer us paradox. Images of screws and wooden slats take wing, then fade out.

The diagram is a recipe and a dream. The recipe appears stable until you follow it. The dream revels in its precarity until you wake up. The bed is sturdy, though you’ll forget it unless you put your memories in a jar, hide them on a shelf somewhere. I write to close my jars and read to open them.

There’s an engine of return to the poem, more form than format. Double space your way back to the doll’s transparent skin, her plastic bones, and see if you can’t imagine her alive. An older sister to your childhood. No matter that your mentor was plastic. She hid nothing from you.