8
I know we are in trouble
when you move your electronics
into the guest room
and start sleeping in that bed.
When I find the dark sock
you ejaculate into
tucked under a pillow sham.
When you leave every drawer
you touch ajar in the morning,
every cabinet door open,
not because you don’t want
to wake me with their closing
but because you don’t want me
to wake up and demand
your attention. In therapy,
you talk about boundaries,
your need to maintain them.
The therapist asks you why
you feel this way. I also want
to ask why, but for now I lie
in my bed each morning,
pretending to sleep in,
until I sense you’ve eased
the back door shut behind you.
—
9
For a long time I made up landscapes
because I didn’t know how to talk
about real ones—the red dirt
that stained my swimsuit
when I swam with water moccasins
in Lake Texoma, which wasn’t
even a real lake but one made
by and for men who wanted to fish
for fun, wanted to piss in the water,
to fall overboard in their work pants
and the cotton shirts that skimmed
their chests, which were flat, since
they spent their time behind desks,
not in the fields where their fathers
darkened in the sun each day
and at night revealed their light
foreheads, the bright skin hidden
by their sleeves. It was a privilege
to see that skin, fragile and untouched,
like snow-covered ground after
the season’s first snow. For a long time,
I made up landscapes because I wanted
to live inside them and to shout
from their hills and lakes that we
were in danger. Now I want to speak
from the Blue Mountains and the Columbia,
from sagebrush and western rattlesnake.
From silt and sediment and seed
and fruit, from scabland and butte.
I want to say that we are all in danger—
and that we are the danger. I want to be
a plane dragging a banner, a message.
—
10
At the border, the VACIS gamma-ray
machine has taken an image
of a truck carrying two stowaways,
along with a shipment of Styrofoam
trays, as it makes its way from
Canada into the United States.
Through the truck’s walls, the trays
appear as dark squares, almost
like dry-stacked bricks. The person
on the left stands, revealing a body
with sloped shoulders, which tapers
from its thickest point down
to ankles that disappear into the slats
which make up the truck’s floor.
The body on the right crouches,
knees pulled to chin, in meditation
or fear, or perhaps in boredom.
In the heat, probably. Or in the cold.
In the dark. Their shadows remind me
of thermal radiation, the snapshots
captured of victims in Hiroshima.
But of course this is not then or there.
This is here. This is the border.
Motherless, my own instinct
to protect kicks in. I want these
shadows to have privacy, to escape.
And since we’re being honest
about love and cruelty, I will
tell you that I want these two
to succeed, whoever they are—
the one standing and the one
crouching. I want, especially,
to check in on the one crouching.
That body is too thin and frail.
That body looks scared, a position
I know well. But most of all, I want
walls to be walls again. I want
curtains to be curtains and shrouds
shrouds. I do not want the vision
of a thousand scientists and technicians
that allows me to see into what is solid
so I can catalog the faces of the dead.
—
20
We need to update the stories
of coyote and hare. Neither outsmarts
the other because both are dead,
riddled with tumors, skin and muscle
coming away by the handful,
each body turned against itself
rather than toward annihilation
or evasion. We need to move
Adam and Eve from Eden
to the Gamma Garden, where atomic
seeds spill to Earth and Eve’s
apple has amazing properties
conferred by radiation breeding.
We need to make that apple larger
and crispier, with a longer shelf life,
more sugars and more seeds,
maybe even conjoin two apples
in one fruit for fleshier specimens,
since flesh is where delight lies
and since we’re on the cusp of being
able to do just about anything.
—
23
I knew we were in trouble
long before I knew you,
when as a child I learned
of the white trains moving
across the country like ghosts.
I knew when I hid under a table
as my father talked about Russian
bombs and how the next world war
was coming any day. Somewhere
inside as I practiced my emergency
drill position I knew, knew already—
long before you were an activist
tapping on military jets in the name
of peace—that the war had already
come, silent like fog. Had moved in
and staked claim, settled into our water,
our dirt, been taken up in our food
and our bodies, encroached on
the animals we sometimes professed
to care for—whose destiny we
sometimes admitted was entwined
with our own. I knew there would
one day be walls that would offer
no privacy, that no concrete
could stop what was coming,
that no matter what we did
or did not do, we would be
nothing more than protesters
on the tracks, our legs severed
as the white train came and went
in the sheer quiet, leaving a legacy
not one of us knows how to live
with or beyond. Slowly we are
turning the entire planet, every
living thing, to frass. I’ve known
this for years because the devil
himself held me in his arms, pressed
his tail against my thigh and told me.
—
These sections of Love and Cruelty first appeared in Wicked Alice.
Love and Cruelty is forthcoming from Meat 4 Tea.
Dana Henry Martin 