Cover

Some things move in and dig down

whether you want them to or not.

Like pieces of small glass your body subsumes when you are young . . .

— CHARLES WRIGHT

Unearthly Delights

After you rip through the screen

and wedge yourself into Father’s bedroom,

you find a pile of art supply catalogs,

brown scraps of bedspread,

cotton batting, a rodent body, rodent turds,

and tiny white naked human creatures

flipped topsy-turvy to skewer

down the ass and out the mouth

in the primordial ooze that is manifestly

the brimstone and bile of this book left open

to Bosch’s realm beneath the left hand of God,

my foxed legacy of human bonfire.

•••

Object Lessons

From Chevalier Quixote Jackson

What might happen to the collection if we let narrative and desire back in?

MARY CAPPELLO

To answer a wish to possess:

tuck a chess piece into a cheek.

To meet a hunger not to share:

swallow a kewpie doll whole.

To recall the rubber of a nipple:

suck on a pencil eraser.

Safe-keep sincere assemblage

by stowing in a ribcage. Yes,

now I lay my

two pressed pennies

down to constant tissue.

•

Like Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson,

nineteenth-century laryngologist who

removed from tiny upper bodies

an involved collection of objects

—nails and bolts, radiator key,

a child’s perfect attendance pin,

a Carry-Me-For-Luck medallion—

to lay into trays of cotton, yes,

like him, each child had hoarded some thing

in her inmost chest.

•

Yes, because children crawl on the treacherous floor,

Chevalier, if I may,

removed then preserved every last one

along with stunning x-rays of needles

lodged in a small patient’s lung. Also

a charm in the shape of a hound. Perhaps

the hound who rescued him in childhood.

Perhaps a jar of charms that won’t leave go one’s origin.

(Perhaps my pooch who calms my errant heartbeats down.)

•

Origins: crime or act of preservation:

Saturn devoured his children

to save his own skin from divine betrayal.

Snow White’s stepmother devoured

the girl’s lung and liver—or so she believed.

My youngest, after Mother died, figured,

Grandma now lives inside my tummy

with dog and bird and fishy.

•

According to one biographer: at one point other children blindfolded Jackson and threw him into a coal pit, and he was rescued only after some mutt happened to find him unconscious.

•

In my cigar box, a swallow

nest of pine

lined with feathers, bits of birch bark, and trash

for comfort can coincide with comforting;

from the shred of blankie inside her purse to

his rabbit-foot keychain

to the hair she plucks and swallows

in a cycle of self-harm called Rapunzel.

Chevalier archived them in shallow drawers

according to their kind.

•