Mercy

“We had a mind to party, but not no Donner party.” — Unknown 

I never scrubbed that sound from inside my head. That muted eternal shriek. It weren’t anything, really, just a noise that followed us 'cross the salt flats and then the desert into the Cascades, though we heard it every goddamned revolution, each time the axle turned. We tried to plane the wood at night, slice away them nicks and burrs. Nothing worked. Felt like the admonishment of the land itself, crying, wheedling, greeting, long before it had a mind for uprise or defeat. It hollered its plea in earth time not man time. 

Oh woman, you barely have a voice. You cook and you mend our boots and you lie awake nights wishing the very stars would align, like pragmatists. You urge the world to settlements, you mediate. Within this burning valley, and most places yet, you are the best of us.

Dry bone shacks and half collected cairns. Sterile cries across such barren miles. These lands are jawbones aching with carious teeth, sung to by ragtag coyote choirs. Ridgetops bristling. Stout moon rising yellow as infection.

The West, the offhand West, its fragile trickles covert, generous of light though skinflint with drink. No pass unimpeded, no voice left to speak, no dry throat slaked. 

***

“Our house is on fire,” the air whispers.

Chafed and stunned to deadpan, I walked for a day or so and only two vehicles passed. What is this?

The sky is brown umber, the sparsity of trees silhouetted conifers. 

I walk so I can get away from the thing that happened. It was abhorrent. I am only one small girl with a queerly knotted gut in a wheeling galaxy. 

One of the vehicles was a worker bee, some kid on a scooter. He slowed and almost stopped and when I yelled for him to talk to me he spooked like a deer electric and whined his way past. The other was a pickup with a bed full of women and men. The faces of the women in particular told me stories. The men could barely manage a glance. I turned my back.

But where did the world go? Did I flinch and miss it? Feels like just yesterday I was listening to Lana sing about the perils of hope and about Kanye and Plath and how we had it all.

What happened to jasmine and juniper? To the heady riot of spring? To the dance of honeybees and butterflies and the twilit helix gyre of bats? Fireflies and the backdrop trill of cicadas?

How do we measure from span to everloving span, the unutterable link between worlds?

The sky is old blood and stinks the same. 

Our house is on fire. 

I’m here at the cool rusted railing of the bridge. No idea what waits unflappable below, but tell me exactly why I shouldn’t climb over. 

Mediterranean Avenue

© Mike Osborne

Here in America, I'm shivering under the red light on Mediterranean Avenue. I'm waiting for my friend, and she's late. A constant rain fell this evening, which has only recently eased, and the road is slick, reflecting neon.

The deepening blue of a darkening sky and the off-kilter red lights smear on the asphalt in gentle tones of muted fuchsia and chambray, daubed with sporadic yellow and white. Yellow hydrant and the X-ray backdrops of winter trees. I might believe it a painting if it weren't for the water dripping from my umbrella down the back of my neck.

It's a place that absorbs all sound. A place where quiet storms rage.

"FML" by Kanye West is playing somewhere in the world or inside my head.

Somewhere looking to flood. Somewhere looking to scare you, with its ghosts of vehicles, its human absence.

I'm animal. I self-haunt. I sing to you, I'm hoarse, I don't understand my loss, I see a miniature horse on a fence line, happy, beside a solar panel.

Something big came through but we never even saw it.

Lantern Souls of the Lake

You push the paper lanterns out into the lake, and the moon is shamed by their glow.

We do this in memory of someone, I forget who.

"How many men have you loved? Women too."

You are beautiful, born haunted, dropped into a dream of need, warmed by a lakeside sun, seeded on a trail that was gouged from the earth by a demon raping an angel. Rutted and gutted, encumbered and incubated. Or was it the other way round?

First time I saw you, your mouth rimmed with powdered sugar, I had to laugh. Laughing was hardly my default then, is less so now. You wet-fingered the sweet dust and sucked on it, like someone on a cocaine binge, and your Romany eyes danced like cryptic bordello tales stashed beneath the darkest of thoroughfares for later telling. Erotic. Driven. Most likely lost.

No one saw anything. They never did. Everything passed in the margins, whispered only by migrants in drab fields and passed via honking bird flights over waterless barrens into the icetails of comets plunging into the sun or whipped into the outer clouds of a shattered and dying system.

That was when we both stood naked and peeling before a torrid star, cancerous and boundless, tempting the planet to brush our blighted haunches while the ground splintered into cryptic droughtland and the clouds went AWOL for good.

Absence and loss and enticement. Tails and tales.

Remember that plate of eggs, sunnyside up, those sizzling strips of bacon, the dark, steaming coffee, and hot buttered toast? Our server was Naomi. She was pretty, like arroyos and dreamcatchers are pretty. The scorpions held back, laden and shadowed, dark arthritic limbs poised with toxins. The desert turned the blindest of eyes. A kitchen radio played a rebel song about secret fires, and a couple in an adjacent booth argued about Taylor Swift and Kanye, while a busload of Asian tourists stopped on the highway to witness Navajo coyotes yowl an alien dirge, ghost dance a potlatch, curb-stomp all dubious history. 

My god, we were happy and didn't have one single motherfucking clue. 

There were furrows we plowed and beaches we combed—true pacific stories of desolation and faith—all along that bright coastline and inland, through the tall wide conifers, climbing deadfalls, dragging palsied legs across molten prairies liquid with deer, waiting in birdless, threat-drenched silence for tsunamis or tremors, half-hoping our antic virgin ambitions would be derailed by the routine cataclysms of our unruly, blessed planet.

"Hundreds," you say.

And I blink, lost.

"Lovers. You asked how many lovers."

"Right, I think I did." I want to ask more, yet I want to ask less.

"The lanterns look like souls. Waiting to be assigned a place."

"They don't even know they can just go choose a place."

"Yeah. Yes."

Vehicles rush by, not far for the crow, yet way below this grassy crest. In each one a drama plays out, even if it's the slow red cellophane draw on a trucker's cigarette or a wayward nun's nylon-clad foot pecking an R&B beat while the dot-dash lines come and go—morse, remorse, despair, and hope—and tragicomedies begin with the smallest trickle of tiny stones atop a slope.

You watch me carefully, and I try to shrug you off, shrug everything off.

My god. Goddess. Pierce my chest with sharpest bone and lean me back under the merciless heat until I tear.

Billboards about Jesus and corn and abortions pass rapid to our right, like maledictions. Cursed and unnerving and joyless as Judas's empty sunless pockets.

Almost there now. You won't stop watching me. "Give me your damn hand."

Okay. I submit. I submit. Goddamn me to hell and worse, I fucking submit. And as soon as I do, the dripping, segmented limbs of a vast and terrible horror clamber ungainly over the black horizon, and our hopeless, maladroit screams ring out like the most graceless of bitter music. Fallen. Condemned.