Evidence…
The remains of coelophysis were found in groups. Some say
they were flocking. Others postulated that the dinosaurs gathered
together at ghost ranch to feed and drink and were struck
by a natural disaster, a flash flood, pernicious drought.
We feel some sense of kinship with the theropod that thrived
in the latter part of the triassic period. We imagine that its remains
dust the land on which we gather, the place we wait for the next
disaster, the place in which disaster has found us.
You make a costume of sticks and leaves and initiate
the hunt. Your simulated dinosaur stalking another
reminds us of our own evolution and extinction.
Long periods of starvation have changed
our physiology. We are almost hollow
boned.
He filled the space between violence, what came after. In absence, in presence, a sensation of breaking loose, of crumbling earth, of nothing. Trying to find the umbilicus, of loneliness, of this relentless striving for. In the suspension of sky and limbs. A whole world caught in-between.
It is harder to discern the seasons, but the earth still tilts off its orbital plane. We know winter as the time Aki’s scars are less visible. To buttress the cold, we wrap ourselves in the skins of dinosaurs.
Every death is an offering. Our own decomposing bodies could produce organically rich soil, increase the population of nematode worms, engender new plant forms. Our extinction, you say, may be Aki’s only hope.
For now, we practice an ancient art: we share. There are so few of us. Despite the catastrophes, there is more than enough.
Lumbering through another trial, the heat and alcohol, stuporous dusk. She lay down and he bent to unlace her calves, thighs, the warmth between. The light was gauzy, a film covering every orifice. She licked his palm, the arch of his foot, his animal. The moon loomed, pregnant, in exile. Every trial, its intimacy.
We no longer hear the earth groan with each facture, every bit of the drill.
But there, deep in the marrow of our bones, we can still feel the schism, the sick break of things.
A generous host, the earth has split and bled. Empty, almost barren, Aki never says a word.
In the winter, protests made the violence more visible. Blood splattered across the bright ignorance of snow. Then violence made the protests more visible. The blood was the same hue.
Catastrophe is janus, the two-faced god. Some days it brings kinship, the parting of the tent flap, an embodied experiment. Sometimes it has us gathering in the field in two lines across from each other shouting expletives.
Someone proposes a new way of resolving conflict. It has taken awhile to adopt it. But after a firestorm that takes three members of our camp, we gather together in the same field and begin to remove our clothes. One by one, we walk naked toward another until our flesh touches. Pressed against each other’s skin, we wait until the heat spreads through our loins. Whatever gender, we mate like this, standing up, our genitalia entangled, the wet slippage of.
Over time, one story stacked on top of the other. One person buttressing the next. She pouted her lips, gestured in the dark. He gave himself over more easily. They developed a language, guttural, echoing hundreds of years. How else to sound such wounded coupling.
Some would say we live post life as if a ghosting of. But we still taste blood
on our lips, still feel the crippling longing for.
We are as real as any manifestation of the perpetual present tense. Our dreams are sensorial. Cloaked in darkness we rummage through our bodies until something settles into place. An elbow or breast. The declension of a belly unfed.
Some nights we stuff our ears so we can’t hear the calls. Switch, you say. You have warned us not to monogamate. But we are soothed by these attachments. The habit, its echo, rests deep in our bones.
At night his feet froze. Her hands clenched the book, freezing language what had been recorded of past and future. Without children, they had nothing to beget but their own awakening. In the shadow of daylight, meaning night. They had learned not to say the word. My uvula is a weather vane, she said. But her voice was muted, her uterus barren. The tribulations kept them watchful, acute witnesses. There, he said, pointing to the shadows, the furred humps of buffalo, a horizon.
There is a new language forming in the recesses of our imagination, a language in which there are no words for atmosphere, for myelin sheaths. You worry about the loss of regenerative narratives but we are shedding more quickly than anything can be replaced. Touch me here, you say. Our fingers slip into the milky substance between your legs. No longer in estrus, you are mimicking a planetary implosion, the vortex through which we obliterate ourselves. But that is the old language. Touch me, you say, opening your legs. Against the backdrop of your dusky skin bursts forth a kaleidoscope of stars
The trials enlarged the circumference of ownership, spreading smallpox across the horizon of continent, sores puck- ering the fore- skin. Some said they started innocuously enough. A few subjects. Some articles. The mediums of exchange. But the prepositions marked territories, defined the spaces in between. It distressed her, all those mine and not yours. The forgiveness required for those with the longest reach.