How things come to be

It starts with two, as it always does, who decide on a whim to get married without so much as informing their families. Their future oldest will later become increasingly suspicious the deed was done largely to secure fellowship money to travel the world. In Boston, still young, they almost begin to combine their genetic material with the intention of making humans who have never before existed and who would never exist again. They decide to wait, which certainly results in a wholly altered set of humans entering the world at a later date in time, possibly, not probably, but not impossible either, changing the course of the world.

These humans do come. Three of them, one lanky, one crazy, one charming. All three of these humans, like most humans, will have a healthy appetite for the lurid, and would admit to as much if pressed. All three are more discerning than the average human, but put this ability to use for very different purposes. The lanky and charming ones, when they reach the appropriate age, follow their parents in acquainting themselves with a two person worldview they build themselves, in pairs. The crazy one flits through passions, each as sincere as the last, always convicted but never confident.

The children's friends and lovers are people who were proximate for long enough to become fixtures, made permanent and treasured by the persistence of passing time. The crazy one once saw this for what it was and acquired a habit of pointing it out, sometimes uncomfortably, always too often, to those close to her, with mixed results.

The parents of these humans aged as humans do, becoming at once powerful and irrelevant; wise and out-of-touch.

The crazy one, in fits of lucid wisdom, sees this and life for what it is and understands the meaning seeping from the stated fact "the brain called itself the brain." But most of the time is merely crazy, driven like a golf cart by emotion and desire, flying airborne over obstacles and grinding the motor in ill-chosen gears.

Brianna

Her mother made her at fifteen,
too young to make new things,
she herself unfinished. Now
the thing she made's eleven,
crouched down, mad-haired,
wheezing like a punctured
toy accordion. (Her inhaler's
out.) Mother's come undone,
or so she hears in other words
from the closet where she's hiding,
crowded in by clothes her grandma
wears to go work at the bar.
Her mother doesn't know she's here
Brianna hears the words herself
I tried to kill myself
and this spectre of her mother
(who she thinks she's another
copy of) has her tied up,
cried up, locked up lighting
matches in the bathroom
just to watch them burn. Go out.
She's wound up an' hissin'
'cause the bus kids
say she psycho,
say her ma
got mennal issues.
Say she jus' the same.

6th Period

I have a long and lengthening list
of thing that do concern me:
the chaos of my notebook, stuffed
with slips of papers snatched from
students hands, etched with pools
of blood drawn in pink ink.
Stacks of papers, broken arms,
blue ink smeared on fleshy tongue.
Scabs. Spilled milk. Green beans up nose holes.
These things don't weigh on me but rather tug,
grabbing what's rough and not yet hewn.
While students age eleven multiply
by twelve on sheets made vast by numbers,
I hide at the window to verify the world
outside exists. The evidence is rising
in an L-shaped foundation and skeletal
frame of a building. It's stagnant and huddled,
in line for a meal at the Goodwill. It's legless
and begging for money. Beside the calloused court
behind our school two lego men in cartoon garments
pass spaghetti hosing towards a rusting tank
inscribed "PROPANE." No fuel, perhaps that's why
the school is cool today, the radiators idling
dormant. Amid the silence of pencils on paper
I'm snatched by fear and fear of fragility
and see the students and I, the desks and the chairs
launch skyward in fiery propulsion. We don't.
We wait, we multiply and pump propane,
shake cold cups of unclean coins,
spill blood in cities wrought in rust.

More Than I

It was an accidental graze, not engineered;
I hadn’t seen his face, nor he mine,
when arm met shoulder. He turned to speak
and seeing he was prepossessing,
more than I, I (faltering)
remembered that it always is a game. So I
played, spoke sumptuous words,
the sort you can only exchange
if you’ve lived and learned in places
with opulent names such as Blake and
Edina. I halved my attention
between what I said and how I said it
(which has mostly to do with a delicate
awareness of one's lips).
He bought for me a glass of wine
to see how I held something fragile.
I wished to tell him why I came here
(to watching buildings rise into air).
He didn't ask. I loudly laughed
at things I heard in half and together
we gestured wildly at what we ourselves
were apart of, picking who’d go home with whom
tonight. We spoke of three-tiered value
in translation innovation (business,
conflict, and intangibles)
and the plague of being a white girl
in the world at large. I left
with my numbers, all nine,
still mine, for I wanted our words
to hang overhead as he fucked
a girl more beautiful than I.

Brianna

They tell me she's a dreamer, adopted at age six by the
Dreamers of Newark, New Jersey. And she's in the clouds, it's clear:
dazed and gazing the days away til she turns twelve. They tell me
school's not been the most important issue in her life:
"social/emotional concerns have taken precedence," they write.
When I meet her she cries and clutches a cheap plastic album
of her and her father who died. I, the godless, pray he wasn't shot.

I find her science test and rip away page two:

7. Imagine a world where there was no acceleration.
Explain one problem you'd have, it asks.

Find the way to get into space or believe in god
and tell him to make the world change please, she answers.

She tells me this Halloween they handed out bullets instead of candy.
They tell me her haze is a Sertraline dream, one of ten million
prescribed. She tells me she don't be doing that no more, that crazy stuff,
'cause she be goin' to special ed this time. They tell me to check never,
sometimes; often, everyday on a form that never ends. I check and check and check.
I tell her look at me, at me, at me so I can tell her that I care and she
can see. She tells me that she's crazy and she's just like her mother,
pants down, outside, pregnant. I tell her look at me. I tell her that she's not.

I look for god and pray for math and reading to make the change he hasn't yet.

Scraps

The headlights of a passing truck carves exalted motion in
the stillness of the heavy fog, carving stolid beams
in spacious swirls. Buildings vanish in the vapor
swallowed whole by sea of sky. Eye contact this time of day
is solemn, calm and soaked in understanding: the sense or
senselessness of six a.m; the fullness of forlornness.