Zero-Order
BY KRISTIN KOSTICK
One way you came back was through a steamy vapor
when the shuttle doors opened, skin smelling of moon rocks,
solar wind, zero gravity. Another way was on horseback
galloping through some meadow, a cup of tea balanced
flawlessly on your knee. You were speaking Old English. Or French.
When I closed my eyes, we were riding on the backs of jaguars
through savannas in the moonlight, the word moonlight
falling from the sky in sparkling fragments. You came back
another time carrying sea turtles, your arms slicked with oil,
carrying brown pelicans, all dead. When I open my eyes,
you are in Vietnam and I can’t see you because you are either
shell-shocked, covered in banana leaves, or already dead.
Generally speaking, you are neither
dead nor alive, depending on which branch an African giraffe
yanks from the tree tomorrow evening at dusk. If a crazy man
in the Little Rock Inpatient Mental Health Facility throws a fistful of macaroni
at his doctor and the doctor signals the guards and the guards
swiftly pin him to the cafeteria table and he is taken into
a confined room to think, I most certainly
will never see you again. You will be gone for good.
I will end up stumbling at midnight through a canyon in San Diego. I will find
blood on my shirt that I cannot explain, no trace of you,
of us ever existing and I will probably also
be knee-deep in quicksand, bugs swarming, a bad song stuck in my head.
If neither of us smoked or if I had brought cigarettes that night instead of bumming from strangers
and we never met, it would be me and not you going to the moon,
to England, wherever it is that you go. Yesterday at the hospital
I understood my grandmother’s confused expression, weeping in the hospital cot,
staring at her catheter. I try to make sense of you, the way it finally made sense
why priests drink, why slugs foam up, why most churches have done away with
confessional booths. In 1962, you will recall, someone at a truck stop
called your mother a slut and this changed things forever.
Her skirts grew shorter. You would not
even be here. You would not be coming back, would not have yet gone.
This time you would stay, immobile, you would be a word plucked from a mouth,
belonging to no language, attached to no thought.
One way you came back was through a steamy vapor
when the shuttle doors opened, skin smelling of moon rocks,
solar wind, zero gravity. Another way was on horseback
galloping through some meadow, a cup of tea balanced
flawlessly on your knee. You were speaking Old English. Or French.
When I closed my eyes, we were riding on the backs of jaguars
through savannas in the moonlight, the word moonlight
falling from the sky in sparkling fragments. You came back
another time carrying sea turtles, your arms slicked with oil,
carrying brown pelicans, all dead. When I open my eyes,
you are in Vietnam and I can’t see you because you are either
shell-shocked, covered in banana leaves, or already dead.
Generally speaking, you are neither
dead nor alive, depending on which branch an African giraffe
yanks from the tree tomorrow evening at dusk. If a crazy man
in the Little Rock Inpatient Mental Health Facility throws a fistful of macaroni
at his doctor and the doctor signals the guards and the guards
swiftly pin him to the cafeteria table and he is taken into
a confined room to think, I most certainly
will never see you again. You will be gone for good.
I will end up stumbling at midnight through a canyon in San Diego. I will find
blood on my shirt that I cannot explain, no trace of you,
of us ever existing and I will probably also
be knee-deep in quicksand, bugs swarming, a bad song stuck in my head.
If neither of us smoked or if I had brought cigarettes that night instead of bumming from strangers
and we never met, it would be me and not you going to the moon,
to England, wherever it is that you go. Yesterday at the hospital
I understood my grandmother’s confused expression, weeping in the hospital cot,
staring at her catheter. I try to make sense of you, the way it finally made sense
why priests drink, why slugs foam up, why most churches have done away with
confessional booths. In 1962, you will recall, someone at a truck stop
called your mother a slut and this changed things forever.
Her skirts grew shorter. You would not
even be here. You would not be coming back, would not have yet gone.
This time you would stay, immobile, you would be a word plucked from a mouth,
belonging to no language, attached to no thought.
KRISTIN KOSTICK is a poet and medical anthropologist doing research on HIV prevention and mental health in India, Africa, and Hartford, CT. Her work has appeared in the most recent Open Letters anthology and the Long River Review, and is forthcoming in Drunken Boat. She co-curates (with poet Andrea Henchey) a monthly reading series in Hartford that has recently featured notable poets including James Tate, Roger Bonair-Agard, Jon Sands, and Adam Golaski.