dawn lonsinger

Vanishing Tense

Fruits are tweaked to tang
like other fruits—tangelo, grapple, jostaberry,
plumcot—hybrid rapture at our fingertips.
And vegetables are plumped colossal
while pixels multiply, scurry like silverfish,
then glaze. Kiosks migrate inward.
Fumes douse the air. One thesis brandishes cutlery,
another cuts. Wires dip down the throat, hood
the plosives as connective tissue grows
on the sides of buildings.

Here, organs seem residual, romantic even.

Light is the lake we remember through,
jogging our memory with each undulation, our teeth conical
and interlocking, our backs momentarily
dorsal, no bones, small inconspicuous openings,
the dangers glittering & spinal as fluorescent bulbs,
the county line drawn over the sutures of our skulls.

A dolphin's grayish back blends with the dark of depth,
its whitening belly with the bright surface of the sun-laced sea
while we stand in the foyer, eyes wet, waiting to be let in

where genetics & scanners & peroxide have not yet burned
through our bodies, made them transparent as surgical gloves,
the heart beating in its gelatinous vanishing tense, the chambered
nautilus knowingly curled in on its prehistoric cache, light leaking
into its eyes, our arms full of measured solids.

In the tampering we are saved, sliced off, repeated,
the images & information of our images & information dropped
like dollops of cream into our common, cyclopic sense,
our faces paper panels spreading like lily pads across surface.

We sit at the table dumbfounded by the intimacy we feel
with meat, how long we stay with the gristle on our plates.

City of Arson

My wrists graze the gaskets
of the fire hydrant quietly, the bulk and dull
gleaming stasis of us both
sinking into the grey cake of daylight
commerce.

Stains of urine and life resident in the municipality.

Parking lots carry the consensus,
pipes slit with water hidden like bones.
We are plunged into the dream

of danger, while the flesh-clasps clank
so silently the horror, festival glitter
dusting the pigeons and homeless.

My feet fathom the reservoir
the psychic’s laughter echoes in

the hospital is never empty,

each breath tabulated with escape. Anything, anything
to perfect the shapes that skirt our shutters, the eyes
that spark with razing.

The mayor says—
“If we have to light up the whole city, we’ll do that.”

It might begin with a small gleaming singe
mark in the carpet. Our children have been
struck by passing automobiles while playing
in water spray. Something flits past the window

and though I am mostly a refrigerator of loss
inside the seams of me I swaddle the baby
of emergency, its mouth lovingly
taped shut. My brain is a four-alarm

blaze. Every block circles itself.
If the valve is opened we will all drown.
If it’s tapped we are already burning—

We know the elapsed entity will make no sound,
that the air will drape it over us—

She Had No Swaddling Clothes

Rumor had it everything she birthed would ruin
itself with flailing, that such relocation of energy
was derelict, lightning in the brain—

dangerous impulsive scattering

For a while she too feared that what went unswaddled
was doomed, that the exposed were the abandoned,
that everything might unravel, animals sifting away
in forest light as if biology willed it—first darkness,
then light, then thinning to zilch.

She read that in Tudor times babies were wrapped in
linen bands from head to foot for eight months to insure
against physical deformity. In her dreams: children fell
through the cracks in her floor; Jesus floated out of
the manger and back into heaven; hippos ate whatever
moved; the ocean was seeping into everything; and her
own hands wouldn’t stop growing.

So she started to take long indulgent baths, warm water
draped over her like flannelette sheets, the world muted
and small beyond the shower curtain. At night she
played a recording of water sloshing over things, fell
asleep imagining every object in its own jacket.

When she stepped outside the green gangly sputtering
of it all frightened her. Who would care for all this life?
Who could reassure it that the sun was a kept entity,
would not hurl itself into our laps?

She started to sit in her car, engine off, windows
up. She was seeking a silence that wouldn’t settle
in. She could still see the constant shifting, sudden
sparks in branches, the wind through her neighbor’s hair.

But slowly it occurred to her—
trillium is tucked in, her house huddled by valley
and horizon, her brain cozy, weather sheathed in
atmosphere, planet in a pool of planets, everything
enveloped in a vastness she can’t witness.

Chaos was okay, and she its mercenary of risk—

Then she began to nurse arousal, unfasten sums,
and outset flowed like a robe of fire from her kindling eyes,
and the landscape heaved and sobbed—