Jac Jemc - A Different Bed Every Time

Until now I have been desperate and young all my life. A whirlpool’s spider webbing a ship, and I am on duty, receiving the distress signals. They light up my brain with their ciphered knocking. I can only guess at what they’re saying. I cheated on my Morse code tests. The water hikes itself up around them. Their noses goggle, filling with sea. They crumple deeper. The sunken six hundred struggle inside the ocean. I stay up all night thinking of ways to retrieve a ship from roundabout the bottom of the sea. I drag out maps and periscopes. I find a compass and a barometer. I can’t swim, but I change into my bathing suit. I consider hurling myself off the dock and dragging each sailor up one by one. The water beetles grow fat with salt. I know it is too late, but still it’s my duty to dredge them up without letting anyone know my mistake. Bells ring inside of me, telling me to do something else and then something other than that. Alarms sound. I don’t know where to go. The possibilities keep splintering. My mind turns over and over like a weak ankle. The waves violin above them; a telescope can give me that sight. My marrow curdles with ignorance. I recognize my lack of reason, and I purge my apologies into the night air. I offer only my grief as recompense.

My sister is curled around the tower like a ribbon. Venus gladdens in the sky as I try to talk her down, but seven intact sunrises later, she’s still there, the solitude snarled in her hair like wind. I try to run my fingers through her disastrous ringlets but probable accidents begin to rustle between us and I give up. Dark parlors are vacant beneath her eyes and even I am praying for an aperture to open already, for some light to reach in and unknot her. A lyrical and nagging lack in me prevents me from understanding what makes her do this: like a pane of glass sanctioning off a part of my mind.

Someone deceived her; an owl perhaps.

There are pleats hidden in our heritage hiding gaps it will take much time to unfold.

There is magic all around her that does not tell the truth.

My sense of direction trembles when I get near her, like a compass near a magnet. When I try to reason with her, she yields only the half-syllables of infancy or full-martyred stories of the women who have gone before her.

I have lost my gramarye; it wriggles now somewhere in the wrong person’s hands. Without it, I haven’t the slightest idea how this situation will be remedied. The illogic of the good has been flossed away; malignant nonsense remains, unclaimed. I am using “nonsense” here to mean “recognition.” I have seen this happen before and prayed the nomenclature would not come back into use, that the eternal would reverse and never ask another question.

I hire a gentleman to help, to chip her fingers from the brick while I tenderly pry the ivy strands of her hair from the mortar. Her connection to this castle, chaotic and forbidden, buzzes through us like gripping a miniscule current with spit-veiled palms. We work gently and carefully, fearful of the disease patterning out to us. These gradual and tiny distances separate her from her dependence. Pulling her from this foundation is much like dislodging young poems from the beaks of hummingbirds. The power and delicacy at once astound us.

Each point connects with a rigid and forceful pulse, but as we lever her away from this landmark, she loosens, her edges going almost liquid. This work wracks our nerves, never knowing if the girl we crow from this architecture will be able to recover, will survive the withdrawal from this behemoth to which she’s been clinging.

When the surrendered self of my sister lands in my arms, the true work begins. I can tell you: a fine talc settles between us and within us, evenly filling us to the brim. Our perspectives pare again and again as we fight to understand the other. We tug at the skin of each other’s sentences. I find she has the looping reason of the psalmist and I know if the way I think is a library, then it is full of larks. To calm her, I weave lavender into her hair, blazed into a shock of gray at her release. When we are at a loss, we teach our mentalities ventriloquism, and find comfort in the sympathy and compassion we’re able to rumble out at a moment’s notice. Each day threatens whims until the petals of the town bells sound and we allow ourselves to sleep and forget.

1. In the window teddy bears & alarm clocks sold themselves.

2. The gridlock stars of the night went invisible with uncertainty.

3. He asked me, Where are you going, kid, so slowly?

4. I had a way of looking back at him that made everything else clear & empty.

5. I grew tired of tongue-kissing disintegrating soldiers.

6. Like a ship’s captain he wore so many buttons & so much beard.

7. His expressions showed up in the lenses of his glasses.

8. With me on the handlebars, he bandied the bicycle about dangerously.

9. Cars wrestled us on the pavers.

10. A lion and a lamb ogled our course from the lintel of the church entry.

11. Gargoyles read the palindromes of streetlights.

12. A plane raped through the low clouds of the sunset.

13. At the bar a gun stretched the distance between us.

14. We drank martinis, watched the clouds deform, and swallowed swords.

15. In general, his mouth spoke my vision & his eyeglasses circled one specific area of my brain.

16. What he ended up looking at were the places where the lace peeked through to my skin.

17. Beyond that, in a parlor, ladies wove through the crowds of wealthy men like roots looking for water.

18. Women with jazzed-out tits handed us drinks.

19. The patchwork burlap shadows listened to everything we said.

20. We walked out the door, wobbly with drink & his whistle splattered out.

21. Everything spiraled & curved like an arpeggio on the staff.

22. We played anarchist hopscotch, in the night, removing cobblestones from the sidewalks.

23. With the structure beside it felled, I could see the concrete description of the inner stairway of his apartment building perfectly.

24. I was so lost that when he put a wineglass in my hand, I held it like a map.

25. Later, drunk in his bedroom, it was as if we had hooks for hands.

26. We languished in his garret under the precarious moon.

27. We snuck down to the dark kitchen, skinned tangerines & shocked each other.

28. We were shoved full, slopped over.

29. Sweat spots metastasized on my blouse.

30. Our hands overlapped, while above us careful ghosts measured the value of appearing.

31. My bare ass on a heavily patterned carpet, designed to hide stains, and then his hand nearby.

32. We had been warned not to move from this quadrant if we knew what was good for us.

33. I was one of many who had laid herself out beside him.

34. The nights were jagged & multiple, like falling down a distracted rabbit hole.

35. My eyes exploded like stars, my lips blew wild screams his way.

36. The last of the fireworks faded. When closed, our lids replayed the whole night in negative.

37. Then nothing.

38. In the morning, with flashlights, megaphones & broad daylight we began our search again.

39. Mothers sat at home, knitting it together, the radio blaring.

40. A crowd of men judged what to do, one after the other.

41. Soldiers inflected their gunshots with meaning.

42. Two trails of smoke snuck from the same mouth.

43. A chinstrap, a seat belt, a stray hair.

44. Murky fingertips like elephant cysts.

45. Tally sheets.

46. A skull kissing a stone lion.

47. The spider web of numbers breaking down.