Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty-one Spring 2013 |
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Without Sanctuary New York City Historical Society and Hayden Planetarium, Spring 2000 Aviva Englander Cristy Grandmother led me from one hanging body to the next: here a man burnt beyond flesh and we cannot turn away; here the moon in measured perspective to one man’s heart. We huddle, shoulder pressed to stranger shoulder, silent as fear and eyes hardened, necks craned to read each lettered joy, to recognize a jaw set in pride, the familiarity of a neck snapped against gravity, heads tilted in careful listening, turning aside, hands bound. In Oxford, Georgia he hangs from a lamppost, supplicant, eyes raised in search of light. In Fort Lauderdale the young girls in starched white party dresses clasp their hands in rows behind him, lift their radiant gaze and lean in to their fathers’ Sunday best. Newbern, Tennessee has two dancing from a single line; one man almost rests his head against the other’s shoulder, arms linked just before an intimate embrace. I wonder why it is always the children who smile, why these postcards are addressed to women. Marion, Indiana, like a lover; someone has saved a lock of his hair. We step outside, make our way slowly across the street. Grandmother pauses on a park bench before moving in to a more natural history. Entering from the east we are bathed in glass and urgent rapture, the need to walk the length of light and time. We rise slowly, comparative measure: star to moon, hand to eye, a grain of salt, a human egg, an atom, water. Descending in spirals, each step forms another galaxy, another bulge and quasar; each new generation of stars measured in redshift as we witness this expansion. She shuffles forward, 50 million years, leans against me, Acasta Gneiss brightens, draws me towards the rail, dark matter, a galaxy clusters, Andromeda. Gravity a lens to multiply and distort. Diamond dust, trilobite, serrated tooth futile for 65 million years. This temporal ruler imprecise. Humanity contained in a single human hair. Grandmother insists we collect each card, holographic births we can carry away; angle your wrist to the left, a nebulae spins, turn to the right, two galaxies collide. We need proof. The year my grandmother was born Laura Nelson swayed gently in the wind, arms unbound, not reaching for her son. She asks me to hold that crude jubilance clenched between my teeth as one step spirals time, shadows the remnants, supernova. |
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