From Jackknife & Light
by Michelle Murphy
Conversion
When she was young, she possessed a hand, now irrevocably lost, holding an apple. She used to stamp her boots to crow songs, raise a thigh-high dust in honor of their impermeable music. The callused balls of her feet engaged in the residue of dance, a fox trot or cha-cha. Her legs threatening a disco split in the early morning frost. To keep her questions alive she carved them in stone, laid them beside the roadways, believing that miracles could play themselves out, one way or another before a new dust would blow it all away. To keep her weight among the epitaphs, it was said she converted apples into hands and hands into thin letters, that once unsealed provoked riots in far away cities, caused household pets to come together in one simultaneous scream. When she was young, she would kneel for the fountain coins of luck, taking back the wishes. She thought how stationary one must be when our history gives into an undeniable absence, when an arm suddenly vanishes without appeal. How still to divine the waters. There is a photograph, dog-eared, that shows her standing at the edge of her land, hands struck open like a match. An apple rests precariously on the top of her head while one eye squints into the camera, laughing.
Visible
This ghost hums in her hair, his slight tunes rising
against her ear but never making it inside. To where the song might matter.
His shyness a bit of fakery. She's heard him open her bedroom door, stand
there leaning on his one good leg. She leaves him washed pears to sweeten
his breath. & though she wants to take on his body, she's afraid of
losing into his muscles, devouring the silence they've carefully built.
What might be so good, a stare at the end of each other's eyes but there's
this blind & no matter. A hand can still hold fruit, distinguish its
ripeness by a squeeze of the fingers. Peel its skin. Anyway, she thinks,
she can smell for bruises better in the dark
How to Disappear
We say dissolve as if milk paint can be washed down to its original pigment, the color of skin before sunlight. We try to believe in too many things. Airports. Creation. Constrained orchards powder freeways with dust, glare over land. No single vocabulary can worry us into revealing the weight of summer rain over a sentence, vowels riddled with dusk's blue shade. Imagine the silence we give into as gravity once removed, not a true death, but a fixed leaning, as in the last page of a book you don't want to end. These fingers slip through another good-bye and lately the apricots sent here have been thick skinned, enormous, too clumsy for my hands. Not with juice but disfigured stones. Sulfur in my nostrils. What does it mean to have their pulp slide down our throats, parch us, absently. Forget where you last saw me, I wasn't there.