THE LOVED ONE

You speak to me through things. I wish this were true. I have tried to make this true. I listened for you there, the telephone coil straining toward me as though I had grabbed it while falling through air. I lay on the floor of the booth holding onto the receiver...smooth plastic anchor smelling from the breath of others, then left it to sway, banging gently against the glass, cast apart from me, a thing of the world no longer...your instrument now. I love your voice and I get weaker everyday. I desire these things: that my blood would grow as thin and pale as water and fall out through the pores of my skin, that my eyes would stop burning in their sockets when I turn my face up to yours, that you would speak to me. Your instrument. I left it tapping the glass, humming against the air that is stuffed already with the noise of a weeping, delirious city, your whisper a pulse beneath that.

He moved toward the translated body, wind blowing through the threads of his clothes and across skin that no longer listened. He skated in his shoes across the ice and fell hard to his knees. Light revealed him kneeling inside a box of concrete...kneeling inside the heart of the day. Light washed the air and turned his skin so pale that his hands looked to him like the hands of another.

"Burn us clean," he said. He took the knife out of his pocket. Light made the metal blade look like something hot. He could see the ice melting beneath the body.

"Water returns," he said. He pressed a palm against the body. No beat there. No breath. He dipped the knife in and up like a feather through water.

"Show me," he said as he pried the body open. He plunged his hands inside and the shock of the heat against his skin forced him to remember that they were his hands attached to his wrists. He drew out a slippery rope that pulsed in the grip of his newly alive hands. He exhausted the rope and then shoved his arm inside the cavity his fingers groping and tugging at something that hummed to him. He pulled it out. The purple triangle slid across his open palms like a fish or a newborn baby. It was clean and quivering. He stroked it and felt it whisper beneath his fingers. It shuddered. Warmth escaped from it and into the air, filling the air with the smell of meat and words that he could hear. He laid it on the sidewalk and coiled the wet ropes around it for guardians there on the ice that was melting

beneath the roof of the sky above.

"Live forever," he said.

Make my ears like skin understanding the knife. The tip of a wing brushes my face turned up in the mist that paints it gray. Where are you? Show your face to me. Let me lay oil on water and you show your face to me, the sheen of my yearning reflected in the water's restless skin. My skin is changing...turning into another skin, the pieces of it coming apart and forming something altered that doesn't look as it did but feels like my real glove. You could bend me like wire. I will sit here, scattered against a wall, watching a man bend over a carcass and dip his hands inside. The hands come out red. The tissue cords shine in the sun. How does a body become dead and opened? It sags in places like it's been looted already. I think I'm dissolving, all of me merging with the fluid running out of my veins...hollowing out like that poor dead body. I would be happy to lie down at the edge of the street and feel filthy water running through me drawing me down to be clean at last floating somewhere in a distant ocean. Am I empty enough for you? Am I good enough for you? I will chew grass that pushes up between the cracks in the sidewalk. I will drink the water that settles on my face at night. I will find things to eat in cans on street corners, wet things tangled with hair and crusted with dirt. Vanity sealed me like a skin. Now it hangs from my shoulders in tatters. What will become of me? What will you do? I am held in your silent grip, my life leaking out of me

and across the rough hard surface of this bed of mine, boiling into the concrete stained already with the lives of others. I see two men. The one facing me sits legless in his chair. He has no knees to bleed for you. His arms are wood where flesh would be, austere metal curved into hooks at the tapering end. The other man is standing profiled to me. I can see him smiling. He feeds the man in the chair candy breaking it off in small pieces and holding it down to the other's waiting mouth. The tips of his fingers remain immaculate of teeth and tongue...the salty taste of skin sequestered from sweetness. Does this kindness of gesture help the one in the chair imagine through the thickness of chocolate that he is eating - just eating and not being fed? The sun hangs suspended in the sky, bright pink like a blood suffused wafer. I want to eat the sun as I would eat you, every crumb of light drenched with your blood...all the food I need.

She took a piece of chicken out of the box and said, "Can you lift this to heaven?" Heat ebbed from the center of the drumstick and out into the rough air that whipped around her and up through the layers of her clothes making her skin hug its bone. She sat in the middle of the wind at the center of the deserted plaza. She cradled the chicken in her hand letting it chalk the surface of her own with stale fat. She held it at the knob end and shook it at nine pigeons lined up on the sidewalk in front of her. She peeled off the shriveled skin and threw it - limp strips down onto the desolate squares of

brick. The pieces of skin stayed quiet for a moment in the cold air and then began crawling across the brick, crawling blind, writhing and twisting. The birds stood in an unsteady row watching the skin move. One stepped forward and plucked a piece up in its beak.

"Wait," she said. She ripped some of the flesh from its anchor and held it up to her nose. Fumes of deadness, thick...inert, filled her nostrils. She studied it resting between her thumb and forefinger and squeezed. Gray sponge. Cold. Giving nothing.

"Breathe into this," she said. Suddenly rapt, she felt hot and blinded as though a current had run molten into every nerve. Newborn, she sat in the middle of grimy concrete and twisted trees. Scraps of paper hugged her ankles like children grasping for warmth. She tore off one piece of flesh from the bone and then another. When she finished with one bone, she took up the next, revealing the delicate harp of the ribcage and the bow of the wing. She watched as the meat fell gray from her fingers and turned pink as it touched the brick. Flushed and bleeding, the pieces lay ready. She rocked on her bench and watched as the pigeons gathered up the pulsing flesh. The birds swallowed and she watched as they started glowing. Colored light pushed through their feathers and wrapped each bird up in a halo that dimmed the outline of the creature within. The bones were bleeding in her grip. Blood oozed out of the bones and coated the skin on her hands.

My heart pumps through me to you. I am throbbing at the heart of the still city. My ears are closed, and I hang suspended in silence, submerged in silence. The spoke from your bloody wheel

strikes me at my center. Light me. Burn me. Erase the boundary of hours. Let me go to the frontier and pass over. My bones and my flesh are my sorrow...my gift to you. My heart pumps through me to you. Can I make my heart as clean as I've made my stomach? When will you come to me? Me. Broken vessel. I might drive nails into muscle. I might wear my skin turned inside out, the garments of pain scraping like memory fluttering out of its cage like a naked weeping bird. What does it mean for this bird to drop, thudding limp, in front of me? Was it tossed as a gift? Will it rain dead birds? Am I meant to open it like a book and tell its silent language? I plead against your mercy. My pain is my badge and my offering. Take my heart up in your grip. There's a crushed can, blue and silver, balancing on the ledge in front of me. Crush my heart like that. My heart is rigid and proud. Crush it and make it clean. Break me. Melt me in your furnace. The roar of planes passing over my head, it withers me the sound layering like welts scourged over time. Your voice comes out of the sky arid and awful as I burrow deeper but I can't hear your words, only the sounds. Is this deafness vanity? Strip me of my costume, stripped like this thing lying silent and skinless on top of garbage. Is it a gift from you meant for me? It sits throbless and tepid, the meat glistening pink and wet...death clinging to its bone. Black flies are busy with it. I will stay empty. Clean out my heart and

hold my pain in front of me like a veil. Red stains drying stiff and brown. My heart's shroud cloth.

Shriven and lucid, he looked into the mirrored wall and saw a reflection of the sky floating above his head. The blue was clear as the ache he felt at the core of his stomach- pulsing around the memory of food. Dazzled and empty, he stared at the sky in the glass. He bled into his clothes. He didn't see or hear the other bodies that moved around him as he dripped onto the sidewalk, growing clean.

"Make me immaculate," he said. His reflection hung innocent in front of him, and he stepped closer to see what it was hiding. His face was creased and peeling. As he pulled off thin flakes of skin, yellow vapors clouded the glass. Faces leered out at him and whispered words to him in a language that he knew. The city wheeled around him rumbling beneath his feet. He turned and looked up at the real sky. It was a blue memory shrouded in thick yellow clouds - rats and guns and laughing heads taking shape and dissolving in front of his eyes.

"Take this from me," he said. He turned back to his reflection put his fist through the glass. He stood like a tree until he saw the sky became clear again and then he fell to the concrete. The blood from his wrist had washed the shards sufficiently red.

Don't leave me. I was stumbling and shaking before I fell here. The threads of my clothes sing through the smell of years left untouched. Am I empty now? Is light shining through the the skin long abandoned by me? I've imagined this place, the dark maw leading down into a damp and chilling silence. I'm sprawled at the lip of the world, inches from release but how can I trade one place of lies for another? The buildings sway over me. Light pours out of windows like breath from open mouths. The concrete shakes beneath me - a huge muscle torn loose from its anchor of bone. The sidewalk cracks and rends like an opening zipper. Booming and rattling fill my ears and I imagine your voice as I try to stand. The bones of the buildings are cracking. I can hear the buildings wail. The buildings are falling, lurching like me. I see them in flames, a halo of fire around each one. Throw the bones into fire and see what they say. Throw my bones to the fire. Let it take them in like the mouth of a starving dog and suck them clean. Let my skull's cavities sing in the wind for you. Let me burn. Don't leave me. I am so hungry. This pain is like a wheel of blades turning inside me, scraping me out. When will you enter in and fill me? I look up and I see, between the buildings gone silent...there in the still center of deepening blue, nine bodies falling through the clear sky. The gaping plane floats away from them - abandons them to gravity. I see this. I do. A blue sky as pretty as paint and fearful with the bodies falling against it.

"Take them up," I whisper.

Clouds marbled the sky, some hanging fat and dark like jellyfish drifting through murky ocean. He paced across the rooftop,

high above the rotting smell of the city, forming his hands into nervous shapes. He jerked around hearing distant thunder like a voice of blame. A bush snagged his clothes and held until he tore himself loose. Other bushes grew in the scattered soil like fragments of a lost garden transported to the roof of the abandoned, violated warehouse.

"Come and get me," he said. Lightening branched the sky. Thunder entered him warming each molecule. He felt his body becoming hard as though it were baking clay.

"Do you want me?" he asked. "Or not?"

The sky was quiet for a sullen minute. The lightening appeared again. The thunder repeated, louder this time.

"Take this." He took out a knife that he'd hidden in his clothes keeping it close and unsullied for this moment. He opened his shirt and touched his bare chest with the blade pressing against the skin. He drew a red triangle there in three strokes. It dripped down.

He knew that there was a magnet beneath his skin. He knew that there was a magnet working beneath the concrete at the center of the earth. The muscles in his legs trembled from the effort of joining the magnets together. Something hit his forehead. He cupped it in his palm and saw that it was a piece of blood clotted and quivering like jelly. Another clot hit his wrist and slid off to plop and spread on the roof. The red clots hit him and then the rain washed them away. The clots were soft red pellets washing out into pink and then nothing. The rain bit through his clothes like strips of wet leather. The yowling wind pushed him down and when he opened his eyes again, he lay quiet beneath a blinding blue sky - cupped inside a painted bowl. Scar tissue formed a white lined triangle on his chest. A drop of blood at the apex glistened in the sun like a small red pearl.

Did they go up or did the magnet claim them somewhere behind buildings that my eyes can't see past?

The air was tinted piss and smells that slithered out of the trash cans stationed along the sidewalks in the park. The wind sent paper flying into the street, left it clinging to the rusted legs of the benches and nestling against the bodies sleeping chilled on the banks of grass. Wind whipped around him. He stood at the center of the world, there at the hub of the city. Eyes dried from staring, he turned in a circle, head tilted up. His mouth hung open. The wind scraped like sand against the sores inside. Above the buildings surrounding the park, stretched a web glowing against the blue sky. The web was a white pattern of nested circles latticed and expanding out - circling slowly as he did. Floating behind the web were what he knew to be angels. He turned and watched them as they wheeled around with the clockwise motion of the web. He watched huge fish

with glowing scales opening and closing their mouths against the air. White snakes stared at him with wide painful eyes. There were colored lights bobbing through the interstices of the web and down, burning him as they approached, telling him things. The angels glowed stark and luminous like creatures under deep sea where it's cold and dark.

"I'm drowning here," he said. "Help me."

A ring of purple light swooped down and grasped the skin around his wrist. Four spokes pulled out and stretched to form a wheel. It spun and he felt the weight of it as though his body would break, as though his heart would break, as though pain would never leave him. He held out his arm and saw the inner rim of the wheel studded with nails. Blood shot out of him and across the spokes marking a pattern on the concrete.

"No," he said. "Mark me."

The spokes pulled back and the ring left his dripping wrist. It hovered humming then dropped and settled in a band that tightened around his eyes. Pain and light filled his head. He screamed and the band lifted off. He touched the corner of his left eye to see what the angel had left. Blood capped the tip of his finger when he brought it away. He looked at the sky through eyes washed red and he saw fire. Nine bodies falling against the sky. Nine wheels of fire, four spokes and a pivot to each.

"They are blind," he whispered. "They are emptied of memory." The horizon was blasted with light as the wheels hurtled through the spaces in the web and down. The trees glowed around him. The heat from his vision rolled back and over his head. Ashes floated up and disappeared. He stood at the center of the park waiting to go. His eyes and his wrist flowed and soaked him. Blood was scattered like beads on the concrete. Soaking in. Evaporating. Maybe leaving too.

"Go away," I said. The dog hobbled to me. It was mangy and fleas boiled across the patches of bare skin. I could see an open place on its hip glistening red and creamy green speckled with black gnat bodies. The dog stood above me looking down as I sprawled across the concrete shivering in a pool of my own liquid.

"I'm hungry," it said. A yellow ribbon of saliva curled out of its mouth and down filling the cup of my hand. I looked from this to its eyes. Not dog eyes. They weren't. They seemed ready to swallow my misery. The whites were glazed with tears and a tear dripped down the dog's muzzle to the ground. I held up an arm and it came and put its head on my chest. My hand rested limp on the dog's head and I could feel its fragile brain cradle beneath the skin. The dog's body was hot as it nestled against me. I felt the heat of it melt through my pores and go deep inside me to the center. I felt my hunger vanishing... escaping like steam. I fell asleep and jerked awake, frightened by a loud noise that seemed to come from inside my stomach. The dog was gone but it had left a wet, gritty stain across

the fabric that drapes my chest. I wear the stain like a badge and I try to remember to touch it everyday.

Nostrils flared, then expelled breath visibly into the frigid air. He crept closer reading their faces. Nostrils pinched, gripping the fact of him moving wet and rank among the company of skins more clean and dry. Scrofulous, he emerged as though he had hidden beneath the concrete and had pushed it aside like a blanket to stand in front of them and say:

"I am a sign to you."

His wet yellow socks dragged loose at the toes and flopped like tongues as he shambled through the cathedral of cold air and concrete. Trains blasted through tunnels shaped for them sending vibrations tremoring up through the floors and into bones and teeth. He snared a face briefly but the eyes embedded there turned away. There was a large wet sore glistening and throbbing at the top of his lip. The skin on his hands itched and glowed with swollen red patches and icy sweat gleamed on his forehead. He realized that no one could see him.

"I am a sign to you!" he insisted to another face. The fissures around his mouth broke open in the cold. The eyes of the other turned away secure and shielded. He thought about the place below his ribcage where fluid seeped out of the hot red nest of skin and dried against the threads of his clothes, making layers of pus and cloth ... a process interrupted only by rain. He thought about the

crusts around the rims of his ears. The ache in his neck felt liquid today and too large. His eyes were streaming inside of the wind. He put his hand up to his running nose and when he looked there was blood on the tips of his fingers coloring the grubby nails like a signal for evacuation. He leaned against a wall. He backed up against the wall on the wind lashed platform. He watched them getting on and off the trains, the doors opening and closing letting streams of them out and taking in more. He could see the bones inside the skins that labored beneath laundered clothes, the skin struggling to breath for 5..10...25 more years while the skull gaped in permanent disbelief.

"I'll read your end," he said. He staggered a little and plastered himself more firmly against the cold brick wall. He lifted his penis out of trousers worn to web in spots. He didn't recognize it as he held it in his hand but the warmth of it penetrated his skin and a dim molecular memory insisted that it was connected to him. The piss came out in a thick yellow arc and then the pattern changed, the piss scattering wild on the concrete. Something black poked out of the hole at the tip and wiggled. He watched the hole stretch as the thing inside scrambled against the surfaces that contained it. Each segment of it was an inch across and edged with a pair of legs that waved angrily against the air as it showed itself piece by piece. Twenty segments exuded and it finally dropped into a puddle on the concrete, crawled to the lip of the platform and disappeared beneath. Three dimes squeezed out, shooting down in a flood of yellow and landing heads up in the gathering pool. The piss blushed and turned thicker and dark. Blood pumped out and spread in a gleaming sheet across the concrete. Blood splashed up and speckled his face. He felt his penis pulsing in his hand, slick in his hand like a big naked vein.

"Take this away from me," he said. He felt his life turning to liquid inside him and running out through the pores, making him empty. All that was left to him now was to be scraped out and made finally clean. He stood waiting in the deserted station. Trains passed on either side. Idle faces looked out of the windows and past him waiting there, scoured and ready.

Obedient puppet me. I wish that I were. If I were, there would be cords attached to me singing my pain back to you and I would pull my arm up and then down and smash the bottle I'm holding and open myself on its edge so that you could see me gaping and empty as a valley gone wasted to desert by the careless sun. I need your blood in my veins infusing the shriveled channels with heat and wet red. I need your throbbing flesh coming to life on my tongue, there to be swallowed, to fill.

The bones stood on their smaller knobs tilted in to touch each other at the large joint ends. There were three sets, three bones in each, pitched on a blanket spread beneath the dripping lip of the building's overhang. She stood beside the blanket and stared at what she had built there. She'd spent days gathering the bones, trying to

find nine that matched and her hands still felt chalky from the greasy cardboard boxes she had wrestled from trash cans to examine. She squatted, heels flat, and rocked forward. She spread her fingers out like a fan and swept her arms through the air. The bones fell across the blanket. She poked at the air above the blanket feeling for the pattern there then she snatched her left hand up in her right and held it in a painful grip. She let it go and rubbed at the grime on the hand, rolling little pieces of skin across her knuckles.

"This dirt isn't mine,"she said...and waited.

"I don't belong in this place." She waited for the bones to move, to speak to her, to tell her what to do, but the bones lay scattered on the dirty blanket just exactly like the discarded frame of a dead creature. The bones were bloodless today, dried and silent.

Will you feed me? Come down through the wires or let me go up. Let me be like glass held up to the sun. Let me be like the gutter washed out by the rain. Let me be like the howls of the dogs wrenched free at last from the prison of their parched and empty throats and thrown out to the sky...dissolving on the air...melting into

the blue...leaving behind a faint sad echo here below...fading up to you.

Dampness squeezed into him as though the building had pores, a sweating skin touching his own. He squatted at the top of the stairs and sniffed at the air. He knew the building's smell. It smelled like

skin soured with years of dirt and neglect. The building sighed and quivered around him holding him in its moist grip, whispering things to him. He heard a sound at the bottom of the stairs and with it, coming closer to him, was a smell that wasn't like the building's smell. It was heavy, like water falling around his head and sweet. He felt his nose go full with the smell and he hugged a wall against the approaching intruder. It was a dog. Patches of bare skin glowed in the aching, dying light of the day.

"Go away," he said.

The dog came closer and he could see the ribs beneath its skin moving in and out with its struggling breath. He could see its eyes. They weren't like dog's eyes. They opened into a creature in need but knowing too and they were shining with something that he suddenly wanted for himself. He held out his left hand. The dog licked the palm and when he looked at the hand, he saw a gold streak cutting through the dirt that layered his skin. The dog was looking at him.

"I'm broken," it said. It turned so he could see the place on its hip that throbbed red under a veil of pale, moist green. The smell

from the wound washed over him, making him gag. It was a smell like meat turning into liquid.

"Give me your hand" said the dog. Breath suspended, he reached out and put his right hand into the wound up to the wrist. The wet insides gripped him, squeezing until it hurt. Heat penetrated him and he bit his lip until he tasted blood. He felt his hand dissolving inside the dog's body...changing shape against the rippling muscles. The smell turned transparent - rose petal, onion skin, fish scales.

"That's good," said the dog. The hand that he pulled out gleamed like a baby's tooth. Veins tingled under newly clean skin. The dog's wound was no more than a long cut blossoming red along the surface with a single tear running down and soaking into the fur below.

"Follow me," said the dog. It turned and went down the stairs leaving him behind. He looked for something to take away with him. The floors whined as he scrambled through papers and cans. The walls creaked, protesting his departure. He'd stayed there so long. He picked up a battered wooden plank and then put it back down. He found a piece of rusty metal still sharp. He was busy for a long time and when he finished, there was no light at all trapped inside the building. He touched the wall as he struggled up in the darkness. The wall stuck to him clammy and moist like a hand reluctant to release its grip. The building whispered a desperate promise to him but his ears were closed. The sign was attached to a broken chain. He wrapped the chain around his neck. So that he could hold the end. So that he could keep the sign flat against his chest. So that others could read it.

NO TRESPASS

it said.

He went down the stairs and out.

My skin used to be a dark heavy shroud twisting around me beneath a blazing sun. Now, bones poke through the skin, my skin, and predict the bruises that skin collects. I collect bruises like medals. Me. Good scout. I am becoming transparent.

Three of them stood on the street under the sky above the deep parts of the city. Beneath them was the place that they went to at night. Down there were the beds that they dreamed on, shivering. They stood in a desert. They stood above the filthy labyrinth...above that place, below the other. Each of them stood on a separate corner facing the juncture of streets at the center. The wet gray air saturated color, making objects dim except in one place at the center. The three of them stared at the place where oil had mixed with gasoline and water to form a circle where four streets met.

"We are in danger," said one from his corner. He had stood for hours holding his arms outstretched and raised to the level of his

shoulders. He trembled and swayed as though the air was moving him. The circle was gold at the edges turning inward to green then purple then blue at its center. The circle was spreading and the street was pulsating beneath it and through it, shining and slick at the glistening center...dark as a secret, the skin of the street

convulsing and lifting up and back down, dipping in as though a huge creature was asleep and breathing below.

"We are drawn down," said one from her corner. She had wrapped barbed wire around her chest. Blood was starting to show, small streams of it running down the chilled bare skin of her legs, stains soaking through her clothes. The corona of gold started licking the folds of the sidewalk and outlining the intersection's shape. The one whose knees bled from crawling for hours pulled himself up to stand. He walked forward across the oil. His bare, scabbed feet touched the surface of the oil as though it were a sheet of glass. The center became still as he leaned over it.

"Show your face," he said. Light washed up from the center and made his face disappear. His voice floated above the light.

"We call our cells sweet for your sake, but we are suffering here. Change us. Take us."

He stepped into the center, into the light. The colors lifted up from the street and surrounded him tinting the air like veils. He glowed from within. The others watched as his body whirled on what they all knew to be the true axis of the world. The body was hanging, spinning in light. The body spun in swirls of purple and green and blue. Its carnival shroud. A car drove through the intersection. The driver's face wore a look of vacant dread. The car continued on without stopping and the body rested on the street finally and certainly empty of everything. The colors ebbed around it disappearing at last beneath the street.

"A perfect translation," said one from her corner. Blood slipped into her shoes and warmed her numb feet.

"Yes," said another from his corner. The muscles in his arms shook against the bones.

"Yes, " said another. He stood on his corner, quiet and new beneath the sky, waiting for his task - the voice that would speak to him and show him the motions that he must suffer.

My body vibrates and bleeds. Dirt coats it like another skin. Can I deliver myself clean, translated to you? Pain cloaks this planet. Show your face. Show your hand. I want to hear your voice and not the one that whispers to me, sad and livid, lying underground and on clean metal tables scattered across the city; bodies dredged from deep water, heavy with fluids, lashed by wind and waiting, howling against judgement. Poor carcass. Death is vile. I want to shed these layers. But not to die. Just to go.