christie ann reynolds
from halo in retrograde |
At 14 I nearly fell from Batman the Ride. Too slim for the claw that was supposed to pin me down. I locked eyes with an elderly lady on the ground. I don’t know if she thought about me after that. |
I did not want to mourn with everyone else when Michael Jackson died. When Anna Nicole died. When Brittany Murphy. When Mickey Rooney. Success can be measured by how nervous you become around a large group of people who are crying. Paul Walker I mourned for. A man driving so many cars reminds me of my father. |
Goodness can make you sick. Lukewarm goodness, a crowd. The subway is the best place to feel it. To remember the people you’ll never know again. |
I know the arctic is beautiful even though I have never been. It is desire that makes us seek pleasure in everything from cake to bed. I can never be as powerful as my dead aunt, her sepia tones. Goodness cannot be lukewarm but maybe the woman who helped me when I fell three bus steps down. |
Shelter, food, clothing, water, love. To survive is to flee dehydration. Walk a strict line to the source. I walk a strict line. I right all wrongs by drinking water, so much water. Can love be retained by water? |
It is an imposition to put me in a crowd. Places where straight teeth are noticed more than poems. Beauty can destroy. I am the heir of stampede eyes. Heir, collective unconscious. Heir hair. Maybe I can flourish. Maybe in absence. |
Collective memory is not the same as a collective heir. Think about a skeleton dancing across a table. The skeleton is not the memory of the person who owned it but now think of a person who died. Remember they owned a skeleton. |
CHRISTIE ANN REYNOLDS is the author of Texts from My Mom (Big Lucks Books 2014) Revenge for Revenge (Coconut 2012), and idiot heart (New School Press 2009). She lives in Brooklyn.
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