LUSUS NATURAE Feng Sun Chen

1. is

There is no letting go, not until the end.

Only the gradual layering of browned filters upon filters in the trash like dumb leaves, the soggy
flaps of impressions and this-is-me-again, hello, craning my neck
against the high, blank sink of night.

How many times can night be described without throwing it away?
I want to do more than throw.
Nothing goes away, says the boundless larynx
sending waves of peristalsis over the stage. That is night.

Purse of pelvic bone jangling with something collapsible and quiet with groundwater. That is night.

Flung curtain, a shift of the sky’s retina.

Is it not such outward pleasure that makes the inner cells grow big?

Document of earliness
when god’s many hands, tipped with unethical electricity
scorched the earth.

White grub’s slumber.

Shout that wraps itself around a marrow of hunger.

A cold baby.

A hope caught in the sucked body of a man.

Straw wrapped flannel in a field.

That is night.
That is night.
That is night.

 

 

 

2. the trap
 
Over the mouthshaped drop in the ground
stretches a thin linen.

Layer of thin insect’s thread
woven into a delicate verge.

Something with lonely hands takes care of it,
fabricates a refrigerated needlework. Near frozen, near white, near zero.

We are threaded gently.
The eye is small
but we are smaller.

Crystals of breath
from the lungs of my kin, whose wings are thin,
whose eyes are shingled with hundreds
maybe thousands of pieces of each other.

Iridescent as money and unrecognizable as sand.

Not only this
but even the wrung out stalks of the trees on the other side
of the pane warns me of insects
but not in the way you think.
The warning is directed at me.

I don’t have six legs but I do have antennae.

Then I look in the glass and a lightbulb is crushed.

My eyes are legs walking over the cell of my room made of cut trees
and the detritus of ice ages.

 

 

 

3. fold

Only in our eyes exists miscreation.
This is why we have been granted sleep, a small mental key.

Mud climbs up the tunnels in my head.
I hold the shining cochlea of night in my hand. Deaf and dumb
and dangling with whiskers.

I call and call into it,
and hold it to my ear like a dead sea-thing
and call into it with hearing.

Dawn closes. Flesh
remembers everything.
I don’t know it.

But it’s there, knocking around my pinched abdomen,
fluid coated currency.

What is listening?
Who’s out there humming
beyond my white spacesuit?

The night is muscular and veined
like a husband.
I step into it.
I am married to it.