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  • Bottle-neck Fists:Curtain Warming
  • M. Mack (bio)

Bottle-neck Fists

curtain warming

THE POET stands center-stage under one spotlight. As ze speaks, figures of varying size and transparency rustle about in the shadows of the stage.

The house is the house I grew up in.

The casserole dishes become serpentine when we pack them. We wrap them in cloths. They clot like memory. This one that we’re wrapping is the one he smashed, a wedding gift, nineteen years old. This other one, its replacement, fourteen years old. It reeks of obligation, addiction, and expense. This seeps into my skin when I handle it; its bright flowers call up the brown ones in pieces, call up the how will we replace it. Here, they are both here. They are both intact. They each have teeth.

We met the conventions of the house. We learned to fold towels in fat squares to fit the squat closet.

We are in the house, as if we never sold it. We are coming back to collect our things. The house is full of things we thought we had carried with us, but here they exist outside of time. But the cat is not here. Does death exist in dream-space? My father is here, overgrown and wispy, flitting in and out. My father’s belongings are not here. Death does not exist in dreamspace, and death exists in dreamspace.

My mother’s dolls stack and unstack themselves in motion like stop-motion. We watch them. Their colors swirl together in their cupped painted wood.

The curtains that came alive at night are here as barren shelving, populated by a stuffed thing here or there. The furniture is unlikely and undisturbed. When I open the drawers, I find plush soccer balls and basketballs. I pick each one up and squeeze its surface, and the process goes like this: I think I can cast it [End Page 146] aside, but then I spot its face—eyes and mouth agape, an experiment in representation—and I know it is mine, and I know it must stay.

The house had four bathrooms, and they were each completely a color. White, pink, blue, yellow. Even the toilets. Even the tiles. Even the tubs.

But we are traveling, aren’t we? We are deciding what we can carry when this representation begins to resent us. When the hallways fold on paper hinges, the upper floors turn to crawlspace, to cavernous bowls. The pink bath opens to the kitchen. The colors swirl together.

There, the cherry pitter mounted. The teeth about to strike.

When the house begins to fall down around us, we have to hold balls of yarn to our mouths to breathe. It is my job to roll the yarn. The balls get messier as I go. Sometimes, I just clot the mass from inside the skein together, wrap it a few times, hand it off, and begin again. Sometimes, they are all connected. We walk along, attached by breath and string. [End Page 147]

M. Mack

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet and fiber artist in Virginia, where ze co-edits Gazing Grain Press. Mack is the author of three forthcoming collections including Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and two chapbooks. Mack’s work has appeared in Fence, Adrienne, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014).

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