Dragonflies, and: The Dreamer Is the Subject of the Dream, and: Epistemology of the Phone Booth

DRAGONFLIES

When the baby pudges with her saggy pumpkinface, and I think maybe it’s her mouth she’s gotaround some gewgaw from the floor, I wantto pry her trap open, but she won’t budge. It’slike her lips are sewn shut in some horror flickaffliction, which is so freaking cute I wantto Cookie Monster her entire head. She gets itfrom my side, her mouth almighty, for I’vebeen known to show less sense than appetite.Pop claimed I used to hum in protest the final barsof the Marseillaise or at least that’s what heheard when, attacked by “dragonflies,” as hecalled it—the kind fictive as the boogeyman,bodies like candle sighs stitchingshut the pie holes of chatterboxes and tattletales,having mesmerized the brats like flying spoonsof tapioca—I used to zip it as if I had Houdiniin there or like my tongue was busy putting boatknots in phantom maraschino stems. Boy looks likea monkey on a cupcake! the old man would say, noneof which rings a bell, but he swears it’s true, my face.I must have worn that foolish burden to death asevery hunger in our house was second to his,my old man fearing, perhaps like Goya’s Saturn,his dominion’s decline, and though he’d taunt me,I’d refused to let him see me beg.            O dragonfly, familyodanata, bug named for teeth, I think maybe you’renot symbolic of my lack. I say maybe you’rethe cure, a kind of iridescent Epi-pen, O eaterof honeybees. I too divulged a bee once, brunching a fruitcup on a terrace. I spit that shit in my napkin, the bee.Barely swelled, nary a flare or had I felt it whisperpinchas does the dentist’s prong when he jiggles my faceto pierce the buccal beneath my gum, I rinsed with a Bloody Mary and made like nothing ever happened. I’m so cool,you don’t know how cool.Once there was nothing I wouldn’t rub against myteeth and gums, til I saw a mother chew her infantdaughter’s apple for her, and it hurt, seeing the way she lovedthat child, knowing how I can’t bear to kiss my own kidswith this mouth.

THE DREAMER IS THE SUBJECT OF THE DREAM

            When I die,I want my survivors to bind my books in the skinfrom my body, the volumes (my ova! my oeuvre!)housed in that tissue scribbled with the moonshine of my stem cells, genetic picaresques inwhich I rescued my children fallen down the wellof adverse dreams and bedtime stories likethe one in which I vanished at a crowdedcounty fair, and, with payloads of cotton        candy, resurfaced like a bucketof Chilean miners pearlescent with the sugarylight of coral silt and ancient stars seenlast by bog boys and girls returned to uspast remembering, skin taut as canvas, hairpressed by millennia in the soggy peat. Myself,I’d rather an afterlife care condo beyondthe edge of language where I can strumunplugged, at one with nature, in and of it,ever swarming, file-sharing character fragmentsall my beloveds can torrent. Unlike myunmusical dad, who now survives in texts on my phone,who refused my rescue and chose to die alone,far from family—unlike him,            I will never leave my kids.And if I do, I’ll be back, not on the regular per se,but when I see they need me to reteach them theirloveliness, and remind them of our rush hourcommutes home from school when the G trainwas a packed cavity, and the big kid sleptagainst my shoulder while the younger mustardseed pawed awake the solar system lamped in pixelsthe two buck app we downloaded from iTunescontained—that time that she was all like wait, but...