Irregular Plurals, and Elegy with Pyre, Match, and Father

Irregular Plurals

A pile of sticks bound for the pyre— it’s easy to forget faggot is already plural.

Every plural scissors its singular.

Everything pieces back to one, the problem of oranges and orchard, the problem a cut apple spits out to its seeds.

Example: the plural of story is history.

I is ad infinitum. The plural of thinking is feeling. My problem is the article I read yesterday about the window and the boy. I’ll come back for them. I’m sorry

I can’t stop a thing from accumulating.

Add an s, an es. Archaic, how we think adding more makes a story bearable. The plural of broken is suicide. The plural of string is harping, just as the plural of hand is jobs. Shiver of. Quiver in.

There is no one pleasure when words fail.

This is true of pain as well, and that is the plural of epiphany. It feels monstrous to be saved more than once, so the plural of we must be Jesus. The plural of I was raped once is every day after. The plural victim growing inside me.

Garden proliferating past its seed.

Think of the sixteen-year-old boy, jumping out of the building’s fourth-story window, limbs seeking singularity, jumps the moment the john—tenth that day—unties the restraints that keep him the plural of bed. Cruelty is its own plural. It makes me glad to say he survived, that boy is somewhere breathing,

making my lives shudder into focus, all too clear.

Elegy with Pyre, Match, and Father

I write to make a place where fire can’t exist. But mourning can’t outmatch the force of chaos.

It’s grief that puts us right. Over the grave, Mother, rip your dress, let black rent lace do what he cannot: exist

in tatters. Let them rain down now, the furious prayers that glaze the body, a blessed gasoline. Fire is an existential

riot against our fathers. But even ash can burn farther. Smash the vase on the mantle. My father doesn’t exist

except in memory. I make and remake him (write and wrought) in such extinguishing language. You don’t exist,

this poem says to Death. Exile me from my body, scatter I into lowercase. My body also wants to unexist

itself. Erased to a pair of hands rubbing together for warmth, a fireplace voice choking out in smoke, Don’t make me exist.