- How to Be Conserved
Be broken almost, and male. This waythe metaphor is best, the body of the male a more susceptible surface for the work
of time and light. We sag. We matour hairy skin and begin, daily, that graceless way we have with decay. Be lithol red. Be Rothko's
1963 Harvard Murals and hang shamefullyin the Holyoke Center for decades then wait. Be ripped, spattered with food, and faded. Be removed.
Meet a girl on the Internet who tells you she's seen worse. Wearyour best jeans to the bar on Allen Street where you meet over drinks and decide to hide
your fractures and the blackstains in your lower left-hand corner, the unfortunate result of a shipping accident in the '70s. Tell her
the only joke you know. She will laugh. Askwhat she does for a living and listen as if you know nothing about traction crackle. About heartbreak and the bone
loneliness of a single color on its own. Be far from home and a little bittipsy. Get drunk. Tell her everything. Most of this she will have guessed already—the stress [End Page 50]
lines of your face as your failedrelationships, the particulate matter of your back as beauty's
refusal. Do not believe in love. Or believe in loveas something ideal and distant like Giotto's blood red O for the Pope, his perfect
circle of— Say it is almost closing time.Leave. Be cold. Be coatless and exposed. Walk her all the way home and when invited in say yes
but only for a minute. Mean all night. Meana life. Or let her drag the battered canvas of your body to bed. Let her
stretch it across the covers, each cleaved layer, and loveyou clean. See. Be the red she lets live. [End Page 51]
Christopher Kempf was born and raised in the Rust Belt. His work has appeared recently in DIAGRAM, Pinch, The Journal, and Sycamore Review, among other places. He is currently at work on a manuscript titled Historia calamitatum about the economic recession. Christopher lives in Oakland, California, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.