arlene ang

(a) With Collapsed Lung

As in, holding a bat by its feet. As a study in attachment, I have resorted to a wooden arm. Thirty-six stitches bring the face into focus. I am sitting sideways with one leg shorter than the other. I am a passage of distortion. The chair, pushed against a blue door, is covered with scars. The unswallowed pill whitens my lips—a weakness similar to the living when they come back for the dead. Fire and water are eating different paths up the green skirt. All this skin is a mask; all organs, lesions or birth defects. On the ground, snow without its globe or the city famous for its snow. A chest tube between my second and third ribs juts out, like a smoked cigarette as it turns away from the burden of light.

(b) Using Sky and Poison

Language. The objects and their order around the body. Signs of freezing fill the sky. For example, portions of a biplane that are cut off from view. For example, solar eclipse. The skirt slashed to receive the scorpion. I have enemies, my eleven fingers raised to count them: the thirst, the club foot, the distance between the gesture and the meaning, the branchless trees in the horizon. There are bruises on my face—a family of four—and a barbed wire to separate the eyes from the mouth. Around my neck, a string of black origami cranes disappears into the green bodice. The lace is gelatinous, indicative: this is the outdoors: ice melt and the ground turning so dark it is the shadow of a corpse about to hit the soil.

(c) Variations on Pressure

Memory is the entry wound, involved but unseen. A lightbulb sputters in the presence of moths. On the wall, a fire escape twisted into a flower. My feet dangle. As the body's distance from the ground increases, the hemline appears to shrink in perspective. I have birthed a dead thing again. My legs cling hardest to the embryonic fluid, their toenails either painted with daisies or torn out and replaced with stitches. On the floor, a green bottle spills a shudder of moon; one black shoe is empty and lies on its broken side. I have the face of my thumbprint: proof that oil paint feels anguish before it dries. A meat hook exits the left breast—the tip dulled by heart tissue, like a wrist being licked of salt.

(d) That Which Shapes Rainfall into Individual Entities

First the fruit fly, its entrails conjoined with the skirt. Then the larvae—intermittent white embroidery on green fabric. The evening cups the alley in the manner of someone eating a pear with both hands. I have a pair of scissors. I have a pair of goat horns on my head—and a blue bowl that collects and brings water closer to its image. The neck is whispered in snakeskin tattoos. On the ground, dissected rats with their feet in the air giving instructions on how to reconstruct the human body. I am perched on a yellow hydrant. My lips are invisible, washed away by light from a keyhole. There is no way out. I have taken my hair down. From a distance, the drizzle communicates a barcode structure. A birdcage.

(e) Unfinished, But Not Without Mutation

The lake is a spoon is a fish belly is a coil of plaited hair. With the eyes removed, dark stains bore through the gauze around the head to indicate a previous awareness of eyes. The tripartite beard is both alien and incorruptible. I am wearing black lipstick. And here, the landscape becomes dangerous. The elms have been replaced with fetuses. To reprocess animation inside the stillborn, the edges of their smiles have been stapled to their cheeks. I am a door a submerged city a denotation device with blue buttons. This is the body as it will be found: attired in formal green, serene and geometric, strapped to a skeleton, my arms transformed into miniature arms inside the beaks of winter birds, feeding.