Saturday, March 11
THE FUTURE, WITH FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE First things first, it took the word for tangerine, leaving only orange to describe the contours of daylight. Some of us tried streetlamp to get at its softness. Others tried ballet slipper on pinker afternoons we grew too old to stay in past sunset. It came whip fast, moving northward through the mulch, bursting from the earth as a tiger lily or a warning, depending on where you were standing, a warning I heard and hid from under splintered lecterns, in the hearts and minds of lovers, anywhere it wouldn’t think to look. It stripped the very words from my books. Gone were parallelogram, cowslip, the plosive k in kite. It reckoned itself the king of me, swinging from the lowest declension of the tallest trees, shaking down the leaves I’d push from my shoulders as I trudged further into the fat borders of its country. It shoved my face into the ruby carpet of its plans: pesticides tearing through the belly of a honey bee, a bushel of oak trees swallowed by lakes of blue flame, whorls of cancer trellised over my bones. I only wanted the endlessness of this, followed by that, followed by some more of this, and decades more of that, but all I have is the oh no it’s gone I can squeeze between my fists. I wanted to be the tusk of a walrus, something that would continue to grow from me, in spite of me, something that could be distilled for its ivory, shaved down to the size of a pebble, shaped into the eyes our children will hammer into the statues they sculpt of themselves to make sure they live forever. (Matthew Tuckner)