j a c k b o e t t c h e r |
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from Illuminated Manuscripts |
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Hyperengorged, I like to alert the media when the shadows of warring bodies touch. When I was famous, a spiral of my erythrocytes were photographed for Ladies Home Journal, and that’s why I was famous (when the miracle turns up as coincidence, the dispossessed scatter glass over the sidewalk of the shops, catching sun). Often the architect’s hands loom before her like shackles, no longer strictly needed. Loop the recording. The mystique of the parking garage, no longer strictly needed. The overpass reeked of guano. But then you weren’t supposed to be outside your car. Often the architect’s nightmares involve visions of the Panopticon. Notations toward an almanac: 80 degrees, January the third, pale deer tensed in the drainage ditch glimpsed from a speeding vehicle. Far view of the suburb’s olive hills (color alone), wires wound about the city limits. I woke and felt good in my sweat. Like kilowatts in a teakettle. In hard times, an aesthetic based largely on repetition. But then you weren’t supposed to be outside your car. I followed the trail of invertebrates out to the tiny garden below the bamboo patch. She’d unearthed the seeds from their beds on a hunch. She’d left town and briefly occupied the unincorporated territory 35,000 feet above me. I hiked to the top of the parking garage to admire my celestial terrain. |
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Sparse clouds pass high and powder blue over the boy, pressing their shadows into the deeps of his retinas. It’s true this can only be evinced from the girl’s perspective. Goldbugs twitch at the edge of the tobacco. From here the state highway curves off toward the abandoned sanitarium like a slug trail of a thought. South central Kentucky or Missouri, gentle blurs of hills. They lay in a depression of clover not far from the road. Their television: whoever said this and whoever said that. Internationally cognizant. They heave it into the smoking ravine. Where will they go from here? The weather is perfect, or sunny and hot. The girl watches as the boy delicately unfolds his four local maps of sleep, phyla, myth, and bounty, and through a sort of gnosis called ownership tries to stitch them all into one. |
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JACK BOETTCHER is the author of the chapbooks The Deviants (Greying Ghost Press, 2009) and Surveyic Hero (Horse Less Press, 2007). His poems and stories are published or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Fence, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and several other journals. He lives in Austin, Texas. |
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