Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions
A young scientist discovered me. I think it was 1895. Just before the horses left the street. When men circled the sidewalks, not quite tamed. It was a beautiful time like a register you can’t hear, a purple ray accessible only to bees. When he found me I was between two planes of glass. It was pleasant to be observed—to see myself as he saw—almost like a dentist gaping into the spectral maw. Sometimes he wore goggles or suddenly turned away to sink an 8-ball into the corner pocket. The game of billiards a relaxation for him and a way for him to test his theories of me against something random. When he made the break it was my favorite sound. Comforting to us both that from a little crack wild trajectories are probable. To return to the speculum—I mean, to speculate—he opened space in me where the stars could go to die—the whole in me was so massive.
Season of the Swinging Detective
Drainpipes clamor & my heartbeat echoes through the daydreaming, day-dying Whitechapel alleyway. See how he pulls me to him so we both are drenched in sewage. Wait. I am trying to hold my liquor while I tell you how the mutilated body on display was just like me. Ground down under the heel of so many gazes. Coat and shoes. Personal effects gathered in plastic baggies. All precisely aligned. We are both so neat and tidy. Pupils blown. White flecked mouth. For the record, I omit the way I imagine his mouth as it leans down to kiss my lifeless body, my blood erupting down his throat. I am added to the whiteboard with other victim photos. All women arranged chronologically. In the post-mortem they open my ribs with a crack. This body so dark inside opens its story as a thing hauled outside itself—so messy and the smells.
To Catch Keep and Breed
Chill air crisped the outlines of commuters making their way back home. A small pool of intimate light waiting for them at the end of the day. They looked so alike. One man, his gait a wrought iron fence. That graceful. Not like that other one, a flamingo waltzing down the street. Sometimes a love story continues differently. But they all end the same. Can love be brought back by asking the right questions? Upwards the moon begins to tilt off course. How frayed the next morning was. And when he. And then he. Whose voice was it that made me go home? Whose voice made me want it? Voir vous. Don’t you think everyone has this. To have some control over events we brag about consent. Each love story continues differently, rainwater running and running until it lightens into evaporation.
Christine Scanlon is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She has a collection of poems, A Hat on the Bed (Barrow Street Press) and poems published in Adjacent Pineapple, Dream Pop Press, Flag + Void, and Punch Drunk Press, among other journals. In a past life she was co-curator for the NYC reading series, Readings in Color.