Excerpt from Hoodwinked

 

Remember It Wrong

"Everyone’s memory is subjective. If in three weeks
we were both interviewed about what went on here
tonight, we would both probably have very, very
different stories."
                              —James Frey on Larry King Live

"My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my
cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen
nearly shut."
                  —James Frey, from A Million Little Pieces

But I was there, 12C, window seat, and there
was no blood anywhere except the blue kind
making blue roots under the skin of our wrists.
From what I recall his teeth were all present,
ivory and symmetrical, one pristine incisor
flushed against the next like marble tiles.
Teeth other teeth aspire to be. I saw no hole
in his cheek but a razor nick or new pimple,
some red blip on his otherwise unblemished face.
Boyish. Babyish, even. The only holes
were the two he breathed from and the one
called a mouth that demanded another pillow,
headphones, club soda, more ice.
His nose was intact, straight as the tailfin
dividing the sky behind us. There was turbulence,
the plane a dragonfly in a windstorm.
My cup of Cabernet sloshed, my napkin bled,
a bag rumbled in the overheard bin like a fist
pounding inside a coffin. I was calm, I fly
all the time, but the man in question
was quivering and paler than a hardboiled egg.
Eyes swollen open, eyes skittering and green.
Or brown or blue. Memory is a murky thing,
always changing its mind. Interview me again
in three weeks and maybe I’ll remember
his wounds, the way my grandmother
gradually put down the knife after she spread
butter on her napkin. Slowly the disease worked,
slowly erasing slowly what her brain slowly
recorded over the slowly decades. Memory
is a mysterious thing, shadow of a ghost,
nebulous as the clouds we pierced on our descent,
Chicago revealing itself in my little window
like dust blown from a photo of someone
it takes you a moment to recognize.

 

Moose in Snow

A moose is born, his legs
unfold and wobble
beneath the weight of himself.
He grows, roams the fields, his antlers
sprout into empty hands.
Then the sky drops
snow, a meadow
fills with whiteness
the moose trudges through,
his breath in the Montana air
cobwebbing. A man
raises his camera
and the moose materializes
in the blood light of his darkroom.
A painter finds the photo
and squeezes out
titanium white, burnt umber,
works the brushes until
he has the snow-stippled coat
just right, and the visible eye
looks like the night
standing behind a peephole.
There are reproductions, rollers
spin in a print shop
and its moose moose moose
descending on itself. One man
buys one, hangs it
with a frame in his sunny office
where his patients come
troubled, medicated, and I
explain to him this heaviness
pulling down the length
of my body, scalp
to soles, cells and all.

 

The Body You’re Suited-up In

The night peels the sun like an orange,
swallows it wedge by wedge. Come dawn,
the sun will rise again for you, bronze

and blazing. You take this for granted,
and this and this and this. There were days
when seize the day worked, when uttering

the phrase was an epiphany mint
sweetening your tongue. Now you might
as well be saying seize the hammock.

And the skull you keep on a cluttered desk
wearing a toupee of dust, how it functions
more as a paperweight than a reminder

the body you’re suited-up in is a body
death is slowly unzipping. What you need
is another slogan, another memento mori

to replace that skull. May I suggest
an X-ray of your chest Scotch-taped
to the kitchen window, that every morning

you study closely your heart, caught
like a child’s balloon in the branches of ribs.
Ghost-pale, as if turning to dust. Which it will.

 

Mosh

My knees are her knees
are his knees.
Same goes with elbows.

We shove collectively
where the wave
says to shove, knowing

it will roll back to us
more furious.
Heat from our bodies

rises eye-level,
our shirts sodden
and holding skin

like leaves to sidewalk
after a downpour.
How lovely the one

crushed beside me,
her slippery arm
flush against mine.

When spotlights
burn yellow, so do we.
Blue, ditto.

Now she’s towed
to the outermost ring
by circumstance

as strobes of white
turn the whirling
mob off and on—

a wheat field
windblown beneath
blasts of lightning.