June 2017, Issue #5
Making Kin: Part II

i.)
Zygote, you are my favorite not-quite-person
to talk to, though at times I’d rather swoon
through quill mums, rangy smoke alarms, or quiet’s
naked palms. Is language anguish-gauge or laughing gas?
Correct answer: yes. I’m not gonna shit you. The queerness
of personhood’s something to not quite get used to––pits
to mark ears; eyes, dark blots. Heart’s intellect. Perhaps like you,
I tell myself that everything about the world is movie,
and everything that moves within is world. Still, to honor
your sand-silt kinship, I’m starting to pat the earth down
with both forearms just for some new perspective. Dust nit.
Poppy seed. Iris mite. Jot off life’s manicure stick:
You are one glad-ass act of insurrection. Of joy’s terrorism.
The lilac vestige of linking’s musicianship.

ii.)
What kind of being is Zygote larger than? So glad you asked:
Those dried brine shrimp, that group of crustaceans
which go into sleep-states just to be sold
in hatch-kits as fishbowl pets. AKA: sea monkeys.
Supposed to be able to fight, play baseball and rise
from the dead, though you hardly can see them—
even with X-Ray specs. Zygote, in our age thinking is seen
as a lump of cold lotion, mostly a thing
too mutant-dreamy to do. Do you bereave me? Would you
agree to the use of cookies? Don’t you just hate
when the no-good knuckles over the truth? Give me
your nevermore hand: Let us become oblong
sans-nation transitionals, like those lobe-finned fishibians
in the Canadian Arctic, which evolved to all fours
while living in waters next to the Nansen Sound—upon which hoof-smack’s
music moves us nonstop: the Peary Caribou. The jutty
muskox.

iii.)
Zygote, sometimes you want to just take the tone of the world
down, scrape the pomp off the circumstance, stop
the marketplace-micrometeorites’ fall
across all the black and blue trees. Life Speck, that’s why
I live here, in mind’s lining. The me there is you-sized. The you there,
wearing my niece’s body, is spec life—a good enough
state of anxiety to throw down a party. Today is the Feast Day
of Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, patron of the poor. Mother
of the underseen: First ever Canadian declared to be a saint.
We’re closest to those we’re trained not to see:
the working dimeless. Denizens of charnel ground. Marine algae.
The filmy stout infant fish. Dust nests smaller even than this:
I spy your one little eye almost leaving… I see things
because I’m unpaid to. Because I’m a teacher at Who University.

iv.)
Spec kid barely post-blastocyst: Okay. I’m not gonna fib.
Life’s going to try and turn
you into its bitch, biological sex notwithstanding.
And while we’re at it, every mother
always already serves as the head
of a nation. As for this particular planet:
it’s one round-backed guitar
you frisk to tension-test for metaphor.
That’s it. Power enacts us into being.
To persist in our persons means
we give over to terms never wholly
our own… This gets me feeling spasmodic.
Makes me want to peck at five species.
Each day’s a flown bunting. A knife-line.
A breakage: the self on the one hand,
a cellphone, the other. 


… viii.)
Even as now the collective brain’s
migrated
to spectacle pit,
World decked out
in permanent warfare suitsits plague of blue angers,

its bland resplendent bursts of
personhood-arson. Redeem this

blowkiss as one type of TSA Pre–
Check swipe on your not-yet-a-
barcode. Mwah! and Namaste
anyhow, Not-it-nigh-kid, ‘cause
we merge in verse.
Now then. Are you of a mind to try on
this tight little fish skin?
Pray-telling is poetry’s birthplace. Do.
Would you
rather real-life swim
or live-stream?


Last question. Answer please
in heaped first-person Earth:

Perfection of the life
or of the work?