SUN IN AQUARIUS: A STUDY IN OUTSIDERS - BY MAIA CRONIN
the alien in two halves
It’s happened again.
I’ve thought too long and too hard and
turned the world into an alien.
Green and plagued and dropping out the sky
to crush me;
like a rewind, it’s just happened again.
As a precautionary measure, I’ve taken my brain off the planet, but
aliens keep dragging me back
by my kicking heels and stubbed fingernails;
pulling me in their tractor beams
until I’m thrown up naked in the concrete square.
(a shattered pane of commercial glass, while
everyone gets mad about the holes in their heads)
Paved in an extraterrestrial sort of way,
I might grow through the cracks in the stone.
I’ve done it again; I’ve made my head strange
and put an alien inside,
built them a little wooden cabin just left of my frontal lobe.
Forgive me if my motor controls are compromised. I am a residence.
I’m shaking in here.
I’m going to jump out of the spaceship.
It’s a shame,
like I’ve always known ––
bones will break when I hit the ground.
the modern ghost
the first unfinished thing was the looking, where she found no lack of presence,
or found maybe too much presence ,
and a bowl of lemons, and a row of unplayed instruments,
arranged from viola to piccolo bass,
but didn’t find the body she had left, stuck,
between the walls.
In the spirit of a modern ghost
she had gone hunting for herself.
the second unfinished thing was the haunting, a repeated
noise, clapping in the back of the brain, not quite enough
to get a scream. By then, she didn’t have any skin. She meant
to say she didn’t believe in ghosts, but it just came out
that she didn’t believe in herself.
at first, she still felt solid, like a piccolo string, like a lemon,
like something difficult to pluck,
but the third unfinished thing was the oldness.
The old house, or being old in general, when she’d had no time.
Eventually, she softened out like fruit and learned the rules;
it was all a little bit lowlight slow, and smoother,
lit by jazz lamps.
the girl went pale in a stained sheet,
or else her skin went through like tracing paper: pencils,
if pushed too hard on her,
began to hit the next surface. Only haunting the attic,
or the computer room, depending on how modern
she felt that day, but there were always pencils around.
She went all full of punctures, and not quite
holding herself together, the way paper would.
the fourth unfinished thing was going through the objects,
which, to a ghostly mind, became bitter as old milk,
and which she slept in, like the turning point of lemons on the tongue.
The word unfinished always rolled too slow and she could only
read for three seconds at a time, like a goldfish.
she felt she was getting paler by the day. She felt
she was turning into lemons.
The fifth unfinished
thing
the medusa effect
it took one damp day and medusa drawn inky
on the cover of my book of myths, all wild in
the hair and the eyes, for me to realise i was
strange around life. i thought she was
beautiful, and then i thought, all at once
restless, how i was mostly aware of the brain
as a muscle, something i could train and
untrain, like a pet, like some snakes my
mother once owned and had given to me,
although i hated reptiles, but i have always
supposed that was another thought i could
train out of myself, like i stand in the mirror
and say my atheist prayers each morning, the
toes of one foot curled into the other ankle,
you will make it through alive, the world
won’t rip you up, and the training has not yet
worked, i sometimes do think in snakes, but
snakes i can watch from a distance, almost
curiously detached, as they curl around
lumpy frozen corpses of my sadness and
swallow them whole, ready to digest, and i
can think oh, the snakes are eating again, but
I know the snakes are maybe as not-me as
anything which lives inside my own head can
be, i sometimes think that’s what makes me,
the way i stare down at my sorry self from
the passenger seat of a ufo, uninvested even
in my own perverse problems and possible
suicides, because from space i watch it all in
a sort of positive light. weightless in zero
gravity. both being pulled, restlessly, into the
snakes that eat me alive, and all at once
knowing that they are not my own self, so i
can’t really blame them for biting.
i think that even medusa was only a girl.
the yeti
the girl is deep in yeti-grief
like it starts all big and furry and maybe
it could smother you to death, but also
it’s in a photo, blurry with water stains, and the yeti
is just walking out of the background, almost absent;
she’s grieving like something already half-lost.
she swears the yeti was real, but
the photo is going indistinct round the edges
and she's feeling a little bit bad. it was only taken
on a polaroid, and printed out square, not meant
to withstand elements, or show a clear image
other than a lot of hair, and the way the treeline stands
like an imposing force. blocking the last view.
her grief is leaving footprints like canoes
but she only has small feet; she’s maybe making space
out of nothing. she’s maybe not sure
if she's grieving after all. they weren't what you'd
call close , but it's a matter of generations, of regrets,
and how a yeti mates for life. apparently, in
the mountains they’re found wandering in pairs
for fifty-five years. like grandparents. like a pair
of socks that have been darned eighty-two times and
don’t have any of their first wool left,
but are still balled up together.
she didn’t get to see the yeti one last time. it was gone
in a moment; half a camera flash.
she keeps thinking of the strangest things, trapped
between trees. she’d been meaning to send that email.
she’d been meaning to write that poem about the
mountain range. and what will they do with the
photographs, the boxes of polaroids, because even
the ones where you can see nothing but canoes
shouldn’t be thrown out.
she knows she will never see the yeti again. she just wishes
she’d thought about that sooner.
maybe then she could have written the right poem.
the one about the mountains, instead of just the one about
the lost creatures that live on the sides.