by Oliver Scialdone
the gallery of perpetual resurrection
the eyes in the wall move with me. their cellophane surfaces reflect an imprint of my image, oblong and industrial, strung up in the ghoulish shackles of my own impermanence. the observer produces me. my making is the making of surveillance, a different life born to each gaze that happens to catch the fuzziness of my bodies as they come into a sense of possessing mass and direction, fruiting creatures bound for disintegration once their purposes have been served. each resists adopting the servitude of the boulder who guards the tomb in the ways serpents resist flight and oceans resist fire, but when a past or present me declines to appease, all one thousand eyes fill the sealed room with their briny secretions and dangle the opportunity to drown on a crystal string. i must also decline this even though death loves me as i am. death does not care to manufacture and instead yearns to butcher me until it finds the beating core and dissects. it wants to crawl inside of me and wrap itself in my skin like a doomed hermit shielding from frostbite inside the fresh corpse of a bear. these walls have no clocks, but ticking rattles between the floor and the soles of my feet. the biggest eye grows bigger and teeth extend from the bottoms of its lids as it retreats back into its socket. i dread being shit back out. i don’t mind the devouring.
get in your cage
my mom always told me not to touch the halos that shimmered from the puddles between parking lines, and i definitely wasn’t allowed to take the prismatic tip of my finger and press it between my lips, even though all i ever wanted was to become one with the things that existed under our feet, to let them siphon me through their inky portals and spit me out into the maze where the gods keep glass shards and brutalist gum wrappers.
i’m crawling now. no word on how that happened, or why my knees are matchsticks. when i drag them, i brace myself for ignition.
cartoons taught me caverns would be wet; mineral water should drip and pool and crystalize, summon itself into the air and rip at the insides of my lungs and throat, grow legs and burrow between skin and muscle, calculating the probability of my suffocation as this great mouth poises to gag. but vapor doesn’t live here; this is a dust sauna, and the deeper i go the more hot wind blasts from the belly of the thing, whose identity and purpose remain as shrouded to me as the truth of why we make our beds just to mess them, or why anyone in this dimension bothers to wake up at all. why am i doing this again? i can’t find the halos anymore. i know a trap when i see one.
it's not a phase
cold friction writhes between me and the grid, line after line, intersections melting then freezing over in a mystified space. particles catch the sourceless light and dazzle—somehow they break even, and i can’t snag their microscopic forges from the air or shrink down and steal their weapons to sell on the black market. now i’m on one of those comic scan websites, and a pop-up swells across the whole page promising that if i click, i’ll get a full suit of armor, chainmail and all: i don’t have adblock for a reason. when i try to lock into the grid again it’s still cold, and even though i wear these mittens that make me look like an obtuse little baby my hands still get a touch of frostbite on the fingertips and knuckles, and don’t even get me started on the state of my face. my face has seen things—just not with my eyes. you won’t understand what i mean, but sometimes the inside of my brain splits apart and another kind of organ blooms open between the grey matter to aim its hollow sockets and blink at nothing. it doesn’t see either, but it knows and it shows me. it whispers through my nervous system and spreads tar along the way. i’m waiting for my suit of armor. i gave that guy my shipping address. maybe it will come to me. maybe then i can touch it.
****
Oliver Scialdone is a poet from Upstate New York. They live and work in Brooklyn.