Me's.

When I said I wanted a clone army, I really thought they'd all look just like me, except maybe a little thinner and outfitted in hundreds of matching Carmen Sandiego trench coats and heels. Looking back on it, I shouldn't have chosen the one geneticist that seemed a little sentimental, and I should have been suspicious when he asked for baby pictures and locks of hair and exhaustive lists of my hopes and dreams. I assumed that there was some kind of voodoo to genetics. I should have known. 

I mean, my clone army, they're all right. The six year old clone-me wakes me up in the morning and I'm getting fucking awesome at mickey mouse pancakes by now. Fourteen year old clone-me is a little bitch, but if I buy her cigarettes or listen to her talk about the Cure for a while, she usually settles. My eighty year old clone is this docile, fragile bird-person who only wants to sit by the window and mumble about Hegel, so she kind of takes care of herself. We have a big house, and I get a tax break for all the dependents. The 30-40 year olds all have mid-level management jobs, so that's a nice kick-back, and I'm pretty sure the 40-50 year olds will get over their mid-life crises and come back with my hybrid any day now. We have great game nights. I'm not unhappy.

But I can't say it's not a let down. They will never help me storm Serbia or tackle my  childhood enemies at the sound of a dog whistle. We are all goddamn altos, so we will never be able to sing Beach Boys covers and travel the world. To be honest, most of them don't even like me much. On our 22nd birthday, my only legit clone traded all our presents for cash and got reconstructive surgery, a new wardrobe and a $500 dye job. We call her Ingrid now. We argue about who forgot to take the trash out, but otherwise, we have nothing to say to each other. 

Painting by Paul Insect.

Merit.

The only merit badge I earned before I got kicked out of the girl scouts was the "senses" badge. As if we deserved a prize for being cuter than those little scouts without functioning noses or ears or eyes, for being able to tell which part of our tongues tasted the bitter in balsamic vinaigrette or which quarter had been stuck in the freezer or under the hot tap before we touched it. I could not tie my bunny ears or invert a teddy bear's skin to push in the stuffing, but I was, without a doubt, a card-carrying sentient being. 

So I took it seriously. I put my ear to the floorboards of the science room to hear the rattle of electrons inside their respective atoms, and I squinted, hard, into the off-blue center of the sun to feel that instant of fire before I glanced away, overcome by that moment when sight and touch fuse. And I remembered everything, years after I turned in my cookie sale sheets empty (sub-atomic sensation takes up your time). When I die, I will taste the blood in my mouth and thrill at the widening light over my retinas; when we kiss, I will hear your wisdom teeth descending into the velvet dark of your mouth; and I will smell it, that after-rain tinge that stains every molecule of air, after you've gone, or I've forgotten you.

Photo by Dorthe Alstrup.

Inches.

I've always stayed a certain distance away from death. Literally, it's been measurable; a scar three centimeters above my retina where the corner of a coffee table would have blinded or likely lobotomized me, six inches of asphalt and broken glass between my bicycle and the hood of a BMW hell-bent on the highway on ramp. I have been millimeters from ugliness and countless hypothetical paralyses, from exploding pyrex on a reddening stove coil and dodgeballs directly to the skull. 

So when I say I know how far away you are, I'm not just measuring those obvious, map-green miles now. I'm thinking handspans across my bed in a pathetic, year-old memory, of steps across a room whose air you took with you when you left. I'm plotting the minefield that might just be everything you say or touch or send me, and I'm waiting for the shrapnel flash,  or else an explosion of woefully avoided light. 

drawing by Mercedes Heinwein

[ps. sorry I have been so absent! working on longer things and helping little kids write their own things sorta took up all my energy for baby fictions. But I am back! Please forgive me!]

Exquisite Corpse

You don't know that you're in love with me until after the operation. Even then, it takes a while: coming around from the anesthesia, you alternate between calling me a gorilla-woman and a whore, but I know you don't mean it. It isn't until after that scallop-pink skin starts to stretch back over the wound and my kidney starts to settle into your guts that you start to realize it. 

So I ask you to do me a favor. You don't know that I'm holding the knife, but when I hear you say Anything, when I see the way you look at that severed finger, then at me, than back at that finger, I can tell you understand. 

It's your idea to bribe the doctor. It's your idea to trade all of our fingerprints next, then entire hands, until people double-take when they see the mismatched stalks of us growing from our shirt sleeves. By the end of the year, we're brushing each other's teeth in the bathroom mirror, glancing one another's eyelashes over our still-respective cheeks, touching one another in the dark and in the day and always, always. By the time we switch tongues, we don't care that we'll never taste again, that our mouths will probably never root these foreign muscles down and we'll never get to say each other's names. That first kiss is too exquisite to pronounce anyways. We'll carry notebooks or get Stephen Hawking machines, learn how Mimes say I love you.

Photo by Roman Singer.

Rabbit Holes

The thing is, when I miss you, the walls bend. I'd say it's an acid flashback, and I'd probably be right--at least, you're stirring the same soupy, primordial part of me, dislodging the same sentences from billboards and broadcasting the same shadow behind everything. It's not constant, and it's not even really all that bad. I've had some good times that way, willing the stucco on the ceiling to grow a hundred humming faces, hallucinating your dumb accent over the subway announcer's neutral vowels. But there is a time and a place for this shit. There are three particular songs, and the cold side of the bed, but otherwise, I'm sealing up the rabbit holes, giving up this seventh-grade style recreational longing: drinking, yes, and probably a lot. 

Jeff Koons made a giant puppy out of flowers and I think that is okay.

The Church of

I've never been much on religion. But there's this tribe in Africa whose ritual masks I saw in an art museum once, and I guess once a day they sacrifice a jaguar just so they can absorb its psychic death energies--that is really what the museum plaque said, by the way, "psychic death energies." Isn't that great? 

But where was I going with this. Jaguar sacrifice. I mean, I think there's something to that--not the animal cruelty part, really, or even the sacrifice part, but that reverence for death. The last time I watched a starving man play saxophone for change on the street, I kind of coughed in his general direction and hoped he would translate it into what I meant: I am sorry, I would tell you I had no money if you had asked, but really I do and I'm saving it to take this girl out. I saw my dog die once, too, and I'm still guilty about how little inner turmoil I felt over it. He just sort of yawned, but with his whole body, and eventually his soul just crawled out with the breath and that was that. 

I'm starting my worship tomorrow, in this church of Anonymous-African-Tribe. When I wake up, I'll go straight to the mirror and try to see it: the absent stab wounds and eventual IV scars, nostrils, mouths. I want to think on where my soul will escape, to plot out the places where I will pour out of myself. I want to be teeming with something, and if I'm not, I want to damn well know it. 

Photo is Denis Darzacq again, surprise!

#4

I saw my apartment in an action movie the other day, right behind a half-naked anorexic assassin and her unwitting protege. And I kind of liked that--the unwitting protege used my ATM, he stooped to tie his shoe on my stoop!--so I started crashing movie sets and impersonating a set dresser. So far, Angelina Jolie has simulated intercourse with Antonio Banderas on my 500-thread-count sheets, at least one of the Olsen Twins has blown-dry their hair with my blow dryer and when Haley Joel Osment found the water-logged photo album that revealed his true paternity in that stump in that one movie, the photo on the second to last page was--wait for it--my sister's fuckin' third birthday party. BAM.

I mean, I've never really had any designs on fame, and I'm about 90% sure that the ozone layer will implode sooner rather that later and fuck whatever half-sentence I've got in the annals of human history. But Mary Kate and Haley Joel and all of them, they're gonna go too, and who do you think the Martians that harvest our half-incinerated celluloid will give a shit about? The squawky little blond getting her throat torn out by a zombie front and center? Or the subliminal message in the dust cloud, the suicidal flying monkey's corpse hanging off the light rig in the background, my toaster oven, bathrobe, and if I get ballsy, my naked blur, a flash so small that there must, there just must be a reason why universe remembered it?

Photo is Denis Darzacq, again