“Pieces”

“Atom”

And from where did those atoms come, which split? Scraped by a scientist from a coffee table, plucked from bone marrow, taken from old dust, which is skin, which is us. Extracted from a geode that has known with its indifferent permanence the aching of life as it spread and shrunk like a heartbeat on its surface. Which space in the universe is now empty, where God had ordained in all his wisdom that there should be an atom flittering about?

Two great holes in Japan, but somewhere, some much smaller holes, from a speck that has cycled and recycled beyond the sense of normal time, that was an ancient remnant of the world’s beginning, caught excitedly in the whirlpool of a new planet. What is your fate now, atom, but of everything you’ve ever been, to be squelched like an immortal soul into your entrails? Now we know that if the universe collapses one day, when it is reborn, there will be less of it. If their wise men, at the same rate, continue to cast atoms into the void, then in a very distant era there will truly be nothing left at all.

“Sulfur”

A utopia is a place where we can see the blood that pools from every crack in every building in the United States, that we can smell the ghosts whose burning bodies hang in the air at each juncture, that we do not pretend we do not breathe this air, do not pretend this air is not a part of us. A utopia is when we fear every day that the scent of tortured ghosts will grow stronger, will someday make the air hot and deep and unbearable, to know that there will never come a day where the air will turn fresh again, that true innocence only existed in the moment after Eve bit the apple of knowledge and before Cain took a stone to his brother. A utopia is to know that scars will never heal, that the Spartans burnt Troy three thousand years ago and every historian still winces and shakes at the memory of the fire, still see the mangled bodies and the burning shrines. Walk through a dead city after a millennium, after five millennia, and know the empty pressure of the ruined and the crippled is woven into the dirt, is in a world beyond, even irrelevant to forgiveness. Our Japanese-Americans remember being treated like the enemy in their own country. Our natives still live in the lands we forced their ancestors into at gunpoint. And slavery is a huge, twisted cyst on not just the people we inflicted it upon; it lies on every American back, infecting all of us in different ways, ways we might not care to know. What new thing are we going to do that we won't apologize for for another hundred years?

The world is lonely in its majesty, all things are a distraction, an affectation of human need. Millions of years of evolution only bequeathed us a structure of happiness, a framework, but this structure, the flowering expansion of all consciousness, love, pain, hope, fear, all an occurrence, possesses formation only due to the carefully whittled, finely clumped absurdity that exists beyond a ghost of human understanding. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur came together on the head of a pin, six tiny objects, and something moved, something spread, and the world's pandemic was unleashed with no-one to infect. So simple, we must now have machines that do more work than this progenitor, but it wasn't stopped, it grew and breathed and had a thought. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur, a chemical reaction, like a button that powers a winch, like a toothpick that falls on its side, a side effect of a universe that had never had a ghost rubbing its numb fingers together. A mechanism to think, a mechanism to think it had a thought, a mechanism to think about thinking thoughts that it's thinking, but it's not magic, it's not God, it's just carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. When we hate, when we fall in love, when we feel the urge to protect or be selfish, it's carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. When we fish together with our mothers, when we run through the city like the rain will never stop, when we smell the pillow of a loved one that won't return, when we're alone, when we're afraid, there isn't anything there, anything at all, except for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur.

“Dance”

When Amber first began to dance, before she saw her first lizard curl to stillness beneath the cherry trees, before her mother was kicked by the horse and lost her unborn sister, before her father moved them all to Korea and made her lose her friends, before her mother could only ever speak in harsh whispers, before her Dad took her to the work retreats, before the long induction ritual where they branded her name into her foot, before she saw everything that was her father get washed away into a watery silver, before her father ran away and left her there with her mother, before she gave up trying to save what was left of her mother from Adam’s milky head and voice and posture, before she was sixteen, and fighting against the walls of a padded cell, before she was twenty and finally broke free, before she was living in a barn for a year without the farmer knowing, stealing from the slop to make her stronger, before she looked into the mirror and saw strength in her anger, before she returned to the cult under a new name with a secret poison, before she became Adam’s most trusted lieutenant, before she discovered the weakened exhaustion of his paranoia and made him trust, before she used that trust to slip him a pill in his tea that made him and his whole empire crash down, before she took the crown of his doctrine and phased it out until the members regained their self-awareness and left in shame, before holding onto her mother’s shoulder as she finally felt regret and reminding her who she really was, before all of that, dancing made her feel like she could be anyone, anywhere, doing anything, and never get lost.