THE COPPER INTERIOR OF ONE CAVE IS MUCH LIKE ANOTHER AND ALSO WHOLLY DISTINCT
What, hiss the fauns, does the interior taste like?
The Six Bitch stands up, reaches toe and hoof
into sleepy moss, reaches tips and tentacles into
the canopy, holds two red beetles carefully between
her front teeth, so slick
and with her tongue low-electric ties the beetles in a bow.
Copper, she says, spitting the bow into her palm.
copper like blood or copper like medicine
Both, she says, and the sea. She remembers salt,
swaying grasses, tide tug. Cupping the muzzle
of the nearest faun, she adjusts the bow behind
one velvet tender ear, one ear whose tufted fur
shows the smallest wind a door. It can taste
like a place from what they call the past, an era
preserved in the act as much as the script. Silk.
Smoke. Creosote. Limestone. Time’s own musk.
THE UNICORNS ENCOURAGE A HUMAN CHILD TO ADD A HEAD TO TIME’S ARROW
A human learns to move through time by slitterbanding
through the birth canal. A hummy returns to their first-breath
coordinates, reaches a dry arm down through wet years,
through the gel that cushions those years, gel beading
the hairs of that arm, hairs going blade, muscles going lax
and longer, giving up the joints, ligaments sighing loose until
it reaches into the rat king’s nest. A hummy’s hand arrives face first,
ribcage second, reaches so deep into skin knot and lung field
that the hand itself grows a tail where once was arm. The fur,
the gel, the possibility of returning to a place that blows the mind.
Stand, hum, between arch mirrors—
a century high apiece, and copper
and dripping
—facing face after face of that day from which you came.
a sharp hat like a rat’s face perched on the hum’s head
round of face, rectangular, potato and cloud
a wet candle swimming in a glass with the cake knife
a frosted knife for cutting sweet things deep