Hypothetical Hole by Mara Cregan

HYPOTHETICAL HOLE Isaac Monroe

The bird’s-eye view abstracted from the bird. Cover me, says the soldier on the screen, I’m going in. We have the sense of being convinced, but of what? And by whom? The public is a hypothetical hole, a realm of pure disappearance, from which celestial matter explodes. I believe I can speak for everyone, begins the president, when I say famous last words.

Ben Lerner, [The bird’s-eye view]

Hypothetical Hole DISCONTENTS ALONE AT THE END

PUBLIC LOVE LETTER /FUTURE READY?/

MODERN DAY EXPERIMENTS IN PUBLIC EXECUTION HYSTERIA

TREASON

THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE

THE PIRATE DREAMS OF INVISIBILITY

LIGHTENING BROTHER

HARDWOOD

PRIVATE RELIGIONS (THREE TANKAS)

I MISS YOU, I’M SCARED

I HAVE IT HARD (THAT’S A LIE) CLOSING REMARKS (THE PRISON DOOR SPEAKS) AT THE PARADE WE SAW

25 27

ALONE AT THE END

Begin apocalypse movie montage: Rescue helicopter heroically navigates a crumbling Los Angeles— You imagine your neighbor in the wreckage left behind, it took Armageddon, but he has finally turned his music down. Screams crescendo up Hollywood boulevard and get lost in a cacophony of snapping support beams— How will language fail you after the crest? When all you have to say is ‘Its been…’ and ‘These are the things I have come to see as truth…’ Everything ends unfinished with a crater widening on Main Street. in the descent it’s all seen as inscrutable. History remains, an empty howl on the lips of a crater. Flesh pounds flesh; bodies climb atop each other all looking for something other than hot gas and raw lung— You wonder why it is always Hollywood to fall into the pit first. As if to say, it started here, in your imagination. If there is no repopulation project, no action hero sauntering out of the abyss, if there is no republic to rise from the rubble, then tonight your silence will mean nothing other than sleep.

PUBLIC LOVE LETTER

These utterances are unexplained. The screen of pain in the back of your throat will stretch out to the brink of your lips’ alleluia, and for the first time see, and be seen; a shimmering scream. Amazing grace how sweet the sound— People pass graces through car windows and caged storefronts, wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine, in sleek black-‐ box containers, or bare and bleeding allovertheplace. Thrown off the tops of city trucks and police cars and fire engines they scatter with ubiquitous goodie-‐bags stuffing their pockets and sniggering in the hour I first believed— Grace, with her acrid green foot and crooked lip that dribbles no apology, will lead a million salt-‐shocked ships toward a home carved out of silence with burning copper scorching an arrow in the sky. We’ll want to hold all noise in a solitary cell, and make sure it doesn’t get any mail or medicine. A life of joy and peace— I was in the second grade when a boy two years older than me Shot scripture onto his bedroom wall,

with his father’s colt. This was the night before the 6-‐year anniversary of the world trade center attacks, and the night before the 6-‐year anniversary of the start of a public love letter written in fear and the need for someone to blame. A history recorded in the blood of The Orient. The next day in school we had two, long, moments of silence.

/FUTURE READY?/ TV hymnals preach a holy spirit of techno-‐colored shadows. It is Saturday night and I am alone watching the future blare itself into existence in 20 to 40 second clips of homegrown commodity fetishism. There is an alienation to this couch. A simulation to this stale smoke, these scattered detritus of lives tuned in. The Commercial starts and I am awaiting my cue to move forward. Hurdled millions of miles through expanding space on a planet paralyzed in its own progression. *** The scene opens up: mother and father donned in a whiteness impeccably pure. A digital alarm: Teaching you to panic. Manufacturing response. She wakes up in maternal fear, neurons fire images of ancient warfare, feminine fists pounding The Holy into place, evicting manspouse from dreams of unknown and exotic copulations. Springing to life, they share a look of knowingness older than life. Older than war. It is at this point that the sound of my heart beating is a fish writhing on the digi-‐linoleum tiling; inviting attention but begging me not to look. *** The girl’s vitals are projected from a wristband. Such a sterile way to realize the possibility of death, collapse. Smiling child, techno-‐messiah, sleeping through the first fingerings of suffering. At first glance one can only, as if by instinct, wish to keep her sleeping, stirring in the homogeneity of imperial dreams. But even empires wither, and this body is a future unforeseen,

maintained in subtle oscillations between prediction and control, atrophy and transplant, the now and the becoming. *** Sleek black edifices lined in rows, enlivened under white light, as if this is where the surgery goes down. The infrastructure of bodies and souls. This is where we simulate the pain that it takes to break you. This is the petri-‐dish where we keep your consciousness. *** The helicopter sputters into stillness on the roof of the hospital, propellers slice the chemical contents of time and history into a thousand gusty howls to be shattered on the civilized horizon just beyond. The cryogenic heart case is hauled out like a coffin. In the excitement, mother and father are nowhere to be found, waiting next to their dejected receptacle, unprepared for the methodology of maintenance, the latex covered precision of resuscitating a fiction in the shell of a daughter. *** I am lost in the intersections of screen and self flesh and pixelated flesh. In the hurricane-‐eye of corporeal dysphoria I collect myself enough to wish her gone. The girl. The only future seen as worth technological investment. I aestheticize Armageddon, see the future crumbling into glossy rubble, see beings stripped from sentinel programs, and bodies moving freely in possibility. A superficial grasp at interruption,

hope lost in the hierarchy of thoughts in this informatic. *** Nearly vomiting, cold light and colder media wash over me, and I have stumbled into the pantheon. Godly vivisectors rearrange tendons with sterile clamps and glinting scalpels. The girl is motionless under a sheet, prepped for reanimation. The heart is held up, enshrined in blue holographic halo, a prosthetic future in the shape of the past. Cardiovascular circuits shape organic pathways sending feedback transmissions through the veins of a rejuvenated body politic. *** The mother presses her ear to her child’s new chest. Thump, tick. Thump, tock. A breath, a decompression. Once again safety, once again, continuity. I go to sleep, future ready. Thump, tick. Thump, tock.

MODERN DAY EXPERIMENTS IN PUBLIC EXECUTION

Today the ghosts are screaming from every angle. They walk down the sidewalk, melt through innumerable doorways, clutter the streets with the voyeuristic gazes of the death obsessed. Snapshots of bodies at every fragile nod in any non-‐particular place; a leg dangling from a white venetian balcony, a hairy middle eastern belly protruding from a wall, a gaggle of sticky faced baby-‐children staring behind a pane of glass. Everyone madly sweating with the knowledge of your existence, enemy in war, soulless body from the other side. When you heard that brassy muttering coming from the shady corner of your black box consciousness all you really knew to do was reflect on the love this city once held. You mourn for its death and your soon inevitable death, and the way flowers were only beautiful in passing when you could brush your fingertips over their petals and imagine yourself sleeping on the shores of teleology with your body writ in only your own truth, and your history written as if you had never once dared to step outside.

HYSTERIA On the elevator you’ll wonder if we’re staring at your ass. You’ll feel the spectacle staged on the surface of your skin like a sharp salty blade. Our eyes slice out your role in tic marks on your chest and thighs. Your rage will build into fiery silence, as the elevator becomes an oven, slow cooking you till all we need is a touch for the meat to fall from the bone. The killing blow is your own: You’re just being crazy.

TREASON

Your consciousness will be uploaded onto a desktop. You’ll struggle with the inhospitable holy ground of megapixels and terabytes, scramble for some singularity promised in the fetish dreams of the death obsessed. Your body will be stolen from you for what you have done. Your soul, matriculated onto our million servers. You’ll breathe electric and dream panoptic and beg until we flip the switch.

THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE

1 Mathematics as we know it will be our demise. Once, we saw math with an absolute clarity, you could spell out the sunset, or comfort in the caverns of a lovers cheekbones, entirely in numbers. An algorithm solid and soft. Mind-‐body equations reverberating off of everything shaking halves into wholes. To each genesis its own undulating Armageddon; pristine and palatable. But then something went wrong. 2 You look good in the dress in the back of your closet. Your mother says it has reduced you to the wax of bees in an ancient Eden, a simulation, a sin. She is the only one you dared to show. 3 Descartes has never and will never know how to induce an orgasm. 4 I found the bodies, in the filing cabinets. 5 I’ve read the lost contents of Alexandria in the spit pooling in the curvature of my baby brother’s collarbones. I wonder if he’ll grow to resent the way his shoulders cut air like a dull blade, I wonder if he’ll learn to lose sight of his longing.

6 Life comes and goes like a stranger from the rain. All that you’ll get of it is sopping shoeprints in the shag and the inky imprint left behind on the couch. You’ll wonder, burying your face in the carpet, if this moment was determined since some ancient snapping of God’s fingers? And if it was; how could any god have known to breathe such pain into the gossamer flecks coming from the radiator? Such beauty in the TV’s techno-‐colored reflection on your watering cheeks? 8 If we were anything more than doomed, it’d be yearning. 9 If this is the truth I am scared and I can feel your heart tremor through this finger on this trigger.

THE PIRATE DREAMS OF INVISIBILITY After Terrance Hayes

In the dream I refract all light and find shelter in the air between two worlds. Scars of skin torn by hooks and shrapnel disappear, Marking my unwinding into loneliness. I break through the body to indulge sorrow with its wind and sails. Omnipresent, mast-‐less tongue, licking all wounds and wounded in that hidden place between breath and burning gunpowder, between your body and the door. I’m watching you as I have hoped to watch you— with your hair draped over the back of that chair like rapids carving stone and opalescent irises that peer straight into worlds where beauty and fear drink whiskey and shoot guns, aren’t stowed away in secret troves. In this locked chamber of your father’s lighthouse you’ve scratched ships onto brick with bloody fingernails. Each one sailed by a treasure hunter who never cared to dock on your island. I have come without a boat or body, With no hands to scour your maps of flesh and longing and fear.

No soot stained, skeletal finger to point to your deep crimson X marking soul. I can see you, waiting for archetype to hoist your anchor with a solid mannish pair of arms and, no longer buoyant, I watch your hopes grind to sand between Times’ fingers, sink to the endless ocean floor.

LIGHTNING BROTHER

Our little boy bodies grow into the pain we’ve appropriated from our father— a thousand inherited silences living in the tautening stress knots on our backs. We salve our wounds with yellow teeth and spit and dirt. Ameliorate pain with brutal intimacy. Cauterize a fresh gash with those empty apologies you’ve labeled love; watch it stretch into a lightning scar on the trunk of our family’s tree. //// At night I listen to you punch holes in the walls you’ve built around your dreams. I imagine your skeletal hand bleeding. When you’re gone, I’ll look through the holes and squint at the light seeping through. \ \ \ \ You teach me love on the trampoline. You teach me hiding the night our father leaves. You teach me hate when you lift my shirt and make me ask for the first punch. You teach me faggot the day I come home in nail polish, and I’ll relearn it every night for years. You teach me to spit salt sucked from a wound all the way across the street. / / / / You beat up Rusty on his trampoline

in the trailer park three blocks from our grandfather’s house. Blood runs through an elastic screen of tar, sifting rubies into dirt. Your knuckles are angry ghosts in the sun, beating white-‐trash out of his mouth and nose. I watch your sweat mix with the tears rolling down his cheeks and feel my masculinity, like a light-‐sport aircraft swirling and flipping up my throat. \ \ \ \ Air isn’t reliable, we hold it in our empty chests until we feel inflated, like cages without birds, balloons tied tragically to the ground. When I teach myself to cower in the dark inhospitable corners of boyhood you teach me to breathe in Blackness, and exhale White light. You teach me to call this normal, safe. You square my shoulders, lift my chin to make me look proud. I learn to love you, I learn to love this, without ever wincing once.

HARDWOOD Gallivanting around the third floor in nothing but a towel, Ian rips up the tack strips with a crowbar and mumbles some jagged, ungraceful melody under his breath. In the dust-‐clad balm, our sweat leaves gray stains on the walls with contact. These are the simple rites of weeknights. The silence that accompanies our flaring, sinewy muscles is an unspoken therapy. It’s as if I have secretly seen years of therapy. Sawdust and asbestos collect in the corners of my lungs. I cough into a towel, say that I’m okay. I’ll say I do this for the house, for the company. All the while his collar bones—two crowbars— puncture the ballooning atmosphere. We deflate and watch the walls exhale. I no longer fear the things that I take in on my breath, the words we’ve broken and forgotten beneath the floorboards, our breathing boyish shames grown into stocky young men under our feet. My therapy is a ceiling without walls, hemophilic words bleeding all over his mother’s new towels, formless and visceral. I wonder if he could use that crowbar (oh he’s so good with the crowbar) to break in to better company. The contours of our company blur as convalescence wavers on a single uneasy breath. Outside, the night’s femurs are shattered with a crowbar The pieces sprinkle and sparkle. We find therapy in a shared isolation. We wipe fog from the mirrors with a towel and look timidly into our vulnerability. Patriarchal prodigies, we build walls around intimacy. We seek perspective on opposite sides of these walls. Joking about starting a nudist carpentry company (I took a break to shower. Now I too am in a towel) there is a restraint on his breath. I feel the reticence he accredits to a “lack of therapy”. I wonder of all he can uproot with that crowbar. When I leave him I will cry crowbars And hammers and hacksaws. I will build four walls All with peepholes. I will sand therapy Off of the hardwood floor. I will reject the company Of strangers, learn how to dishevel the altruism on their breath. Too scared to check, I wonder if my knees are shaking underneath the towel.

Unsure on whether to invest in therapy or a crowbar, I swap the towel for pajamas and go AWOL In Ian’s sheets. Eyes closed, I anticipate the company of his warm, measured breaths.

PRIVATE RELIGIONS (THREE TANKAS) If this is divine— The crooked tree stooped over— I’m in God’s presence. Everything I have yet known will be buried with these roots.

The politics of killing everything you are with a hacksaw. This is my party’s platform: we want to build something better.

Here’s to the things found in the bathtub. That weird mole. sexuality. Diagnosis. Remission. Prune. Soaked in my own secrets.

I MISS YOU, I’M SCARED

He hopped a train to somewhere with arable love. Family, somewhere. This is his body. This is the gash left bleeding. These are his letters. “Riding in on top of the train. The border is a wound yet to heal.” “Riding on the top is hard. Them men aint as tough as they like to play.” “Yesterdays fall back. The future rattles on top of the train. More soon.” “The tracks hug bodies that couldn’t make the jump. I hope to evade them.” “These—my labor’s fruits? I don’t want to be hungry like campesinos.” “I love you but I will surely die here tonight. Tell the kids to smile.”

I HAVE IT HARD (THAT’S A LIE)

1 My friend is enthralled with the idea of colorblindness, he holds it above me as a looming example of his own tolerance. His skin is peachy white and it tells a story he would prefer to drown out. We have both been taught when the right time to cross the street is or when it’s time to put the new phone away based on who is walking down the sidewalk. A color-‐coded story of good and bad. A subliminal conditioning that sticks even after you fall in love with the black girl with the words that tear down civilizations. I understand how wrong this is. I have it hard, but that is a lie. 2 The story of my skin is lost to me. I have never gathered the strength to understand the connotations of pinkish olive undertones. I have left myself ignorant of my skin’s roots in my soul. I shelter myself from stories of insidious ancestry. My history has been neglected and has festered. I wonder if I can rightfully say that I have overcome it. 3 The sun has sunk neath Braddock Avenue like a bottle in the dirty river. My white skin is immersed in black night in a black neighborhood. Dilapidated houses, statuesque on the side of the road. Tonight not even the blight is colorblind. My privilege lights my path home, I come in and lock the door behind me and rush off to bed in a lightless house. I sob in my sheets for the peoples stories that I have so far neglected to read. I sob for every one I have stolen a room from.

Collecting myself, I let go of acquiescence And storm angrily into sleep.

CLOSING REMARKS (THE PRISON DOOR SPEAKS)

Let me explain the rain to you again; it’s pots and pans, the rusted playground from when you were a kid, the effigy of an old life. Can you get lost imagining what these sounds feel like? I have stayed up each of these nights watching you become negative space. Your fingers arrange themselves into slashes on the brick to help you remember how many years its been since you’ve last seen your daughter. Your knees buckle and legs break, contorting your body into a bunk bed. When the boots come around, as they always do, I can see the gangly, emaciated bodies of dreams evacuate your pores in every bead of sweat, a hot flash like someone’s last match going out in a dark uncharted cave. Everyday you come back and stitch together a new piece of skin, leave it in the square of light that comes from your window and wait for it to tauten and tan. Every day you run your fingers along the sutures of body and soul, metal and brick, discipline and c a n n i b a l i s m. You curse the blood you’ve spilt because it was not the right blood.

I once went away While you were asleep, walked right out into the rain and felt almost nothing. Trudged through the mud to the tree outside of the fence that you can see if you squint hard enough. I lay down there, sang a song in notes of the sun in fractals on the surface of the water, children laughing, and other things that could never close. I felt like someone beautiful that, maybe, you could’ve loved, but when you woke up, you only saw the same, closed metal door.

AT THE PARADE WE SAW ;

Little girls with tinsel paper pom-‐poms; barking mechanical Santas lazing atop the biggest float; deer hoofing snow at the front of a procession of seasonal ghouls; blueening human frames donned plush and red and cold; blood cells pumping into asphalt capillaries from a single frigid heart; lovers entwined against divisive winds; their heartwarming postcard likeness melting snow into mounds of gray ice; a single sparkler isolating the face of a child in the street; the marching band; flurry of awkward limbs and brass ejaculations; a silent boy wishing for acne medication; a Christmas list of red craters and oily hues; the promise of their one full-‐bellied syncopating dream; parallel lines of bodies in camp chairs at the curb; a small town corroding and freezing and sagging; that quivering body of collective memory; white-‐gray flesh of buildings hanging from old bones; inertia seeming to have left; the immigrants who cobbled these streets long lost; a static spirit wraps them all in the same glossy paper; and we are here, witnessing to the point of coalescence

This chapbook was in some way influenced by : Terrance Hayes Zachary Harris Michel Foucault Ursula K Le Guin Tim Seibles Adrienne Rich Many Thanks to the above writers, to Philippa, to Ian, to Tyra J, to Rosella, to Claire, to Erin, to Cecil regardless, to my grandfather, to Ms. Romanosky, to Kelsey Smith, and everyone else. From here to utopia.