Irène Mathieu

Pangaea's 16 Questions

what on earth
is a planet.
good goddess & good gracious & spacious
presumptuous to plan it.
what on earth
have you planted.
what harvest. what handed royalty wielded
the spade until red clay yielded
drops of blood & later magic buttered fingers
& crosses.
& dams.
what grown-green sound of fury clanged.
what galloped. what ranged.
which dim echoes did you heed. (none.)
which ghosts can sleep soundly.
which ghosts take nightly Ambien.
which ghosts have given in
to the infinity of a scream.
anything halved and halved again
and so on will never disappear
just dilute and scatter.
why are you surprised
to smell it on the wind still.
gravity holds things close
the atmosphere a smothering embrace.
why are you self-righteous.
why do you look down.
where is a planet.
where can it go
but inside itself.
the natural history of a pirouette
in outer space is condensation.

---

(alternate ending

a metaphor walks into a bar.

no, that’s not what I meant,
that’s what I said.

we trip toward the future
where we will all be covered
in hideous meanings and
will walk down the runway
with it
so stylish

we will all be gods and
will eat only brain foods
and will exfoliate with
quinoa plucked from
the sides of flying fish
that flew into the mountains
and stayed there.

we cannot wait to do
experiments on each other.
we cannot wait to turn
our next-door neighbor
into a robot at the church potluck.

we will spit Genesis like
rap automatons:
in the beginning
in the beginning
in the –
in the –
[scratching]
[the vinyl turning too fast
and melting at this point]

how many Jesuses does it take
to make a week?
is the question we will put
on every standardized test.
we will scratch and sniff
the bubble with number 2
razor blades
sharp as the teeth of our

favorite god,
and he will laugh like
something we buried
long before we had
enough words for the reek
of it, something we no longer
know how to explain.)



--
Irène Mathieu is a pediatrician and writer based in Philadelphia. Her poetry, prose, and photography can be found in The Caribbean Writer, The Lindenwood Review, Muzzle Magazine, qarrtsiluni, Extract(s), Diverse Voices Quarterly, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo Journal, HEArt Journal, and elsewhere. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Callaloo fellow, and a Fulbright scholar. Her poetry chapbook, the galaxy of origins, was published in 2014 by dancing girl press.