Joey Kingsley

On 33 West

The likelihood of transforming matter into energy is something akin
to shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds.
                                                                                                                                 —Einstein

In the left lane: two men in the cab of a jacked-up truck
speed. The thin sliver of their side mirror tilts
& I see an orange hat bobbing like a dented apple,
five-o’clock shadow, the edge of a jaw, one cheek drooped
like a hound’s. We’ve been following them for a mile
when I notice the deer’s coarse hair ruffled in the whoosh
like grass matted in a wet yard, & the hooves hooked,
like the elegant ankles of a bride scooped up at the threshold,
over the handles of the mud-splattered four-wheeler in tow.

The buck is closer than he appears. Limp, the slender body
caves, a kind of surrender without surrender. How often
have I longed to be ferried through cold that shears
like the revolving barrel of the tractor’s blades in hay season?
Last week, skidding on wet leaves, I flew off my bike
into a parked car. The thing about bodies
is that they break, in time, night pressing in: the mirror
severed from the car’s door before the upper lip even registers
concrete or its nerves drive the brain to adrenaline.

It’s a fact that starlight bends around the sun like a ring
around a finger, a mountain’s switchback, the onyx icing
the eyes of the deer. November: more blue, less bark. Distances
are greater. The truck veers toward the exit, a golf ball sailing
over the freeway, and we lose them, the dead animal gone
into a blind spot behind a curve in the trees. They want
freezer bags of meat, a rough coat, the antlers’ glazed rivers,
the deer that won’t run into a clearing, a perfect shot, & later,
even upside down, strung from a tree with its split hooves
tied like a body bag, or a bag of corn meal, or a brown sack
of red potatoes, will swing a dead weight. The radio
blares a pop song. There are so many ways to pray.
We can gaze into gray into blue into purple
approaching the red-stained hill, the horizon vaster & smaller,
our lives shrunk down to the exact. At some point,
we get to leave. There is big space. We kill
& are killed, our stupid mouths half-open.
The tongue is a clause. It stops.

---

Early Arrival to a Beheading

Before me, a book of Flemish art: Samson, heroic & asleep,
             & his lover, her breasts shattering into stars above him,

                          two moons snoring through Eternity
                                            on a chaise, two armed guards at the bedroom door
as she cradles his head.
                                            As if he were a swan instead of a man,

                          for a purse of coins, bluish silver, Delilah sharpened
             the blade of the servant who, blended in shadows
                                            & the signatures of rain, filed a dirk

             into his hair like a slide, seven microscopic strokes,
one for each lock razored loose,
                                            the hand’s desire to render him Baroque
             too strong for the brush that held it back,
                                                                        speaking to the scissors in Light.

                                                                              *

Sweep it up: yesterday a stack of records slid across the table
                          into a blue, dahlia-patterned bowl that torpedoed
into the floor, a lake of green tea glittering crystal
                          on the red Coca-Cola cup that had just held it,
                                                                        the day fallen & steaming.

But here, our severance gathers, in nests,
                                            under chairs, & into a field of splinters
that the apprentice brushes into an anthill of kindling.

                          It was the charm of a gesture drowning
in the charmlessness of the body, Kundera says, where I sit
             in the salon anticipating my summons.

                                            Four months ago, sweaty & tired, I stepped
from the brittle light into this bright interior of mirrors—
                                                        gilt faces, swivel seats & wash basins,
             the black holes where people lose their heads.

                                                                              *
Absolute freedom: the body charmed out of its skin & moonlight
             filtering in through the ribs of the dark,
                                       a lofty guide toward some kind of subjectivity.

In kindergarten: my father drove us to pick up
             my mother from her work at The Paper. A bullet’s clawed
scratching worried the wall of the passenger-side door,

                          the trunk duck-taped for the ride to the newsroom
where ice cream’s éclairs, frozen shavings,
             fell out of plastic wrappers like death threats opened
over the sink, licked shut by the crooked              fingers
                                                                                       that load the traps.

                                                                              *

But in the old myths, a batch of poison calls for the fat of a redhead
             & only mistletoe cut with a golden sickle & caught
                                          in a white cloak saves the afflicted from death.
             Combing my hair this morning, the hydrogen bonds

knotted like a fence & denied all entrance,
                              the alpha helices in a single strand twisted like roped ladders
in each thin elastic body, a fibrous cortex,
                              roofing mathematical braids over skin.

                                                                              *

And in my lap now: Samson who razed a temple’s columns,
                                           about to be shorn. The first shadow following trust
is a cuticle of doubt, my name scrawled
                                                                      in The Book of Appointments like a fistful
             of crabgrass persisting between footsteps, all faltering.

---

Self-Portrait with Phantom Limb & Vintage Revolver

And what is this? On the corner of Laurel & China
             I lift a moth’s rich brown & doily markings
so its feelers, the smooth limbs of a stunned dancer,

suggest an origami fortune catcher where it lies
             in my hand, nine muscles in the hook of my thumb
contracting to maneuver the small puzzle of bones

in my wrist into a cup that offers little more
             than the memory of ghost-flutter. And my life?
I see it as a bullet stuck in the chamber

of a vintage revolver I bargained down
             to a third of the price. How tenuous these hands,
whose whorled patterns the color of parsnips

now ruffle the injured wing--
             a pleated skirt torn like a shadow book,
lit & already yellowing from within—

so it folds back into itself & collapses. They hold
             whatever they can find: even my skull
blooming like a fistful of red berries flung over snow,

a few bright interludes of trumpet between
             talk-radio muffled by running water.
Why must the old faucet continue to drip?

Once, scientists believed that unpredictable pain
             in patients missing limbs was a fabrication of the mind
& for decades no one knew why someone missing

his left hand could feel fingernails digging
             into a palm where none existed. And for years
what was left unresolved grew into an ache

of nerves separated from their endings. And it
             must be that our knowledge of what is missing
beats the body into hearing its own limitations,

a vernacular annunciated by absence so the mouth
             that in telling its secret, as da Vinci insists,
places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener

like a limb that tries to speak but is lost
             & thus eternally present—a bullet that won’t discharge,
the other end of the line silenced now as a revolver

that houses multiple chambers,
             a series of selves that spins inside
the single cylinder of its hard body without release.

---

The Weight

Over the pea plants, Mendel guessed that if two
chromosomes touch, one bold strand crosses its leg
over the other. I used to believe that when I grew up,
I’d change back. Standing around a pool table in that old
neighborhood, I remembered the lesson. When I learned
to play, the man said hold the cue like a friend, not like
you’re trying to own it. From my dead uncle I learned
so many shots go missing that our inevitable vanishing
seems always to be on the brink of vanishing. In Church Hill,
from the stump of a beheaded crepe myrtle in the front yard
another tree grows—not the same tree, but wildness returned,
crooked life with tender buds. I woke up to the alarm:
the incessant cricketing of a broken smoke detector.

I replaced the battery & from the stump of the lizard’s
tail, exposed muscles braid over bone so that new skin
emerges a different color. There are small scales: sand & grit,
a voice that runs through water, rises from the belly like steam,
the body being so filled with want. Beep, beep: a man’s voice
on the message machine was tight, normal & downstairs
my mother screamed his name before I left for school.
Not because my father swung at her or missed the barn
catching a gulf in flames on a hill, but because His name
is the lonely she loves & my aunt’s husband was dead
on their honeymoon. My aunt also was dead & for years
he was everywhere she was not. In fact, she’s still not
where he is. This is how the soul empties itself & floats.

Listening to Billie Holiday, her voice drags silk over
gravel & glass. Because I want someone to hear me this way,
let’s pretend the soul holds a basket of broken eggs.
Yolks lost, the shells blade-thin are dressed in film that’s
dried on the calcium’s EKG. Across town, a train
howls the edge of a field—the narrowest causeways
of desire, back alleys stamped to death on chicken bones
& cigarettes. Tomorrow, I’ll scrub the walls & sing my mother’s
song, her freckled hands inside mine. Soft-Scrub bleaches
flecks in those crevices—perfect corners, eggs & sheets fitted
for buoyancy, fight. Once, I lived in a house where downstairs,
a couple made love & in spite of brick walls, I heard them,
shrink to the size of a pea, quiet & light as its green weight
held in the hand, and cross each other over. Mendel, you bred
a hybrid strand of bees so vicious they had to be destroyed.




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Joey Kingsley is an instructor in the English department at the University of Mary Washington. She received her MFA in creative writing (poetry) from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.