Love in the Wild
after an installation by Vicki Lynn Wilson
In the still-churning city women study guides,
helpless and afraid, fearing their jewelry
is not stored in the most efficient manner.
They study guides on winning racquetball techniques,
techniques to flatten, to enhance, to ease
entertaining, to overthrow, to launch
campaigns against their systems.
We moved out to the dump,
fashioned a tundra from scraps.
Our task to cultivate instinct,
overthrow desire for society.
We did our best, bulwarked
Styrofoam cast-offs into caves
that I decorated with red gauze
while you surveyed the wasteland.
We obsessed, painting each crease
in cockroaches’ wings white,
replicated our built-environments
in their terrariums, created elaborate
traps for stray dogs, their tails
jaunty flags as we raked our nails
through their fur.
We failed, pawing through gauze
into a space vivified by desire,
kinged the largest roach,
joined the dogs in matrimony.
The wolf became docile because we fed her,
taught her to beg. Eventually she acquiesced
to our homegrown surgery, a television stitched
into her fur. She healed, dragged the device.
We felt guilty so we killed
and buried her, the screen still squinting
in her side then scattered the roaches
from their nests. They lumbered
away, heavy with clotted paint. The dogs
trotted awkwardly, pressed along
each other’s sides, sutured paramours.
Then I, too, left, my task
to cultivate solitude, crawl into a hole
carved in ice, learning to survive
on what is found there:
blind microbes scrawling in the melt,
the shadows of what passed beneath me
but I still had desires, crawled from the hole
to find her, knit my fingers into her blood-stiffed fur,
our encampment scattered as if by a great wind.
Later, eating stale candy from the dump
I realized you are imagined,
and my little pets, scratching their painted legs, even
the wolf rasping in her grace, imagined.
I am not in a tundra at all.
I am somewhere saturated with light
and full of guides on how to overthrow
to launch a campaign against my system,
littered with strategy and danger,
and the same quantity of isolation.
after an installation by Vicki Lynn Wilson
In the still-churning city women study guides,
helpless and afraid, fearing their jewelry
is not stored in the most efficient manner.
They study guides on winning racquetball techniques,
techniques to flatten, to enhance, to ease
entertaining, to overthrow, to launch
campaigns against their systems.
We moved out to the dump,
fashioned a tundra from scraps.
Our task to cultivate instinct,
overthrow desire for society.
We did our best, bulwarked
Styrofoam cast-offs into caves
that I decorated with red gauze
while you surveyed the wasteland.
We obsessed, painting each crease
in cockroaches’ wings white,
replicated our built-environments
in their terrariums, created elaborate
traps for stray dogs, their tails
jaunty flags as we raked our nails
through their fur.
We failed, pawing through gauze
into a space vivified by desire,
kinged the largest roach,
joined the dogs in matrimony.
The wolf became docile because we fed her,
taught her to beg. Eventually she acquiesced
to our homegrown surgery, a television stitched
into her fur. She healed, dragged the device.
We felt guilty so we killed
and buried her, the screen still squinting
in her side then scattered the roaches
from their nests. They lumbered
away, heavy with clotted paint. The dogs
trotted awkwardly, pressed along
each other’s sides, sutured paramours.
Then I, too, left, my task
to cultivate solitude, crawl into a hole
carved in ice, learning to survive
on what is found there:
blind microbes scrawling in the melt,
the shadows of what passed beneath me
but I still had desires, crawled from the hole
to find her, knit my fingers into her blood-stiffed fur,
our encampment scattered as if by a great wind.
Later, eating stale candy from the dump
I realized you are imagined,
and my little pets, scratching their painted legs, even
the wolf rasping in her grace, imagined.
I am not in a tundra at all.
I am somewhere saturated with light
and full of guides on how to overthrow
to launch a campaign against my system,
littered with strategy and danger,
and the same quantity of isolation.
