Birkensnake 7

1

The mind of the seamstress is so free to curb, as it breaks through the inner cell, vast circular silence of memory. She opens her memories into snow banks. The curtain of the pores. Memories are absconding in there. As there is no one to house its current resident. The body is glad that a part of its body remembers. The birth of its death. It stays indoors. The pores and their interior closets of blood vessels are watching the rain fall down. They are watching and waiting. Watching their activities outside of their front doors.

2

The skin is a skyscraper with many windows. Window washing. Not with Windex. Guava-scented soap. They watch the soapy sea foams fall past the pores. The blood vessels gaze through the curtains of water and skin. The pores are excited about the limelight. Excited about the dove and the guava and the soap and the summer in their appropriate hemisphere. The rain comes and washes their heartbeats away. The rain comes and becomes so great with height and light. The rain and one blood vessel in the cubicle of pores gaze out of the window and wonder if they should run out and live or commit suicide.

3

One drop of blood stands still against time and wanders through the house of the hemoglobin, the different empty rooms of the body. They question. They have a lot of questions. What are they doing inside the surface of skin? The blood floats and the blood floats. The blood sprints and spirals (slow and steady) along the endless racetrack of the blood tunnel. Watching activities and life from the inside and gazing out of their red-tinted windows and not being able to stop a thing from proceeding (dead or alive, animate or inanimate). The blood, after all, is not hired by the body to be sentries. A needle enters the bloodstream. It will move along this river until its intellectual eye pierces one caliginous island along the Pacific Ocean. The kidney or liver? Perhaps the lucrative needle desires to move upstream to drill through a fleshier copious thing called the heart. Soft, veiny boulders. There. There. An oil spill.

4

The mind of the seamstress, for the moment, suspends before opening its lips from the mountain top. The top container of the body. The top layer in a bento box. Other people are becoming less of themselves. The mind is afraid to dine with despair. It has become a fantastic kisser of the side of the door.

5

After the needle drops into her bloodstream, the woman cries. The needle is poking at death, prickling its blood in a pool of blood. Her tears are tears, of course. But what’s most important is that they are interlocking tears. No one can enter; not even a quiet smile.

6

Your kind is unbelievably soft like the doorway into eternity, says the needle as it enters the portal flesh of the heart. The seamstress is expecting this. Everywhere is a door. A pinch alerts and lets her know that there won’t be operatic rehearsals in the atria. Death doesn’t rehearse. All kings are afraid of their own birthday, says the needle to the seamstress. Now that you are dying, you are becoming more conscious of morning glories. They bloom on the interior walls of your stomach like English ivies.

7

With a rifle, an incorrigible boy of 17 years of age enters a family-owned convenience store and requests the owner to hand over all the cash. When the owner pushes his son behind him, the robber mistakes it as a sign of alerting the cops of the robbery and shoots the owner in the head twice. The criminal remembers the startled eyes of the son as he reaches over the cash register for the cash. The crime is never resolved as the detectives are unable to come up with the murderer.

8

Before she dies, the seamstress remembers. She remembers because the bedroom floor of her mind is climbing the interior walls of her English-ivied stomach. Before she dies, she craves guava juice that floats freely on bento boxes. What if the Atlantic Ocean was segmented and compartmentalized into bento boxes? In the off chance that there is an oil spill, the humans can quarantine and substitute it for another. To be emptied and cleaned and refilled with salt water, the appropriate kind of cuttlefish, the right family of minnows. It will sit near the windowsill, practicing its water curling techniques. Out of its familiar environment, a wave won’t neglect its art form.

9

The body nominates the kidney to purify the blood. But perhaps the vocation belongs to every body part. Everyone must participate. Only the elbows do not care, largely ignored by the body until injury.

10

There is no guava juice on the table, on the kitchen counter, or in the refrigerator. The seamstress is aware of this. Before she dies, one part of her body will sample the scent of guava. On the body of a brand new soap. The seamstress climbs into her stone-designed shower stall and turns one spigot left and the other right.

11

It’s raining. The blood does not need to dive 150 feet out from the pores to commit suicide. The blood does not need to roam. The conscientious body does all the menial work for all the employees it hires. Including immediate termination without proper evaluations. No more monthly reviews. No more files hidden in the epidermis.

12

While the rain washes the windows, the skyscraper collapses. For two hours and twenty minutes the pores drink in the scent of a memory, a portal between oblivion and permanence before the ambulance comes. In the binary world, in the world without God, after a life of solid exists a life of liquid. In the binary world, in the world with God, rain and skyscraper take turns wearing each other’s clothes.