Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (5 page)

Piece human, piece hornet, the fury

of both, astonishing abs all over it.

Ripped, just ripped to absolute bits,

his head in the hornet and his head

in the hum, and oh he want to sting

her. The air he breathes is filled

with flying cheerleader parts. Splits

flips and splits, and ponytails in orbit,

the calm eye of the panty in the center

of the cartwheel, the word HORNETS

—how?—flying off the white uniform.

Cheerleaders are a whole, are known

to disassemble in the middle of the air

and come back down with different

thighs, necks from other girls, a lean

gold torso of Amber-Ray on a bubbling

bottom half of Brooke. The mouths that

cry GOOD HANDS GOOD HANDS.

The arms he loves that make the basket,

the body he loves that drops neat

into them.

Oh the hybrid human and hornet, who

would aim for pink balloons.

Oh the swarm of Cheerleading Entity,

who with their hivemind understand

him. Rhyme about the hornet,
her
tongue

in
her
mouth at the top of
her
throat! Clap

one girl's hand against another's. Even

exchange screams in the air.

The pom-poms, fact, are flesh. Hornet

Mascot is hungry, and rubs his abs, where

the hornet meets the man. Wants to eat

and hurl a honey, in the middle

of the air. (No that is bees I'm thinking of.

Like I ever went to class, when the show

was all outside.) The hornet begins to fly

toward the cheerleaders. “Make me

the point of your pyramid,” he breathes.

And they take him up in the air with them

and mix and match his parts with theirs,

and all come down with one gold stripe,

and come down sharp and stunned,

and lie on the ground a minute, all think-

ing am I dead yet, where am I, did we win.

First no one could dunk and then they all could.

The dunk evolved, and then stood upright, was even

perceived to be intelligent, with too big a brain

at the top of it, the ball. It grew upright and smooth-

skinned with a tendency toward religion, the dunk

stood up too fast, they said, and consequently has

headaches, and trouble breathing in spring when

it is so beautiful. The childhood of the dunk

was no childhood at all.

He practiced on a paper route, throwing
The Sun

to the same place each morning. Did not sleep long

but when he slept, the springs of his bed imparted

something to him. At night the streetlight floated

down and let him dribble it. Then there was school

there was every day school where he crumpled up

tests and tossed them in the trashcan. He shouted

TWO POINTS and had to stay after and copy out

the “football” page of the dictionary, which could not

keep him down—he saw writers of the dictionary

at their desks, performing small silent neat dunks.

The crowd of the devoted watching. Like watching

is reading. Like it isn't. The dunk felt like a leather

study in space, and someone thinking
how
inside him,

and a perfected body in a leather chair wondering just

how high he can jump toward heaven. A leap sometimes

occurs within an animal, the dunk felt that happen

within him. He landed sure on his feet again and then

he was wholly himself. A joint so surely in its socket,

the whole city could go walking on it. All the rain

comes down at once in a single bounding drop,

and the wells of the countryside look up at once full,

and no open mouth is thirsty, and every mouth is open.

A great heavy body it weighed the dunk down. The dunk

and the moon pulled it up like the sea. The crowd of us

shouted his name to dunk him deep into himself. More

than half-moons in his fingertips, and rising through the air

in a loud round translation,

and the air right then breathing him back.

Was the only complete thing in the world, was the dunk.

Well that and everyone who watched it.

Goosebumps even on the ball. The ball spinning like

bodies could live on it, and whatever led up to the bodies

too. It stood up too fast, it got taller and taller, its women get

bellies like basketballs. A woman dunking! That'll be the day.

Yet here I am sailing over your heads, and then,

with the sound, slamming into them.

Little boy he is learning to see

Magic Eyes. Little boy hidden objects

leap out their way at him. He covers

his walls with the pink and red posters,

and pops his black eyes at them, and sees

all the objects that live in the sun, objects

so tan they stand out against sand. More

than words the boy wants to see something

undress, even if only a lake and a sailboat.

They jump out and he longs to jump in—

he would cannonball into that lake and

just float. Here he is in a room that smells

all locked up, like men and the imprison-

ment of lizards, and he stares at Magic Eyes,

in fact he stares so hard it hurts, and says

oh my God a heart, and oh my God a pair

of lips, because what is 3-D after all? When

the air in the room becomes apparent,

and carves itself out around a her or a him,

and now little boy's father he bangs down

the door, and strides in and stares so hard

that he hurts, says, “We had 3-D in my day

and we called it AMERICA! We had 3-D

in my day and we called it bare bosoms!”

but the pictures refuse to open for him

or show even their innocent parts:

the dog and the sphere and the American

flag will never undress

for the first time again.

He slams the door behind him, and thinks

getting into heaven is hard. It is the cube

that does not open. It is the cube that is only

to look at, but look. There behind that door, look

there. There the cube is, leaping out of the square.

Along with the poison berries,

and it's your job in this life to spit both out,

and spit both out if you want to live. Listen

and learn to me and the woods: the Ummm

of the little crickets. The fresh and slangy

crows, who end every last word with the letter

A
. Rats, say the mice in the woods, and What's

the fuckin difference, Dad? My PawPaw

always says, says the voice inside the fruit tree.

Good ears and great ears and even uncanny

are trembling here in the woods, perked every-

where are ears for speech as it is spoke. Stiffies

of dialogue circle the trees and look for holes

in the conversation, and wait to get Red Riding

Hood as soon as she leaves the wild.

She says she never will, and stretches the word

giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl so long that we all become

women during it. The woodsman lives here too,

and he stretches the word maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

so long that we all die out before he's done.

Death is so random, deep here in the woods.

In the woods the eternal Daaaaaamn and Gonna,

and the small exact birds saying What it is. Like

like like from morning to night, till even the night

is like the day. Nothing dwindles down to nothin.

Maaaaaaaaaan and giiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl flee to the woods

to forget their proper usage, and after what seems

like endless fuckin—well you know and you know

and you know what I'm saying. Know what

I'm saying and know what I mean. They fall hard

to the grass like the oldest trees and lie a while

listening, and then begin to speak, their mouths full

of the air of natural dialogue: Hopefully, hopefully,

totally, totally. Where are you from I have nowhere

to be. What are you called can I axe you a question.

Can we stay here forever. Probably, probably.

With the probly and the prolly and the loblolly pines.

The Brave Little
Goes to School

A–Z animals hunger for learning. They hunger

for learning, you sneak them to school. A mouse

in your pocket, a frog in your pocket. They talk

or you think they can talk. A cricket hides in the dark

of your desk and glitters like a great black IQ point.

You carried a housefly to school in your fist, now

repeat after me the teacher says and the fly makes

vowel sounds one by one and sometimes
y
the

fly says. Now what other animal goes to school—

a nude in your pocket, a full page of nude!

She shines with concentration all over her skin, trying

so hard to learn to learn. Man is an animal too says

teacher; you brought a man to school today. A man

from the past is visiting you and the one place

he wanted to go was school and his name is Benjamin

Franklin, Ben. He sits at the desk next to yours, learning

each little quote he's going to say and then lavishing

the learn of his eyes on the nude, whose skin is bursting

with the exports of Ecuador, mostly and mainly rain.

Ben Franklin should not be in school, the word

in his mouth should not be in school, a word that is where

a girl pees from. A fresh sheet of ditto is laid on your desk.

Don't worry, you tell Ben Franklin—the unlearningest

animal of all, the Answers, came to school today

in your closed left fist, curly-tailed like they taught you

to write them, impossibly small and already bleeding.

The teacher writes QUIET PLEASE on the board. The pig

who came to school today is unprepared for the squeal

of chalk. It asks is something else in here dying the way

I'm going to? The cricket and Ben Franklin raise their hands,

the Answers somehow raises yours.

Before neon came along, was made, did not grow

like the rest of the colors, or grew as a tumorous

growth on Art

wherever sun touched it too much,

and we went to see that tumor in museums

whenever our parents would take us

and brought replicas home from the gift

shop—before neon there wasn't a way

to buy plastic packs of plastic stars and put

the Big Dipper on your ceiling,

no way to put stars on your ceiling at all

unless you went outside and slept there

which we stopped doing years before

when all adults woke up and wanted

to touch a firm camper between the legs—

it was a new kind of fruit like the maraschino

and they craved it every minute of the day—

so we stayed indoors and reflected the glow and

all adults were jealous, they turned old-timey shades

of green and they hated our head-to-toe neon,

because:

The names were the same just

with NEON before them like colors woke freshly

divorced

and demanded that people call them Ms.,

this made parents uncomfortable and sexually helpless,

they pictured nipples like eyes on stalks, they thought

why was I born too late, and thought how much scarier

it would have been when Orson Welles lied about aliens

if they'd been able to see neon

in their minds back then, and they banged the doors

angry on their sleeping children, no doubt dreaming

neon dreams that would have killed the parents

with how scary they were, so hard the biggest stars

fell down

and fell into our mouths, and we woke

in the morning tasting them, and the stars tasted

toxic and perfectly new.

What have we dumped in the ocean? All

the dolphins have begun growing breasts.

Now dolphins are women when you want

women and fish when you want fish,

at last. The breasts

they are more playful

than the rest of the dolphin put together!

No nipples according to us, the nipples

the brains of the breast, if the dolphins

had nipples their intelligence
we think

would add up to more than our own.

Men of the world

rejoice, it is no longer girly

to own a calendar of dolphins, bursting

the surface of the water and themselves,

thickly spread with the glitter of nature.

Time to turn to the next luscious month—

it's the sluttiest one, April, all covered

with droplets of spring. People who suffer

from extra desire can pay one hundred dollars

to ride them, fifty dollars extra if you want

them to leap, seventy-five if you want them to dive

so deep all the blood rushes into your ears,

and they fill with the crackling sound of sea-

foam. A triangle pokes above the water

and says better shapes below—circles are

the most sought-after shapes of course

but teardrops are also accepted.

In a childhood room of the Pacific,

a mother gets a glimpse of her mutating daughter

and deeply indraws a gasp of sea. “I thought

you would stay a dolphin forever!” she cries

out to the blue at large. Who could have seen

this coming? On Minoan jugs all the dolphins

stare knowingly. Dolphins you swim so often

through literature, now we will see even more

of you. Quick pour glowing runoff into the water

and add nipples the brains to the breasts, why not,

now dolphins will be smarter than all of us, we think,

smart enough to read

this even, quick pour glowing

runoff into the water, let's give them a fresh new pair

of eyes to read this and read their new run-on with.