Amy Thomas, Lung Song

What I mean is: carved a stark landscape in the cave of your gut. Boarded the boat with a foot sturdy as a slant branch. You say beware the salty salty. I rant that my people were the first explorers, hello free world, thank you for my lost legacy, thank you for the veins in my face, thank you for the ghosts in my marrow. You sigh and spit tiny drops of some labyrinthine fluid. I grabbed your hand and this is all action. I stuff my own toe in my mouth and through it tell you all about my grand plans to retell the epic.

(included in Fawn’s Head, dancing girl press 2015)

 

*

 

I woke up from the bed of woven fish hungry for something tart. The fish gave way, remembering their ocean, undulating and coyly silver. What happening in that fraught space was lightning enigmatic. The happening growled like a ghost for it. It was a carved out space in the concave abdomen, glued there a mountain of gems, tiny and sardonic. A leaf was stuck to my palm and I watched its freeway of veins disengage from the center, sprawling out in tributaries, a delicate minty green. As I clenched a fist, the leaf sighed in that space, let out a dry gasp, sprung back to shape, sighed again. That interstitial wandering, the voice echoing in the hollow.

(included in Fawn’s Head, dancing girl press 2015)

 

*

 

It began as a tiny pea seething under my skin and etched thin lines. A burning collection of lines and half-letters. The flesh around it a burnt dark matter black. A sprouting from the inside out, feels as a flowering along the way, feels as grizzled mass pit in my gut and spikes jutting as fangs of liquid sharp. A sign around my neck reads her scream is the ultimate in animal. I eat coal and whole roosters. The pea, swarming, seething, broiling pea. The rooster with my lung in its mouth. The coal grimacing, wearing its teeth. Enzymes shouting in latinate throatsong. Tiny coils of teeth would wrap around me in strips, dug in all at once. My bleeding came in spires.

 

*

 

From what house that stony father axe bringing. Swing swing at his feet, minha machadinha. Snow tracked into a blood carpet. The murmuring on the doorstep. Muffled my sing song and dragged me down by the foot, my sleep weary stone-bearing faceless body with its fingers slender length around the feet. But the father was laid down funereal and gutted, filled with so many lobsters and a hissing from beneath his fluttering eyelash. Minha. Minha. Minha. The smell of a cellar all earthy and sweet mold, my singing affixed to the night. A cosmic sputtering and graveyard digging mud-laden undertaker. Ancient hands from above with the dance dance flash. One of them a ladyfingered porcelain white disappeared as fast.

 

*

 

He is locking my knees. Brittle plates and the skin stretched across the top of them ruched. I felt the bloat beneath my shirt, the bubbling. The streets are brown now, paved with the soft stones. A step is the clacking of horses, is the clank of spoon to plate. On either side a deeper brown, beiged stars. The pang of our step in me like a roar stalled in the black. My voicebox with a little finger in it, with a twig in my lung punctured. Behind me the closing of a door.

 

*

 

To faith: Alveolar scratch. Elevens in a bruised flux. An imprinted machination creaks in the cyan. What smashing bell tower does this dried spit call from. Interstitial yodeling, what fills the grinding teeth. What kind of tomb is this. Infected third space. Does what climbs from this grommet come with its own static. In the night, your mouth gapes and I make a y incision along my own collarbones, flesh peeling away with a sugared lip. Slip a fingertip, slide a nail along the red slow. It’s all gravy now, love.

(included in Fawn’s Head, dancing girl press 2015)

 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Thomas earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame in 2011.  A native Detroiter, she currently resides in South Bend, Indiana. Her poems explore the space between definitive points in time or identities and attempt to haunt that zone through artifice, curatorship, and irreverence. Poems from Lung Song have previously appeared, in one form or another, in decomP magazine, BlazeVox, SCUD, and Word Riot, and in her 2015 chapbook Fawn’s Head from dancing girl press. A previous chapbook, Strange Language, was published through the howling wolf chapbook series in 2009.

AUTHOR STATEMENT

Sometime during my stint as an MFA student, I stumbled across the Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) movies, a series of Brazilian horror films centered on a murderous, atheistic undertaker obsessed with having children and passing along his bruised heritage. I immediately felt a strong kinship with the films and began a project that sought to re-tell this character as a version of my own father, splicing in multiple other family characters caught in a hell of unknown origin. My interest here is rooted in ancestry and bloodlines, in what it means to have, or be, progeny, and what a world would look like if those bonds were disjointed or broken in a literal, bodily sense. These poems attempt to explore the space between here and there, occupied by someone who is half this and half that. That plasma-zone, for these poems, becomes a place occupied by artifice, curatorship, theatricality, and oratory, but attempts to be grounded in an ever-real attempt to reach the sublime or ecstasy by transcending—or skirting—those questions of family and ethnicity.