Safi Alsebai
Hand Cemetery, Mountain View
The moon stays in the sky until noon
There
Where candles are the choice pincushions,
residual threads trailing
They
bury the hands of the dead in pairs, without the rest,
hands tied together, twine against the knuckles
Palm to palm with the perpetual tongue like
a pearl in-between
They can (the dead)
pray like oysters in their one big grave
opalescing, together, forever: undead hard-found sillage
The 36-hour day:
When it gets too hot and rattles and the blood-
flow to my arm is cut off by the pretty head that
lays on it, my hand gets helplessly enfolded in the denim choke of happiness
the color of Goya’s exile in Bordeaux,
no longer bleating, reposed, the relief
of ink’s acidity onto palster the relief
of wrenching and of sedimentation
Causes of fear: numbness versus asphyxiation
Mechanic is a natural thief
and premorbid like other handymen
Members of that gym of satisfaction:
Metalurges, silversmiths, novelty-driven
What is a proper object even? What is enclosure?
Something to make you scream your head off
They’re not even mechanics anymore
They’re officially modern in their
ownership and waxy
Bats six or seven every hour, fly over the
lake flush against the sun
from this forest
at one end to this forest at the other, leather
butterflies
Finally at night:
Dry lightning No thunder
Being Swanlike
As he drove his what, like anything
finite has gas mileage he passed marshes,
strip malls, death factories and death museums
a scenic death drive
In this town of mercantilism, artisanship and worse,
what if he could invent a machine?
It would go something like:
You can be medieval one day, bawdy, and porous,
so, before the invention of and inventing
drives, crisis, principles, allegory
You can invent anything in public, favor secrecy
in public you, I,
a spray of historical freesias and
liquids worth a million words
Safi Alsebai is a writer from Arkansas, where he studies medicine.