Dan Kaplan

Honolulu

Your cat may have scratched open

the sky this morning

but try sneaking any of the nine

planets in your handbag through

customs. Never explain why

your carry-on is weightless.

Try. See who bites on your X-ray

of Saturn. The rings look like

ribs. The rings look like

handles. The rings look like

rings, which you’d fling over

the fence and never retrieve

from a robed and perfumed

evening introducing itself

—are we neighbors—as though

you should but never have

met under different cloud and firefly

formations. The rings look like

rings that you’d never think about

on a day when you’re drinking

something like iced tea or feeling

like you’re in a commercial for

iced tea. Weeds looping through,

gripping the rings—you wouldn’t

think about that. They look like

adoring arms around Elvis’s legs,

arms of tall people, tall because

their hands meet around what

they squeeze, which is fairly stout since

this is Elvis in 1973, also the year

the first cat batted not .400

but the moon, and Jupiter,

security said, had to be checked

all the way through to Honolulu.

Plate 1: An Anatomy

A, plush spotless aqua den carpet; B,

you lying on it; C, your bones coasting;

D, stratocumulus cloud hung between

6^th and 7^th rungs of snowy rib;

E, chrysanthemum sprung from bed of liver;

F, electroencephalographic

winch controlling larynx; G, hamster

wheel; H, hamster; I, ditched mufflers

rusting in the ear canal; J, spiders

in their spinal climb; K, capillaries

in the lap lane; L, bags and bags of soaked

ideas weighing down matter and vertebrae.

See also Essential Hemorrhage (Plate 5)

and Structural Deformation (Plate 9).