Kirsten Kaschock

The Invalid

You are my property. This is day one of the longest recovery. This is hour two of the longest day of the infinite recovery. Look at the bed. Look at it. One day soon I will raise myself from the prayers and find a single egg of hope. The egg will be pure. A free market good. An imported preserve. A tulip bulb. An olive. Look at the way my thigh is white. Look at it. Look at the way my thigh is wide. Ocean. This mattress is not the mattress I wanted for our matrimony. That bed was stolen just before the unending night of the disaster. Your mother gave us this one. Your mother nursed you on the bed where we screw. Used to. The mourning is never an honest mourning. Come inside. No, just for a minute. This brass bed is a foreign vessel. While I’ve been in it, traveling, the ceiling has lowered itself six inches. Eventually, the ceiling will rest against my forehead like a cool cloth. Please. You’ll have to reach out with your sunken palms to push it back. I have wanted and wanted to look up—and have it blue.

The Egg

The egg is not a metaphor. It is smaller than a hen’s egg, and tragic in its virginity. The way the egg will not be cracked is a myth. Many will come. Many from other lands, lands where the sun sets southeasterly and is veined, will come to attempt the egg’s opening. It has been rumored that a new god lives inside the egg. A god that looks like a feather. But the egg will not offer itself. The egg has the type of volition that refuses. Nevertheless, many will come. One, especially, will come. She will sit on the egg, giving the egg a mother. She will lend a certain warmth to the egg which has always been colder than frostbite and green-black. After a number of years, the egg will move from absolute zero, attaining temperature. At that moment, the egg will begin to shift—internally. Its escape from stasis will prohibit the possibility of any god. The egg mother will then stand. She will bow a slight bow, knowing she was somehow involved, and that something has been saved from grace.

The God

The god that looks like a feather has waited over seven millennia to be born. Much can be learned in the time before sowing. Witness the pitch of the horizon frozen between tree branches. Or the subtle differences in serial number. When a god waits, it is because a god does not mind waiting, and the waiting has merit. It is unlike the waiting in an oncologist’s office or until the nuptials. When a god waits, it is as in music: a fermata. The subliminal grandeur of a god’s birth should happen during a nebula or in the eye beyond the pale. Time, for such-and-such a god, does not move forward nor circle back behind the register for a hidden revolver. It simply pulls to the left. A god adjusts. A god ducks under the boardwalk for an hour with close and fecund purpose. Even when the millennia are quick with the hook-and-eye, even when they swagger, they are merely fingernail clippings at the water’s edge. Senselessly clawing. A god that looks like a feather does not need patience—its being eternal.

Baby Names: Girl F

Fable the one you think would go on, but circles back, her daily calls almost a nuisance—wasn’t she

supposed to do something special?

Faye a liar. she will have nine lives, each a different color red

Fell this one, after reading in her own handwriting too many times her own name, goes down the well

Fendi won’t stop herself, will hit a series of dead-end romances, end up on the couch with a therapist,

skirt hiked, hubcaps flashing

Figaro talented, perhaps—so what?

Filo flaky but kind, air coated in butter. this one will have your number, never visit, float through LSD

episodes like skin cells in an attic, neglect a mind for math, take showers that run cheap motels out of hot water

Fink you don’t name a babygirl Fink

Flail the dutiful daughter never succeeding, everyone eventually succumbing to cancer and having

their insides scoured out with Comet

Folly an Xmas child with bows, wrapped tighter than a heart. a three-year old with a pout sickos cream for.

Foment a solid engine of girl—writes thank-yous, is probably going to marry her father, has one recurrent

rape fantasy involving a church

Foot a child in the mouth

Fran for your great-grandmother, her mugs of scotch and milk, white ghosts, cellophane in the freezer—

you wooed her dying for the brooch you wanted, an opal—this girl, also, a cursed stone

Friday stays at home weekends organizing the refrigerator, always she has been 37

Fury a name for a girl with charming hair. you could never have this one, not with your coloring

Fyne what you eventually name her—resigned to predicating her ruin