David Carillo

THE MALARIA AGENCIES

Tonight I tremble in the bed of my ancestors’ ancestors

Each eyelash a guided missile

My fingertips

They surgically rearranged before I left

So I may decipher smoke

What about myself I cannot understand

Is this sickness

Is my failure of imagination

My love

I remember the days

You and I read the times : hunted for apartments

Drank gin-n-tonics

In every welcoming hole in the city walls

One year : one thousand miles : two years and four thousand

I understand the way this will work

You will remain almost

You will remain on the wings of moths

And the stomach that surrounds me

Will reduce me to the elements

Tomorrow I’ll cross town

And the morning’s carfire will leap to a memory

Of your hair catching soft light

A counterweight to this dug grave

In these moments I will recall nothing more about you

Whatsoever

To the fishbowls and cinderblocks : the rooftops caving : the grass blades

That tie my skin to skeleton

Watch for a code tapped by flashlight

At the edge of town : it figures disintegration

Then to my stomach : my nerves : my fingertips and pleura

All the organs in general

Not forgetting

Eyelashes : arm hairs : and the numbness overtaking

My darling extremities

You are the love letters hidden

In the back pages of newspapers

You are the thready dreams in satellite photography

I ask

That you lend me your understanding of understanding and loss

I want that you feel the curves of my backbone

The way I feel

The curves of the earth along my back.

Look for the marks under the desk in the corner

Those are my initials

I will precede the dawn

And into the thinning jungle slosh

Buckets of steaming water

On the deck : spotting and calling out the coordinates of impact

My codename : Voicebox

In the marketplaces and plazas where the languages that elude me are correct

My codename : Trumpeter

In the university over maps and textbooks from which I inhale history’s decimals

My codename : Skylab

Ready my codename

Codename : Elizabeth Ready

The mortar rounds : rockets and airstrikes

For all the fire I may in the future direct

My codename will be Windchime

Against the wall : my lungs rung out : yes my codename

You guessed is Butterfly

In the middle of the night : the moonlight growing new scar

My codename : Washington

Under blankets gathering numbers from the lowdown airwaves

My codename : Loveletter

My codename : Workday

And for every question

Prepared with water : aching smoke

My codename : Fingernail

My codename : Ampere

Else afterward my name becomes

A wheatfield

There in the green shade breathing : in parachutes of ash

Miles gone from the fires

I exhale your old letters

The words drumming in the heat : scattering : sticking to the walls or

Cooling themselves in the dust on the floor

Or slipping through the window

Light as ash

Once months ago I dreamed of your bathroom sink : The brass faucet’s

Gentle arc over porcelain : the tap poured radio static

And I drank that

Sloshing to my lips with my palms pressed together

So as not to spill so much : you were elsewhere but I remember your hair

Was a different color

When I woke I lay closely after dawn

Outside were children’s voices

My fever was a violin played sadly

A headful of winters : the coal mine’s anatomy : this fever of black stalks

Dreams for me

Of the olive steel bodies of mortars and howitzers

A city of gun barrels calm as bamboo

Of the nightly heavens of smoke

Descending to fill the cracks in memory and mud fields

Of the moths flap flapping

At the fires

Where in the morning what’s left are the cold blueprints

Of wings and ash

So go my red blood cell’s stringy melodies

I wake quick to hatching sounds : sheet music

Lamp light

Pocks the walls

If the shadows here were my body’s size

I’d lie still in their humming arrangements

Martian : the ferriswheel above the coasters and boards of the ocean town

Leaves dusk for midnight

Empties carnival light and machine oil

Into the dark sea

I remember the ocean swallowing everything but the small

A funhouse bulb : a hotdog bun : a gull

Where I was on the beach

I saw the whitecaps spit teargas at the horizon

The horizon’s throat tightening until it drifted at dawn

Unconscious

Where are the worlds my memories go to to return sudden

And with different insides

And I saw that wheel was not all empty

Cars carrying no one followed those with children

Up over : down again

And the ocean was radio static

And the bedsheets turned everything to desert

And a brightness fell from the saliva and filament

Of cotton candy chomped hollow

By sticky mouths

In the newspaper I read of the luck that I am alive

In my blood is the blood of strangers

In them others’ blood and so forth

Alongside the roads are the bodies of livestock gone sour

Disease or shrapnel : bloated : picked over

There are the empty shell casings : there are the landmines : there are the threads

And fingerprints of the missing

And the stolen

When you sent your last letter

I was on a assignment : en route in the hollow of a chopper to territories

We had not learned to control

Above the treeline we washed in the black smoke

Of tires : of oil : of accelerants and former targets

Lungfuls of the world I would send back to you

Lungfuls