from Wish
[I want the dead to hold up their clean shirts. I want
the dead to feign victory, in victory. I want the dead
to be a neutral zone. I want the dead to walk clean
streets, bright avenues of shale and quartz. I want
them to slowblink. I want their language to be
mostly water. The dead are something inside us.
Flowing. The dead work differently,
unfixed by boundary, by latitude. I want the dead to
write new laws, new maps, new modes of address.
I want the dead to waste time. I want them to laugh
because they have nothing else to say.]
[My insides are a red and glamorous viscera: this interior
theorem I make from air. This grainy photograph I can’t
set down. But the dead have a new way of being. Their
interiors are stitched with non-history. The dead are not
empty, but unhinged, which does not equate to freedom
exactly. I need the dead to be exact. I need
the dead to open up my sternum and make a room of me.
I want oxygen unfettered by neon, undone and unmoored.
The dead have no analysis. The dead are a vivisection
of us: dreamless desire without animation.]
[I want the dead to sing. I want
a song made entirely of names,
of bleach stains. The dead filter
through us like carbon capture,
but they leave us bloodless in
autumn light. I want to burn
forever and not for anyone. The
dead are a grit in the machine of
tyranny. The dead have tyrants
of their own, beached and
bloated. I want the dead to see.]
[The dead are already always gone. They are futures away, above sea level.
The dead stumble from their homes into brittle light, find themselves in states
of perfect realization, as close to truth as rain on skin. I want them
to be a river of forgetting. I want them blue as a vein spiking through all our
desert cities. I want their shores picked clean by cranes. I want the dead to be
untouchable, walled off from us by time, but instead they’re blinking into
every mirror. Every room on Earth is a window for the dead.
The dead are always here and gone at once. I want this contradiction,
to take it in my hands and unweave it. Instead, the contradiction only
glimmers, burns cold in my fists. The dead burn cold like this. They fissure.
The dead remake the world by leaving it.]
[The dead want. The dead ask. The dead skitter
at the end of urge. The dead make a wish of the past,
a wilt on the horizon, a rotting garden stuttered with
iron. Death is a planet crushing with rain. It orbits
the tiniest star, weak radiance that tints their shadows.
The dead want to ask about your urge, your skittering
frame. They hold a gauze to catch your breath. Death
makes a vessel of you. Makes a wish.]
Jarid McCarthy is a poet and playwright residing in the ether of Southern California. His work appears or is forthcoming in Foglifter, Night Music, and Old Youth. He is the creator of Empty Room, an audio-only experimental theater project.