To Carve a Fossil
      
1
Wednesday morning is for
the collection of chunked limestone
from its chalky caves, the fast drag
of wet lips on cigarettes—
Wednesday morning
is for the sound rocks make
when laid out to dry
across a lace tablecloth.

2
Once, I found him sleeping
there under the arbor, hair all up
in Drummond Phlox, dirt
smelling, hatching his hands
palm down on his jeans.
Not knowing as ever
where he was.

3
And he whispered
through his febrile sleep,
Someday you’ll just end up
carving through the sky.

4
But in winter, when my skin
cracks deep as the troughs
between grass sleeves,
when my fingers are fastened always
in place, negative space held open
for a spoon chisel—when the vacancy
of air is heavy as satin
bed sheets—his voice croons
loudest, grit-picked and hollow,
sweaty sounds that need changing
or a glass of sculpted ice.

5
Eventually, each facet
of my lips will grow chapped.
Eventually I will wake only
to a dining room table
of transferred history.

I’m sick with the wilderness
of coffee tables:
glass tops, wide
wooden legs,
white screws glaring back
in cobbler lips.

Upstairs your voice—
steep pull
of the taiga—
brings with it
what I’ve done:

washed my palms
in your mother’s sink,
clippered through
my mouth

with her toothpaste,
her water, spent my nails
on the piney barge
of body soap.

Eben Crownford chose Pennsylvania for its hills and over-stocked yard sales, for its apple butter, its flood museums, and most of all for its generous title, the Keystone State. It was never unlike Eben to underestimate the importance of nicknames: when he was five, he assigned everyone in kindergarten a nickname based purely upon physiognomy. His best friend back then was Stilts, a girl with the longest legs. They hadn’t spoken since he’d kissed her badly outside of astronomy in the eleventh grade.

Eben made crayons from home-heated wax, shaped them with his fingers while the stuff was still pliable, always careful to seal them with an EC, right on the flattened ends. He’d lived his entire life in a small boating town in Massachusetts, until rent became too high and so Eben moved ten miles north of Easton, Pennsylvania, ten miles north of the national Crayola Factory. If Eben had wanted to start a simplistic, God-fearing religion, he would have brought all his cardboard, black-suit-filled boxes to Lancaster, and if he’d wanted to design neo-modern homes, with strange red square couches and little to no closet space, he would have settled himself in right down the road from Fallingwater. He’d never been good with getting geography right.

But somehow, he managed to earn enough to buy a good flat-screen television, and after only three months he’d taken to buying name-brand groceries again.

Mostly it was the band of doing-it-themselves hipsters from the local high school who kept him going. They came with their ancient orange cars and Jewish T-shirts, walking awkwardly because of vintage shoes a size too small. Rather than just ringing on his doorbell, they would tap at the glass panes with the tips of their sunglasses. It was quiet enough that he could only hear them if first he’d heard their cars, and then had come prematurely to answer the door, and stood right behind it. Once inside, they would talk ironically about the weather, while picking through batches of Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, and Stolen Patch Green. They were always most interested in the earthy tones. At the very least, they would spent sixty dollars.

The March after the move, he met a young businesswoman named Kate, who enjoyed breaking bread rather than cutting it, and waiting ten minutes for soup to cool instead of going right in and burning her tongue. She was short and blonde, with freckles running down her arms like splatters of copper wax clinging to a kettle. After nine months of dating, she moved in.

Eben enjoyed Kate. He had a blast with her. That’s what he told his mother when she asked if he was considering—as she delicately put it—renting a tuxedo in the near future. “But I’m having a blast with her,” he’d replied. Because his mother was hard of hearing, she took this to mean “I’m going to mass with her.” Frequent and sedulous church attendance was something that had always pleased her, and both left the conversation feeling triumphant.

Ever since that little Cold War, things have still been slightly split between East and West. Sure the crumbling of the Berlin Wall (akin to the great symbolism of the Crumbling of the Bleu Cheese in 1847 in Southern Idaho), did some good, but that iron curtain still’s left filaments everywhere. And it’s not even just with the Cold War that there’s that split. I mean, look at classic witchery: you’ve got the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Wicked Witch of the East. They’re completely different in their public relations policies and political attitudes. And the coasts! If you dressed West Coast to an East Coast prom, you’d end up looking like a complete slut. East Coast to a West Coast prom, they’d think you were set for some cow-milking.

We’ve established the fact that sometimes there are differences between the East and the West. Just as the number seven is different from the number three (at least in most cases), one side is not usually the exact replica of the other. And due to the Rule of Things Being Better, one side’s way of doing things is probably better. Yes, most of the time it’s the West, but we can’t let those guys get it every time.

So I’m sure you’re wondering what fuck I’m talking about. Well, I’ll tell you. And it all stems from the simple metallic cup-shaped object you insist on touching so many times throughout the day, and especially during the night.

The door knob.

Invented in 1874 by Mr. Jonathan Jacob Samuel Nob of Southeastern Nebraska one day while he was randomly throwing cylinders of brass into long slats of wood. He was just trying to pass the time in between crop-circle-analysis and his weekly meatloaf dinner when he picked up his son, Andrew,’s pole that he—Jonathan Jacob Samuel Nob of Southeastern Nebraska—was forced to buy for Andrew’s pole vaulting class. It was a stupid class at the rec center, and Jonathan didn’t understand why Andrew couldn’t be a normal boy, who plays with sticks, and secretly watches his mother undress through the peephole behind the Picasso print, which he made one day while trying to figure out why there were barn animal noises coming from his mother and father’s bedroom, just like he had done when he was a boy. But he thought, it’s boosting his hand-eye coordination, and if anything it gets him out from under my hair for a good four or five hours.

from that old describe a barn from the point-of-view of a man whose son has just died in the war prompt, circa one year ago…

      I used to think we could fix the windows up.  To fill them with colour, to stain the glass with gold and blue, a violet something like velvet, a green the colour of the undersides of leaves.  I don’t know why I ever wanted a cathedral in my back yard. 
      Now it is a place for termites and their harems of mold and moss and cobwebs that look more like wrinkles than like lace.  Spiders cling at every corner, though most of them have been eaten from the inside out by fine-beaked birds.
      You’d think the drainpipes were spinal cords, hollow and barely white and filled with the mucus of leftover rain.  Sometimes when the wind shakes the frame, the drainpipes gurgle and belch, and then all resolves to a slow siding sound, the sound of water tearing against bone. 
      It is, after all, just a skeleton cremating in the sun, for it is the sun that greys the dark red paint, peels it along the panels, and urges it into ash.  There is only randomness in the way the wood aligns to form the walls.  Only randomness in the framing of the door, the way the windows no longer share right angles.  It is a miracle that the walls are still able to meet.  
      Even the shingles are headstones.  They read: “Buried here a barn, rest in peace livestock you no longer have a solid roof over your head.”  It’s irrelevant, though, because even the Canada geese have flocked back up North. 
      When I walk through the doors, which are always propped open, it’s cold, it’s wet, the dampness clings to my hair, my entire length of hair.  I can smell buried spills of gasoline, underneath the tractor rusted still.  Curled up, at the base of one window, rests a pair of children’s overalls, empty at the knees, the buckles torn right from the fabric, the cuffs stiff and almost buried by the dust.

Once, this past fall actually, I dreamed that I was in my kitchen, barefoot, pajama-clad (all stripes, and then the salmon-coloured T-shirt I spat gold and green designs onto, my hair the hair of four am) and here I was, in my kitchen (the cherry felt pot holders, the Artist magnetic poetry, a fifth of our states consorting on my fridge as magnets), and I was boiling water.  For egg noodles.  And I thought, Should I cook tomato sauce for these egg noodles, or should I not? (And in present day, also that morning: What a stupid, stupid question—tomato sauce?—of course, I need a cream-based sauce, mushrooms yes, beef or sour cream or condensed cream of chicken soup.)  But in the end, I’m pretty sure I made the tomato sauce and served it with the egg noodles. 

This is the mundanest dream I have ever had.  Ever.  And it would seem as if the dream merely concerned what I was most likely thinking about approximately two minutes before I fell asleep, that is: what to cook for dinner Friday, but the Predictions Dream Dictionary courtesy of the internet assures me otherwise.  Apparently, “When dreams contain this powerful image [of water] in any of its forms, understanding the role of the water is essential.”  Perhaps, then, it is necessary to examine my boiling water.

According to the Predictions Dream Dictionary website (which simultaneously advertises both a preview of Slumdog Millionaire and a new drug called Sensa, for pear-shaped women), water can represent both danger & tumult, and security and an essence of its own primordial life-giving force.  Controlled water, which I suppose is water contained in a saucepan, boiling at level 8 on the dial, means new life, refreshment, and vigor.  Because I experienced a vast rebirth the next morning, woke up a new girl, rejuvenated and ready to rumble, I feel like this is an accurate representation of my dream.  Except that totally didn’t happen. 

Which makes me think: wish fulfillment.  (Hello, Freud.)  Admittedly, I’m completely the type of girl who gets a certain thrill out of watching water boil, who loves the sound of it, is mesmerized in some strange Narcissus-esque way and is drawn to break the surface, run her fingers through the raging bubbles and feel the pulse of rolling water.  But: this didn’t happen in the dream, instead I boiled egg noodles.  Which makes me think: perhaps I am represented in these egg noodles, and yes—I can see myself in the many, in the flat, curling and relaxing in the steam.  The question then becomes: What is tomato sauce? and I ask you: What is tomato sauce, ever? My friends, tomato sauce obviously indicates the receiving of a letter.  Or, that’s what The Illustrated Dictionary tells me, or what I can access of it via Amazon.com.  Now is the time that I’d be keen on paging back through correspondence and matching dates to journal entries—but I don’t date my journal entries anymore, and there’s a reason: sometimes a pot of boiling water.  Is just a pot of boiling water.

Song of the Log Scaler’s Shack

In the morning of blue rowboats
      and tossed on rock beaches,
            we hold our hands up to the clouds
and marvel at the cut-outs
      we tear from the checkered sky:
            wrong-weighted hearts, the shapes
of minarets, tessellating gum
      leaves, the sighs of flattened tree rings. 
            The shadows of our fingers
bend and beat like ripe trombones,
      and in the space of your fur cap,
            the lithe line of suntan, burnt strange
into your hands: the wood ash
      of bucking, lips of wet sawdust
            mount my cheekbones—until calling
from beyond the grove line
      the smell of baked goat cheese
            carries your coat back to your skin.
I bring my lips out to your ears
      and say, helping on your caulks,
           “To-morrow I’ll be here—”

     Winding my way around the stack of candles molded to fit dishes shaped like fish and seaweed, I once again returned to the Art Stuff, which was—at this place—stacked on shelves against the wall on the left side of the store.
     Biting my fingernails, I looked down, then up, down, up, then froze. I flared my nostrils to sniff. I smelled something orange. And Goddamnit, I smelled something cream!
     There, sitting so innocently beside the bottles and bottles of Charmin’ Cherry, was a new scent, a new scent called “Sherbet Shake.” There were tiny blue bottles—thin and rectangular—that housed the Sherbert Shake seaside sparkle aloe body gel and those nozzle-headed bottles of glitter splash, bright orange and thick with glitter. There were lotions and nail polishes and a sun care kit, all in this scent that, in layman’s terms, was creamsicle.
     “Mom, mom!” I screamed as I ran, almost knocking over the display of sunless tanners. She barely looked up from the room sprays. In her hand she shook a bottle of Nutmeg.
     “Do you think this would help the bathroom problem?” she asked, fingers laced with coupons.
     “Mom!” I cried again. My mouth was seeping with a smile.
     “What?” she asked, absentmindedly setting the Nutmeg room spray down.
     “I’m psychic!” I cheered.
     “What?”
     “I…am psychic.”
     “Uh huh,” she said, returning to the room sprays.
     “No really! I seriously am! Last year I said the new flavors of Art Stuff would be cherry and creamsicle, and they were.”
     “That’s interesting.”
     She just didn’t seem to understand. I mean, first I would be predicting Bath and Body Works Scents, then maybe I’d throw around a few horse races, rack up some cash with the Super Bowl, and then….the fate of the world would be in my hands. I’d have the power to do anything because everyone would fear me, respect me, wanna get in the sack with me. I mean, I’d be a freaking scientific marvel!
     Over the past few years, however, my psychicness’s gone in and out. Sometimes I’ll estimate a High of 70 with a small chance of showers, and it will snow like the dickens. Sometimes, I’ll try to figure out who Aaron is going to give the last rose to on The Bachelor, and it will wind up being the skinny blonde bitch. And sometimes I’ll think I know the answer to a question on a biology quiz, but I’ll be far from choosing the correct answer, D. Meiosis. At other times, though, I’ll end up writing a fictional story, and then it’ll come completely true (and I’m talking about even replicated dialogue here).
     So maybe my abilities won’t always be there for me, maybe it’s a once-in-a-while type of thing. But I do know one thing at least. I’ve got two vanity drawers filled with glittery Art Stuff, and I don’t really think it takes an oracle to guess that my knees will never, ever be dry.

finis

          February rolled around, and I got an invitation for my friend Erin’s bowling-themed birthday party in the mail. Of course the only gifts I ever got for friends were cute little Bath and Body Works Art Stuff lotions and shaving creams and soaps that came in these adorable felt purses, so my mom agreed to take me to the Bath and Body Works at Manassas Mall, the one we went to when she wanted to make useless stops at the post office and the bank and the grocery store. She said she had to return a few lotions of Pearberry, and I really wanted her to swap them for Warm Vanilla Sugar, which was pretty much the only adult scent that didn’t make me sneeze like crazy or, ya know, send me into hallucinations thinking that I was seventy year-old in a magnificent garden of something flowery.
     “Pick something nice for Erin,” she said, waving her hand back to the table of Art Stuff and shooting down all my hopes of a new tub of Warm Vanilla Sugar hand-softening scrubbing salt.
     “Okay,” I said, mouthing “Warm Vanilla Sugar” in a very obvious manner.
     She wasn’t paying attention. She was looking at the new bulbs of room fragrances. Apparently they were 20% off, which was obviously a Mega Deal.
     I wandered to the back of the store, stopping a minute to pick through a clear plastic box of half-off back massagers: ones shaped like a bar of soap with wooden spikes coming out one side, others the simple mod-art sculptures with “Bath and Body Works” printed neatly across them in grey TNR.
     I didn’t want to waste my mom’s money on back massagers when I had four at home already, though. So I made my way to the display of Art Stuff at the back. My eyes were a little droopy from lack of sleep (that Johnny Quest kept me up real late, ya know), and I don’t know if I wasn’t thinking all that clearly or what, but for some reason or another, I didn’t notice it until I’d been staring at it a good four or five minutes. Yes there was the Electric Apple roll-on body glitter, yes there was the Goodness Grapeness cosmic cool body lotion, and yes there was the Blazin’ Blueberry shower foam, but something else was cluttering the table. Stacked from top to bottom, about the third scent in from the left, was Charmin’ Cherry glitter lotion, Charmin’ Cherry lipgloss, and Charmin’ Cherry plastic packages of facial cream and acne cleanser, complete with a light pink terrycloth disc for massaging pores.
     You might be thinking: Oh big deal, she just happened to think of one of the most popular fruits that they hadn’t already made a lotion of and just threw it on the table. BIG DEAL. Well shut the fuck up, okay? Obviously it was one small incident, but when “coincidences” compound, they ain’t “coincidences” no more! Ahem…continuing on.
     Summertime. School was on the verge of letting out, and they really didn’t need me anymore in those classrooms, so I was at the mall one lovely Tuesday afternoon, Potomac Mills this time (the one we frequented most often), and my mom had a coupon for a free bottle of some earth-tone shampoo or something.
     Again I was sent to the back of the store, sent to go pour over the same lamo flavors of glitter lotion. (I’d stocked up on the cherry shit back in February, and plus they’d discontinued the citrus, so it wasn’t such an excitement as it used to be.)