I thought I could stop 
time by taking apart 
the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.

Nothing can keep. Nothing 
is kept. Only kept track of. I felt

passing seconds 
accumulate like dead calves 
in a thunderstorm

of the mind no longer a mind 
but a page torn 
from the dictionary with the definition of self

effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving

on as if nothing happened. 
Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed. 
Went to work. Went home.

There were parties. Ecstasy. 
Hennessy. Dancing 
around each other. Bluntness. Blunts

rolled to keep 
thought after thought 
from roiling

like wind across water— 
coercing shapelessness into shape.

I put on my best face. 
I was glamour. I was grammar.

Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.

I, too, had been taken apart. 
I didn’t want to be 
fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless

like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.

Spring in Hell and everything’s blooming.

I dreamt the worst was over but it wasn’t.

Suppose my punishment was fields of lilies sharper than razors, cutting up fields of lies.

Suppose my punishment was purity, mined and blanched.

They shunned me only because I knew I was stunning.

Then the white plague came, and their pleas were like a river.

Summer was orgiastic healing, snails snaking around wrists.

In heat, garbage festooned the sidewalks.

Old men leered at bodies they couldn’t touch

until they did. I shouldn’t have laughed but I laughed

at their flesh dozing into their spines, their bones crunching like snow.

Once I was swollen and snowblind with grief, left for dead

at the castle door. Then I robbed the castle and kissed my captor,

my sadness, learned she was not a villain. To wake up in this verdant field,

to watch the lilies flay the lambs. To enter paradise,

a woman drinks a vial of amnesia. Found in only the palest

flowers, the ones that smell like rotten meat. To summon the stinky

flower and access its truest aroma, you have to let its stigma show.

You have to let the pollen sting your eyes until you close them.