No One Leaves

Kirstin Allio

No One Leaves

No one leaves the house anymore, not from work, from imagination. “Distant wars make me feel like a bad person.” To confess is to break one’s teeth, in Kurdish. No one lives within their mental map of others’ futures. “My husband still has his baby fat at fifty!” What’s faith? None of the physicians have openings. “Did you say opinions?” What is wrong with people? Childhood? Irony? “I know it when I see it.” A storage unit for holiday decorations. “They were yay about that.” Pinecones dripping plastic. The pioneers were cynics. Money, politics, intentional or unintentional poetry. Poverty makes a sign for stump grinding seem sexual. “Several people have told me I’m lonely.” Full disclosure, fall is over. The opposite of solitude is profanity, a failure of silence. “We’re trying to language feeling going forward.” A fallen tree a figure of speech leaving a lived-in space leafless.

Our Next Meeting is a Joint Meeting

You’re in your feels, flushed by the fact that there’s no who at the back of everything.

It falls to you to kill the lights to see the stars, terminuses of beginning, breath of bewildered prophets ballooning old jars.

You’re told to toon out your parents’ ingratitude, ingratiating as a nonprofit. There’s a place (you’re told) where choice is an aphorism, an ice age of underexploited expenditure where anyone can say it but only you can see the permission structure.

Pressuring the farce (don’t be sad) blows a fuse to a machine age and you’re a mastodon. With other munchers. Myth busters. Lawn eaters. The meeting covers the ground.

Myth

was math, matter divided by pattern. All gods were metadata.

*

An airplane was a chaise lounge pushed along by a well-tended hand from a glossy ad for a vacation from language.

*

Gratitude was guilt, grief the scapegoat. How to find a needle in a haystack? Burn the haystack down.

This Page Left

This page left emotionally blank, silent.

Gestation. Guiding

question, a female manifesto? Manifestation. My fief and turf, my description (pattern) of fiction (matter) is fiction (          ). If you had to sex the answer, soaked as the worm in the worn handle of clear liquor, where would you touch me?

All that touches turns toward green. To promote myself is to break character with the built environment.

(I tried to hold onto her, but there was something green in my posture. Not pride, but not wanting to be a predator.)

Pride and Predation

Me: young hair/old face
Her: young face/old hair

Breast of burden/bird
Of prey: does the question pre

Date the answer or the answer
Predate the question?

Me: a runaway
From feelings, her

A feeling of running
Toward danger. Me

An end-run around lying
Down with dogs dreaming of lions in the long

Shadow of the grave
Stone gas pump—

Get up, brush the high
Stakes off. Between

Us, it’s just not working.
Beauty exists in the sphere

Of hurting. In the heartspace
between us, one heart between us—

Unformed and Uncontented

Insert pain here. In great detail.

Insert silence. If you fall in love with a solution, make sure it doesn’t become mainstream, a mannerism. Like sniffing between sentences. Sucking air through the spaces in your teeth to cool it down.

Enter the dog, long-suffering as any dog caught up in human business, but ass backward, an eye on the back of its head, an anus. Cerberus? As a representation of time, it could go either way, the underworld boulder on the up side or the downer of the tale. If you believe what you see, you see what you believe. Reality replaces psychomyth as the secret structure of the host culture.

Reverse Engineering

The campsite was deserted. Scribal
bikes, baked grass.

On second look, signs
of structure showing through: shopping cart
packed solid, shopping
cart jack
knifed, un
packed, up
side down.

*

God is the factory settings of the self in the sense that private property is to Marx what sexual repression is to Freud.

*

Campsite against chain link against inter
state: its inhabitants
aren’t called campers.

Bicycles lying on their spines like slain deer.

Stunt Novel  

“She’s hard up. She’s very negative. First thing out of her mouth, ‘I wasn’t happy with the cab driver.’ ‘So try Uber,’ I said, and she said, ‘I’m not getting drawn into that nonsense.’”

“I feel lighter and lighter,” she said and I leaned across her lap to look out the window. I said, “Do you feel like you’re flying?” “No,” she said. “Not unless God’s a servant leader,” she giggled.

*

I was looking for outstanding metaphors, I needed to hear editing compared to dropping sandbags out of a small, talented plane.

Editing was more like flight than erasure, said the author so famous she wore a sweater dress a stunt shade of orange. She was sober so she complimented the bartender. I was squeezed on a couch with the bartender’s cousin’s friends.