BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

I drew a solitary revolving door,

made it a mad motherfucker possessed

of the millennium,

alone in a sea—

          I have drawn this door knowing

how soon I'll slide

from the smooth eggshell canopy

of earth—

          This door is my salvation

peddling along to scoop me up

when every last chance screams

to keep the stones

of memory safe—

          I drew this door into past lives

flying away from the pea-sized yard

of childhood where I am three or seven

or ten years old—

                    a nun for Halloween

dressed by a Baptist

to piss off the Catholics.

I drew the door into the future

when the flack proves too heavy

to drag around—

                    the door will say

remember you're sewn

from good cloth—

                    If it were a solid door

it wouldn't be time,

wouldn't progress—

                    If it were a mirrored door

and in the mirror ten thousand

unlikely angels

like superimposed photographs—

                     It would fill

with knobby tree roots

landing in my mother's womb

in the middle of a storm—

                     It would be truth

spelled almost backwards

and thirsty as hell—

                     but look!

I'm a baby in glass bassinet.

I'm a heartbeat—

                    now I'm gone.

BREAST CANCER IS IN THIS YEAR

I’m headed to the boob shop

to get one of my own. Pulsating

dwarf nova wrapped in screaming

cilia and ill-gotten calcite

tongues. I’m getting a gray fist

with lashes to keep

my jubblies company. A renegade

shadow like the misplaced soul

of a wild stallion to run

through my rack. I’m buying a Bambi

to graze on my ta-tas. A duende

for my dinners. A black

seed for my melons. Oxidizing leftovers

for my cans. Thirty lead soldiers

to march through my bazooms.

A patina for my knockers.

What more could a girl ask for?

To die the simple death of the flat-

chested, all those euphemisms

crowing around the grave.

CYTOKINESIS

All I can think is where did she go?

in the dark at 2 a.m., my heart racing

against its own Jungian synchronicity:

producing the memory

of fear, flashing like a thousand pinhead

paparazzi cameras of the limbic system

when your plane’s plummeting

at 40,000 feet or when your jacket

gets stuck in a ski lift mid-jump.

We don’t forget those moments,

even in our sleep. What did I do

to produce in me this splitting—

self against self? The son shall not bear

the iniquity of the father, said Ezekiel.

But what about the daughter?

This is my father’s fear

and his father’s and all the fathers’

who ever stalked on two legs

across Europe for the mammoth.

We will not starve to death

nor will open oceans keep us

from sailing our outriggers to the land

that was birthed by the sun.

Take that, nighttime. I can see myself

on the opposite end of a room

which is now a panorama

of the room I’m actually in.

No light except what exudes

from both my bodies,

as if they are riddled with the light

of memory, the millions of tinny voices

that bind to receptors and scream,

Hey! Watch that cliff!

Hey! You’re seeing a duplicate of yourself

in the dark! Scientists now imagine

that apophenia is the bridge between art

and insanity, whereas before it was just

the craziness of fitting squares

into circles and thinking all was patterned

in the world. I can see

myself, a paper doll

in flimsy paper raincoat, the kind

with pinkynail tabs folded over

my shoulders and around my paperthin waist.

My other self, the one with me here,

in blue pajamas. Goethe saw his double

riding past on a horse

on the way to Drusenheim. The twin wore

an unfamiliar gray suit with gold trim.

When Goethe rode the route again later,

he looked down and realized the suit

he was wearing matched his doppelganger’s

years before. Some of us can feel it happening—

a cleavage furrow forms

in the center of the cell and the cell divides,

and we watch ourselves running

away from ourselves in slow motion,

never gaining ground, convinced

we’ll become the great philosophers of our age

if only we can make time move

backwards and reconvergence possible

in the schematics of the brain.

DON’T MAKE FRIENDS WITH HAPPENSTANCE

Happenstance has a way of shoving

that little square of paper

into your mouth, forcing a jig in the piazza

with fifteen palm trees swaying

to the gospel drone of your brain

while a mouthful of post-

teens strip and swell in the mud-

brick’s night air. Happenstance steals

your verve, your verbal acuity

and fancies you a Cheshire shrine.

Happenstance takes a crayon

and draws your mother’s birth canal

where you can’t forget its tumbling

placenta on construction paper.

Little jay fallen from momma’s nest.

There will always be

an eyeful of guilt—reading the wrong

novels while the posters on the wall

spill water from two dimensions.

Long after happenstance walks out,

closes the door, locks itself

away from the rest of adulthood,

there will be a flashy,

intense desire to meet God

in your armpit

one of those lonely nights

in college when just then, just then

you were the coolest kid

on the talking jungle gym.

Alexis Orgera lives in south Florida. She is the author of two chapbooks, Illuminatrix (Forklift, Ink.) and Dear Friends, the Birds were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio; Fou; H_ngm_n; The Journal; jubilat; Sixth Finch; and The Tusculum Review, among others. She edits the soon-to-be resuscitated New CollAge at New College of Florida.