Amy King//Starry Night

I fell asleep and asleep again.
I was asleep in sleep, the empty bladder
of sleep swaying
a hammock of truth, which was not the truth.
My body burned a landing strip,
a field of moths gathered
as pigskin kites with low wing wisps,
the littered light of communion.
The body of Christ fell upon me in pieces,
sails of Icarus scallops
with air like lungs below the crucifix
bleating starry night.
I fought that kiss,
a torture that raises epidermal hairs,
antennae turning dream’s
correspondence into the same
human-shaped faces
that look back into us.
The iris, the lips.
We barter with shadows an inner abyss,
our deep-nosed roses diving
to cradle the taste of fire,
the falling into an empty bladder of sleep.
I am jealous of life.
I am life’s custodial emission.
If you listen,
an avocado tastes like time
has survived the telegram and corresponds
with sands that build
technical vertebrae between us;
we’re shaped the same as spinal grenades.
The material sign of safety pins
fastens survival as an open mouth gash,
a tiny blood seed of beneficial
numbness unto all that exists.
Awake, the artist blooms at the Hotel du Day:
we rose and moved around
a room painted midnight
with food from our resting hymns.
Every body rends his own
fairytale in fault lines.
We sketch such horizons, bodies with moths
mossing life on heated surfaces,
lips that line space where our inner eyes
green and hollow the skies
for the bruise of purple destruction.
Pull the cord now, re-live atomic bomb hues
as photograph, not landscape,
the world exclaims. And so we exist next –
I could touch the entire blue earth
with my mind’s swinging wings,
if by fragility our suspended sky
blew into the bulb of the surviving universe.