homeschool
1
You pronounce that when the body goes,
the head doesn’t.
A dog comes back as a cat,
a cat as another cat
with the same name. That faraway
look is you working through some first
falling-off: narrowed breath, fixed blood.
In the bath, you empty one container
into another, ask me to explain
how the soul rises.
2
Some animals play dead. Some children move
equally between monster and doctor.
A possum will emit convincing mucus
like a rotting carcass. You go limp
behind the sprinkler, admit
it’s all pretend when I sprint over
clutching a cut iris. Young fire ants
feign death intuiting
the limits of their soft exoskeleton. Give me that flower!
you yell, and I toss it onto your chest
like an aficionada.
3
Divide and subtract your world,
learn to reduce by things. I take away
two crayons, leaving you
with three. I make an abacus out of Adoration
Tomatoes (agreed: that our mouths will be
zero). Why 500 miles on a plane
feels different than in a car is a question I answer
by invoking wings. I worry your grandparents
won’t live much longer. They keep trying
to give me furniture.
If I pinch the skin
on the back of my hand it takes seconds
to retract. We spend days testing
each other’s age this way—the sharp pain,
the sudden tent.
4
Sidewalk chalk suffuses the dead
centipede with flux and incandescence—pink residue
dusting the basin
that holds the end
of something. I think, how
can I be frank about each limb
in your outstretched palm?
5
Moonlight enters through your blinds, casting
transverse stripes. I pray that somewhere
hidden and hushed a Thylacine hunts.
That the curved horns of an Auroch brighten
against its curls. Most nights I can’t believe my luck
that you exist. I would like to confess
that I sneak into your room
to kiss your widow’s peak,
but you already know this. Encircling my neck
with sleepy arms you’ve caught me. A world
in which you learn the word snare
but still insist on aminal:
Why can’t I have both?
6
That you never die is the eyelash wish
whispered in my ear. And when the hair
disappears from your finger, I lie:
that our demise is like the catatonic
trick of sharks. That our breath slows
not stops—the spirit soldered
so expertly to our lungs—
Alicia Rebecca Myers writes: “Most recently, I have published poems and essays in Creative Nonfiction, Best New Poets, FIELD, The Rumpus, Fairy Tale Review, The American Literary Review, and Gulf Coast. My chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2016), was selected as a winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. “