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. “