Overflight

We built a fire on the beach,

fired up our brains

with cannabis and Boones Farm.

We were made harmless by night,

by the overflight of the Perseids,

by the clucking of the ocean’s tongue.

We thought we were one with the universe,

sparks from our fire rising higher

than our imaginations could span.

We ran from an owl angered by our fire.

Our desire to fly, like sparks, expired.

Prostrate, we hid our eyes from the sky. 

*Published in Oxford American magazine

Phrenology

My husband says they are suture lines,

those rough ridges I feel when I scratch my head.

He takes the skull from the top of the curio,

Yurik, we call him (though we did not know him)

and traces the erratic seams with his finger –

dark squiggles like lies erupting on the chart of a polygraph.

     He tells me

that we are born soft-headed, our skulls a collection

of boney tectonic plates drifting toward a cranial Pangaea,

a super-continent to house our highly evolved brains.

Saggital, Lambdoid, Parietomastoid ridges, like fingerprints

unique to each individual, but common to the species,

our skulls pieced like bone quilts. 

He shows me a photo

of a new-borns’ skull, points out the Anterior Fontanelle,

the “soft spot” of every new mother’s nightmares and

every adolescent’s morbid fascination, and the smooth-edged plates

separated by dark, grout-like seams like my kitchen tiles.

   Grants Atlas of Anatomy tells me

that the face of a new-born forms one-eighth of the skull,

but when mature it will form one-third,

that sutures and symphysis will close by the sixth year

and that the whole honeycomb skull will be rigid and hard

like sand dollars lacquered and mounted in frames. 

I tell my husband about

my college friends who dared each other to ride naked on motorcycles

at Gulf Shores during the Perseid Meteorite Shower,

their honeycomb sinus cavities full of cannabis smoke

and their eyes full of shooting stars,

about how childlike they looked splayed on the phosphorescent sand,

their cranial continents cast adrift from each other,

their slack mouths leaking surprise.

By P.T. Paul