JAKE BAILEY The Unfolding of Treatment ReZistance

Incomplete List of Items in the Yard

An item, I’ll say, can be organic, so long as it’s no longer alive. If alive, it’s the living, a crowded cell moving against what’s inside from in—

east wind the former, bone and water soon—and so I’ll count the cicada wing, filigree-veined, something of cellophane

to the reflection of the clear wrap between; I hope it’s periodic. I’d like for it to have kept this ground these thirteen years.

A carapace clings at the stunted palm on the front walk out. Pieces of glass lay close-broken and left. Not much, otherwise, of the human

hand but two dropped pennies, so long exposed they’ve corroded dateless. It doesn’t matter which year

they were pressed, which year dropped from faulty pocket or thrown, which known manner of loss.

Precisely how ruined the face. That doesn’t pull the memory back, though we could make one (ours a material culture);

there’s no knowing safety, in bodies blurred borderless the minute they cross thresholds away from the few known doors.

EMMA AYLOR 9