Systems
We have science and ways to make it make sense: circumstance and happenstance are ways to ward off exhaustion, ways to amplify it. Trust in cartography, ringed indefinitely. Measure circumference: almond, egg, pea? We work for it, work against the grain, fantasize about statistics. Cellular resistance. Defile the fillings in oldest teeth, metallic sheets. Start with the mouth and pull it all out. Then rosy-tipped lipids pinned to the chest. We wander far and wonder at the heads of our fathers preserved in ice — making the rounds every day, tending to the suspension. Excessive growth. We have ways to process progress. Retract the lawn, the fake grass pounded down by tools and hands crusted with dust, washed in mud. Drippings, meat from bone. Go through the motions of intimation, the notes we send ourselves, returned postage-due. Irregular margins. Names on a wall, names engraved in stone, names that remain and multiply when we spin the globe.
Colleen Coyne lives in Minneapolis, where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Drunken Boat and Pebble Lake Review, and she is the current Editor-in-Chief of dislocate.
