1.
the lady hand extended off the couch slightly curled at the fingers and sleeping. it’s drunk flower night. candle plants fly through the sleeper’s nose and she is gardened, rose-willed, remarked on in the literature of the tables and chairs. carpets ground themselves waiting for her.

2.
remains piled in the sink — flies slain during a recent invasion. their ghosts like politics, imagining the swat of magazines aimed at them and missing over and over. the bodies lie still, staid revolutionaries who will not agree to a truce.

the lady hand is the culprit, they whisper. no surrender.

3.
if a man enters here, he is set upon by vaccuums cut loose from their engines, gray winds drawing him in, coating him in all the old they’ve got.

these interior lands are a reservation of the highest order, dead sands, forgotten sacraments, gods unnoticed still imagining they are the drivers of creation.

4.
the lady hand stretched out and sleeping. a branch of forgetting. no argument for relevance. existence its own justification.

what the body burns at its hidden rituals is the solitary business of cells and electricity.

5.
flies open revenant eyes. multiple windows look onto a city of durable goods. the lady hand, the marble of a temple. blunt demands on time, meet the resistance of art and memory.

she has loved once or twice. eats pulp from oranges to recreate the sting of nourishment.

candle plants can exist for years on the fading glow of romantic notions. men cannot fathom their own small place in here.

6.
when the lady hand moves, the audience leaps up, applauding the triumph wrung from the misbegotten play.

if the curtain moves, it’s only to fall. the lady hand holds nothing. everything. the swooning youth, the old rigid honor of the black-tied suitor, the credits read aloud in transparent wings.

this is the medium of the candle plants, the soil of the night.

7.
aztecs, priests of drunk flower night, opened the bodies of their daughters to see if the gods were home.

knock, knock, lady hand. your house is on fire.

your eyes, your stone flavor.

danger is the blessing of the candle plants, the flies sing.

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Ursula LeGuin used to talk of “bung pullers” — pieces that opened new gates. This is one. Meaning? Haven’t got a clue. You tell me.