Porcelain, smoke, swans snapped at the throat; every boy I trusted was a broker. Every broker I met bet I could profit from poetry—naming what wounds me, writing fracture into filigree. Feel me rupture from my patterns and onto the page? I’m caught in cobalt the color of catastrophe. Apostrophe: preaching to the pottery prized by my grandmother, whose grandmother taught her to treat tears as treasure, theft as trade, and girls as ghouls, ferocious and so inexplicably fine.
*
By evening, I unload and learn a language of palms. I practice balancing teacups on the tear of my throat, the territory chiseled yet unchipped by time. I am cargo, chimera, customs officer: a woman who spits out tea steam, each cloud the size of a country. Borders sewn above my eyes. Gilded handles lining the lids. The lacrimal bones are hostels. Heirlooms, wicked by the West Wing’s curator; he frames the prey, warrants her predator.
*
At the gift shop, a man asks if I’m authentic. He points to my flesh, ponders finding white in the wild—as if finding were not a verb that claims. As if my blue, my bruises would behave. I think not. By closing, I have imagined each of the little women dotting my spine, soft sleeves slipping past their arms. Their mouths are gaps, impossible angles; nothing enters and exits unchanged. Behind them hides a hunter, the paddy protecting his musket, his minutes as he waits. Weeks later, the scene’ll become collectible. Slippery and alive with the wonders of this world. In it, I am a fixed-smile figure. My hands hot and heaven-heavy. They hold nothing.
*
My mother warns me of warehouses. Worse is when they’re empty, unfulfilled by the allure of production. The allure of destruction: woman as transaction, beautiful enough to burn. The allure of reduction: every edge slices the same. There is only one spelling for strife. No novelty to the tragedy, the dark mountains receding. The martyr-red unspooling into dusk.
*
Centuries later, I press my ear to the plaster. I pray and promise to forge a future where the cabinet cracks open: where plates can crawl out on lacquered legs, rims shuddering with the soft lightning of lashes. A scene terrible yet ordinary: the harbor dark and decorated with hulls. Crates ghost-bright and burning. Birdsong and battleships. Pottery paparazzing off the deck. Tonight, I launch myself off. I open the latch. Every porcelain pries herself out.
*
Freedom: cups splitting into skin, shivering into shoulders, soldiers, soldering teapots and teardrops, tissues and tongues dripping saliva, sour and stunningly human—and from it springs girls crouched inside their own cracked chests, with wet nooses for arteries, righteous knives for fingers, violet inkwells for eye bags—and from them springs scabs, crude cheeks, porous and unpainted, peeling back whatever spills. Whatever’s casings chipped open, cobalt clotting into cells, flesh fused to the floor—and myself writhing out of packing straw, palms of paddy and pondwater, magnolia and motivation, monstrous and newly-named pulp fact and not fiction—and every woman wailing wet, impossible breaths, gasping, crawling, walking, traveling—and the continent changes, and the passage changes, and the people changes, and the product changes, and the price changes, and the politics changes, and the harbor stays the same.
