INTROCEPTIVE BUFFER SATURATION

How do you experience time?

I’ll go first.

While reading, I lose an eyelash at the end of a poem.

The black fiber clings like a hoofprint to the mountain.

Little comma, pausing, apostrophe in a hurry.

I love the way it looks, alone in the white expanse.

I turn the page without brushing it away.

Fifty years from now, I abandon my robot child in a forest.

When I turn back, the eyelash is reborn, the animal of the fossil.

Yesterday, Andrew said indifference means living in the now.

When you don’t care what happens, you relinquish the future.

I can only intimate to him everything my body has forgotten.

Power surges fry the boiler. Cold bleaches the street.

The moon rises early and ends the day by accident.

What Andrew said is true, I mean neurologically.

Being indifferent, to the body, is a continuous present.

On my fingertip, the eyelash is being a small, empty bowl.

On a craggy rock, three hungry goats are mostly staying still.

ON DISSOCIATION

  after Marie Howe

It is for this I leave you: endless February
behind my last apartment, another city,
the fickle snow sticking, for once, dead finch
cemented to the ice beside the Honda;

my old love harrowing the trash in search
of a ginkgo leaf I picked one afternoon,
tattered now between its filaments like
a chapel window blasted in the siege—

or the jaundiced, abstract August after leaving,
when he crashed his bike and shredded half his thigh,
woke bloody in the street, remembered nothing
of that week, just said he hadn’t meant to scare me—

or the dream I have one night a week at least,
where the kitten I abandoned to the shelter
is still mine, though I’m still me, the place
vacant for years, just scattered litter, a blanket nest.

I turn the key. The empty foyer chokes on dark
and fumes, and though she doesn’t gambol up,
I feel the air displaced, her shallow breath.
She is like so much was back then: alive,

but only just. Too late to run, I pick my way
along the wall toward her black tongue, distended
belly, what I’ve done. Outside, the oak trees
cinch black mesh around the orange moon.

How to explain that ever since, all real
events, even pleasure, are a long concert
I am being subjected to?

You turn me so I’m face down on the bed.
The dark thrusts in again, in time with you.

My old love throws the kitten above his head
and catches her, ignoring her thin protestations,
the brutal weather of that time and place
flying and falling softly in his arms.

My eyes adapt to the dark as though the dark
were an animal, afraid of me at first, and then
approaching to sniff my outstretched palm.

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Lena Crown’s work appears in Guernica, Gulf Coast, Narratively, North American Review, Poet Lore, and The Offing, among others. She’s received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Peter Bullough Foundation. She currently serves as the 2023-24 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in nonfiction at Colgate University, where she teaches creative writing while working on a memoir and an essay collection.