christie ann reynolds

Image by Tyler Spangler

from halo in retrograde

At 14 I nearly fell from Batman the Ride.


Too slim for the claw that was supposed to pin 
me down. I locked eyes with an elderly lady on 
the ground.





I don’t know


if she thought about me after that.

I did not want to mourn with everyone else when 
Michael


Jackson died. When Anna Nicole died. When 
Brittany Murphy.


When Mickey Rooney.


Success can be measured by how nervous you


become around a large group of people who are 
crying.


Paul Walker I mourned for.


A man driving so many cars reminds me of my


father.

Goodness can make you sick.


Lukewarm goodness,


a crowd.


The subway is the best place to feel it.


To remember the people


you’ll never know again.

I know the arctic is beautiful           even though I 
have never been.


It is desire that makes us seek pleasure in 
everything from cake to bed. 


I can never be as powerful as my dead aunt, her 
sepia tones.





Goodness cannot be lukewarm but maybe 
the woman who helped me 


when I fell three bus steps down.

Shelter, food, clothing, water, love. To survive is to 
flee dehydration.


Walk a strict line to the source.


I walk a strict line.         I right


all wrongs by drinking water, so much water.

 


Can love be retained


by water?

It is an imposition to put me in a crowd. Places 
where straight 


teeth are noticed more than poems. 


Beauty can destroy. 


I am the heir of stampede eyes.


Heir, collective unconscious. 


Heir hair.

 


Maybe I can flourish.


Maybe                            in absence. 

Collective memory is not the same as a collective 
heir.


Think about a skeleton dancing across a table.  


The skeleton is not the memory of the person who 
owned it but now think 


of a person who died. 




Remember they owned a skeleton.

---

CHRISTIE ANN REYNOLDS is the author of Texts from My Mom (Big Lucks Books 2014) Revenge for Revenge (Coconut 2012), and idiot heart (New School Press 2009). She lives in Brooklyn.