The Science of Trees

By Abigail George

The photograph is of my mother. In it she looks like someone else. Perhaps someone else’s mother. Our relationship is fraught with difficulties. I’m a fat cutout or rather the curator of fat cutouts. Dark water inside of my head. I can hear her voice. She is calling me. Yes, I am coming. She’s my sun.  A slow word. An open and shut release. She’s a mountain covered with light-green foliage. Her hair is cut in the style younger women wore in those days. The expression on her face is carefree. She is not burdened yet with a brilliant, manic depressive husband, and three spoiled but talented children. She is the storage space where I keep all my childhood treasure. I search for the city language of chronic illness. Find it there, the miracle,  staring back at me on the page. My mother is beautiful even though she is the origin of winter to me. She’s taste, and smell. Sight, and sound. My mother is elegant. I feel when I look at that picture, holding the photograph in my hands that I can have a coffee with the girl that my mother is. Perhaps we can even go for lunch. Share a slice of decadent, mouthwatering cheesecake. That’s what girls do. They go out together, and talk, and talk. She will tell me how she met my gentle, and wise father. She will tell me their love story in so many words. She has all that slicked back magical wavy magazine hair. I only exist because of her. She carried me in her womb for nine months. The pregnancy was difficult. I was delivered by Caesarian section. Late at night while the house is asleep I write. I write to reach all of her. I write in code. She’s warm like a good, hot breakfast of French toast, and oats with cinnamon milk. Syrup and bacon. Eggs and toast. Muesli bird food. I remembered when her belly was gravid with my sister. Then with my brother. Perhaps I can even remember when she stopped laughing. The cold shore of her love ruined me for life. I’ve become a dangerous woman. Dangerous to love. I had position once, that giddy moment but now I’m marked in some explainable way that everyone who has eyes can see when they look at me they know that something is wrong with me. Outside my bedroom window. There’s the high school I went to but never graduated from down the road from where I live. The high school where I was bullied. Teased mercilessly for being too smart, too thin, for being invisible as long division, and dust. There’s the hospital I was born in down Stanford Road. The flat where my parents first lived, played house, settled down to raise a family, have that sunny road, have those kids. The flat opposite the library with the Encyclopedia Britannica that is still there locked in a time machine.

My mother is warm, and sweet but only with people who belong to the same tribe she belongs to. Girls and women.

The smell of clean cut grass is in the air. The scent of my mother’s rinsed hair. Salt and light on the open sandy path at the beach as we make our way to the sea. Curled in the foetal position on the bed listening to music played loud to drown out the other members of the family making their way, marching their way through the order of life in the other rooms of the house. Inside my head are waves. Vibrations of energy. Something snaps. Does it have a sound? A round shape like the shape of this blue planet called Earth? Is it circular like the moon calling the tides down an inquisition through a loophole? Is it the circle of the sun that is causing me this hot, dense, heavy abdominal pain? Knots of butterflies in my stomach. Playful moths in the pit of my stomach. The flame that flickers. Shadows of fingers. The sunlight is considered thin. In the afternoon it hovers against the wall, the comfortable sofa in the family room, after a rain showers flecks. The woman in the photograph is my mother. She is wearing a beautiful dress. She looks very elegant. She is smiling or laughing? I do not know this woman. She is a ‘fiance’. She has found herself a husband. She is not tired of life yet. She isn’t not cold towards her daughters. Not yet, anyway. She’s going to be Eve. Made from Adam’s rib. The world makes me go cool inside. In this photograph she does not have any flaws yet. They haven’t collected her from the hospital with me yet. I wonder if the woman in the photograph knew how to love. I knew she knew about loss. Her brother. The accident. She is not wearing her glasses in the picture. She looks lovely. She is too thin. Has she not been eating because of the stress of planning the wedding? She does not look like Joyce Carol Oates. My mother looks like she is a model in a catalogue. Damn! I, on the other hand, look like Joyce Carol Oates, I think to myself. I think to myself all female writers should look like someone they admire terribly. Alice Munro. Joan Didion. Anita Brookner. Marilyn Monroe, the poetess, and not the actress. Jean Rhys. Harper Lee. I know these things instinctively. It’s my brother’s birthday next month. It’s that time of year again. Easter. ‘Pickled’ fish pickled with onion and lashings of turmeric. White fish flaked with raised forks every year. Buttered toasted hot cross buns with raisins for eyes. Chocolate hollow eggs. Rabbits everywhere the eye can see in the mall. Down the shopping aisle.

The writer Anne Lamott taught me style. Technique. Jean Le Roux, a distant relative, taught me that you must marry for love. That to be addicted to silences is the most feminine of journeys. The writer Anne Lamott taught me that if I  follow her writing instructions as if I was following an ingredient list for a recipe will it only be then  that I can call myself a writer in the rod of the mist. This sublimity. This cool sumptuous balancing act of vowels and consonants in ink. The proof of language translated onto the page. Her books with their magnificent, stooping  tumult. Then I think about Susan Sontag’s cancer. Nothing seems to matter to me now in this world. Only chronic illness. Only this city that I live in. My mother tongue. Only the kerfuffle of cancer. Cancer cells growing, growing, and growing with no end in sight. The black sheep of disease.  Ah, the bittersweet art. Promises of it all. Life in writing. Life resurrected in writing. Anne Lamott. My mother. Jean Le Roux. Susan Sontag. The search for a self help kind of calm inner peace has taken over all my brain cells like a duck takes to water. My brain cells are part lofty cargo/part meat country. The craft of my writing is novel to me. The wings of the entire establishment of the camp system inside my head are like the proof of a heatwave. I am a free artist. An androgynous artist with the mystique of bipolarity. There is a link. Timing to the kinks, the links in the chain. Always has been. All my life. I have sought feminist writing. Art in language. A spacious museum that I could visit anytime by opening the pages of journals. Black Croxley notebooks. My mother gave that to me. The sun. There was an ocean behind Sontag’s ‘illness as a metaphor’ and a baptism of sorts for me. I longed to copy her. Write brilliantly without any superhuman effort at all. With the death in the family, with the onset of that came stereophonics of cancer in my head. Once I had a beautiful aunt, Jean Le Roux. A distant relative that passed from breast cancer. Life is not just a kerfuffle or an endless stream of traffic. Life is hungry for streets, alleys, theater, for musical comedy, and the drama, voice, the speech of tragedy, I am quiet. The day is quiet. The body is a flower. So beautiful even with the words ‘chronic illness’ on your lips. Even in the throes of death. My mother was the first woman I knew. My first love. Daughters love their mothers even though we might not admit it all the time. She taught me humility. What she didn’t teach me was how to love others. Was she selfish? Did she want me for herself for all of her life? She did not teach me how to love a man, and keep him. Cook, and clean for him. How to get him to marry you, to love you. She did not teach me to be soft. This paradise to be doe-eyed. She did not teach my lips to be loved. My hands feel creamy. There was always this flightless distance between us. This song. This dance. Madness on my part that once illuminated, and shaped my young adolescence, and adult world. All I want to tell her is this. That I admire her. I have always admired her. Her stylish flesh. Her power, and drive.

She’s lived all of her life while I am frightened of everything to death of the feats of the universe around me. The environment I live in. I am tired. Coping is a half-mechanism. I think of him in Joburg. Director. Winner of international awards. The sweet memory of him is ‘killing me softly’ like the song.

There is always this struggle for creativity in every bit of dust and air. For the ray of light, the driftwood that the beach spits out is imagination. There is always the order and the routine of the day. Make dad’s breakfast. Take medication. Hide the pharmaceuticals away from my small nephew’s inquiring gaze. The day is always the same. As fresh and new as rain. I find myself in tall grass. Hair windswept. I find myself standing in front of a mocking sea.

Insomnia. Fleck. Wavelength. Photosynthesis. Mitochondria. Photoelectric cell. Handsome words that comfort me like time’s place in the world. It travels like a nomad. They taste like sugar on my tongue. There’s no struggle that awaits them. Internal or external. No winter. Nothing objectified.  All too soon adolescence was gone. Then the blues began. I didn’t know what to call it back then. I can hear my mother’s voice inside my head.

She’s talking about my brother. How he’s never going to marry that girl.

Twilight of the Superhumans

No one expected this. Kid in a gasmask helping an old lady across the street, even though the crosswalk is in excellent working condition and traffic doesn’t really exist anymore under this big green radioactive dome, shielding The Metropolis, the pillar of the Steel-Kingdom, held and dominated by the House of Steel, founded by the first man of tomorrow Steelman and fully established by marriage with the Amazonian demi-goddess Madame Miracle, though now it’s King and Queen Steel and we are all damned on this entire planet.

Under the dome, we’ll either die from cancer and other forms of radiation sickness or meet a brutal end in an unnecessarily operatic war of reluctant superhumans and egocentric mad gods.
The old lady never got a chance to cross the street, as a hulking behemoth of tumors once a Gamma-ray scientist landed into the center of the street. Skull faced, contorted super-strong beast howling at King Steel, wispy white hair in a black and red leotard, silver steel S in the center holding a pristine white cape into place, yet you could see he was yellow with cancer, the years of storing energy like a battery but dying of radiation poison this new god yearned for victory at any cost.

He condemned himself to essential death in what was a superhuman arms race. Create new soldiers to usher in a militaristic peace into the world since the great fragmentation between the various fractions of The Alliance. The Peacekeepers would make a comeback and despite the membership not consisting of the original seven champions of justice, everything would be fine and orderly or King Steel believed with cancer eating his brain.

The incredible Brute raised himself up and being a mass of terminal disease with just as much rage and insanity as the levitating being above grabbed the only speeding truck on the road and threw it at the bane of his current existence, showering radioactive isotopes upon the ground, through fissures made by gamma saturated grasps of fury.
 Kid in the gasmask pushed the old lady out of the way but it wasn’t enough as she was struck across the eyes going blind and swallowing another whole and kid in the mask referred to as Robin-Jay by his ailing mother who may have hinted around that his father was once a vigilante sidekick, not that it mattered as a gold chain with an archaic religious significance dangled from the boy’s neck.

King Steel incinerated the automotive projectile with laser vision and gasped as he saw the young lad’s golden talisman. Gold. Another weakness in conjunction with radiation. It was a slow agonizing death this poison but gold like the kryptonite of fiction weakened him like a man of steel from another time.
He looked down at the kid in the gasmask and something caused his spine to shiver for the first time in decades.
	“Son, stay back. We need to be united…God is coming and it’s not a good thing.”
The cancerous mass lunged at his floating nemesis and just like the truck out of sheer impatience from years fighting and fear of the figure below, King Steel melted Brute right on the spot, leaving a charred twisted skeleton not much different than a Dali painting among the broken street.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, isolated from the East Coast of the radioactive dome had trouble of their own. The Masters of Marvels fully assembled with an army to crack open the dome and take what they needed from the House of Steel to fully win this war. It wasn’t too long ago when the various superhero teams of: The Peacekeepers, Fearless Five, Justice Guard and Supremacy Squad had decided to officially disband and rebrand themselves as one unit…THE ALLIANCE to rid the world of evil doers by any means necessary…even the numerous bands of mutants had set aside their differences alongside many of mentally scarred street vigilantes. However Dr. Universe sat upon his high throne stationed above the roundtable to ensure everyone was equal beneath his vast superior power and knowledge, serving as a force of guidance more than anything instead of being just another demi-god like a certain extraterrestrial with his humanoid resemblance who dared call himself “king.”

An armor encased master with a bionic heart wrapped in a mystical purple cloak wearing a spectrum of rings adhering to all the colors of a rainbow, it was a hard won battle against Atlantis but the war was far from over, he once foresaw that in his sidekick Jimmy Jett’s magic eight-ball glasses, even after they defeated the House of Steel, the Mutates who had left Earth to terraform Mars and renamed it Planet Z after the Z-gene which bestowed their powers would return with much greater force, which ultimately formed an alliance on a nigh omnipotent level.

What could be considered as God was coming which spelled the end of everything they originally fought for. There would be another mass extinction on a planetary level rendering the existence of battle between good versus evil quite meaningless and the good doctor and his illuminated colleagues couldn’t manage that which is why he sent the bat-shit crazy one to finally execute that cancer ridden warped alien who started out as just a good old Michigan farm boy only to find out he was “gifted” with a power from beyond the stratosphere. The Alliance was never meant to hold and usher in a utopia like they wanted and eventually they dismantled it from so much in fighting after the execution of the villains, then the toppling of sinister global regimes and finally just usurping these small minded yet narcissistically engineered societies which only further plagued the human condition and the eco-system itself.

The Atlanteans of course had something to say as did the Amazons who after their pantheon was taken out make a hasty alliance via marriage with the House of Steel spawning demonic descendants which would have Steelman’s powers yet none of his weaknesses though those abilities would be diminished the genes from the mother would make up for it and this concerned council which consisted of the best and brightest of superhumans who were more human than human with the exception of the designated executioner Knight Shadow, the typical rich boy scenario only it was more sexual for him…a trip to see Dracula, wetting himself over a blood sucking scene with something that wasn’t urine, embarrassed socialite parents rushing out of the theatre to be gunned down by political protesters screaming “Eat the rich!”

There was something more erotic about his costume and implementation of extreme violence than brutal street justice, just ask his sidekick Squire…oh you can’t…Arachnakid had suffocated him within his own web of terror, in an effort to be more man, than kid so he could join the big league of superhuman killers and eventually get a seat at the king’s table.
Dr. Universe sighed as he stood to greet the rest of the incoming counsel, he wouldn’t tell them of hopelessness of the situation nor how it was completely useless to officially decimate not only Metropolis but to engage in battle against that which created them in the first place, but he would tell the story of the egg.

The herald soared the space-ways. A slender chrome being encased in a field of celestial upon a disk made of the matter as his skin and surrounded by the same field of fire. He had a name once and sometimes wondered if he had truly been born a man or what sort of inferior abomination from a backwater forsaken planet did, he hail from? 
He could barely remember the words to articulate, but remembered the number zero-zero, whatever that meant. There were fragments, one of a nihilistic shaven headed monk hellbent on proving the meaningless of existence by exterminating his sect with his forbidden lover whose name was Shal…and before the executioner’s laser axe could come down on upon their necks, RAI-SHI arrived…swirling series of electric storm clouds and obsidian armor. The dark seed of what really governed the various forces in distant and unknown galaxies.

The planet was ripped apart, as they were suspended in space as RAI-SHI shed the armor and implanted itself into what remained of the planet…a hovering quasar pumping egg containing the darkness of the blackhole, then reborn after shedding its original husk, it turned to Shal and Kul (was that his dead name?) who were remade as two chrome heralds to search out the eggs hidden on other planets so that RAI-SHI could prolong itself for millennia more without exhausting precious cosmic power or warfare which would have more than likely included weapons made of gold, the weakness of his race and there were offshoots upon other planets he knew of.

Kul soared alone as Shal panicked, dismayed by the fact she couldn’t breathe air, ripping her own chest open to expose her lungs in order to breathe. He saw her exposed torso about three hundred years ago as headed toward the Earth to herald it’s destruction and engage in combat with the inhabitants. 
RAI-SHI the machine god who created a series of techno-organic bodies in various planets incubated in these eggs, naturally it had enemies ergo its inhabitants were engineered to be hostile to defend the eggs from various invaders yet somehow there were obstacles such as a planet’s own eco system building its own series of defense mechanisms to subvert control from the artificial deity’s agenda.
Professor Z, sat in his levitating chair on largest built earthen tower erected onto Martian terrain. He communed with what could only be conceived as god and wept in silence as they went through a cycle of eternity experiencing the births, deaths, and rebirths of universes. He didn’t have to make amends for Weapon Zinn anymore and gladly shut down Pablo’s brain with his near limitless healing ability and plethora of adamantine bones which was a combination of diamond and platinum capable of scratching through any surface yet incapable of being rejected naturally by the human body. 

Adamantine like gold was still a weakness for RAI-SHI and Pablo also known as Raptor had too much of an independent streak.
Dr. Universe hovered above the Earth, tears streaming down his face knowing that this was the last time he would ever see it, conjuring a web of crisscrossing energy surrounded by a fleet of Copper-Giants (fully automated but operated by the original Copper Giant on Earth full of cancer and hiding down below King Steel’s utopia). The fabric of space and time ripped open, an unholy alliance was to be made as tenacles protruded and the albino emerald eyed Octo-King and Queen emerged.


Down below Knight Shadow, tumbled out of his armor, still clad in helmet and chainmail. His gauntlets grasped King Steel’s flowing white hair and forced plasma bursts into his ears which even though he was dying of cancer and severely weakened still only annoyed this far distant descendent of RAI-SHI. He tore from his world’s finest ally the symbiote which once belonged to another insect influenced hero, disintegrated with sun-vision, and tore the Mystic Hamsha Eye which clasped his attacker’s cloak together and crushed it beneath his cracking white boots.

“Without the manufactured symbiote and Hamsha, you’re nothing but bone and meat Wayne, how did you even conceive a plan of this pathetic magnitude would work?”
Knight Shadow tripped over himself and grasped a short golden sword. 
	“It wasn’t intended to work.”
King Steel boisterously laughed at the display of futile resilience.
	“I’m not going to launch myself at you, we’re not young and stupid anymore.”

Knight Shadow stood still with the sword at his side observing his once best friend turn rigid as his flesh and organs slide off his skeleton.
Kid in the gasmask stood over the corpse.
“Well, kid…what’s next?” He rasped.
Kid in the gasmask removed his mask, his skin shining brightly in the sun over the cracked radioactive dome.


	“The name’s Golden Boy, now melt me down into a colossal bullet and shoot me into the head of God.”

Michael’s Dream

Early morning there is a moment of stillness within me is noticeable. It is three o’clock… A deep sleep takes me to another place separate from the world. Takes me to a soothing place before the sun rises while the moon lights the skies. Seeing more stars covering the skies of Vermont. Mild thoughts along with a calmness comes. A separation of a world which is full of noise and hustling people during daylight. It’s three o’clock and sleep evades me. It’s always this time in the morning in which there is tranquility. A place where the trueness of life is renewed. While the cardinal sleeps before waking up the world with its melodies. It always been like this as the moon watches. Sitting at the old royal typewriter there was no search and pecking. My fingers danced as they leaped into the air, striking the keys. Thoughts took form as a meditative state came. A moment in time when my thoughts melted like snowflakes.

Grey skies dispensed flakes of snow falling into the winter air. Each flake evaporated upon touching my skin. My soul delighted in the wetness of the snowflake melting on me. Snow always woke up something within me. It was the first time realizing God’s existence. Feelings of softness which blended with my thoughts. Thoughts falling and melting leaving no sign or presence. The taste of nothingness remains within me. Perhaps it was the whole point of snow. A reminder of nothingness. One moment of life. Thousands of snowflakes coming and going like thoughts in early morning. Snow has a quietness. While the snow touches die upon touching the ground. Similarly, life is a snowflake touching our essence before dissolving into the ground. It is five in the morning and the moon recedes and the sun lights the sky. It is time to wake up. It was those hours that harmony existed for me. My dream brought a familiar feeling within me. Perhaps this is reality, and the world is a dream. Who knows for sure? God watches over me.

11-23-2021

Fierce Gold Sun 
 
Fierce gold sun
sits on my chest,
wraps its scorching
arms around my
shoulders. Its breath
singes the hair
on my body.
Is this what bombs
do? What human
being could think
of such a thing?
Creators of
death, inventors
of destruction,
how did you sleep
when the bombs dropped
on Mother Earth?
The blossoming
flowers were not
enough. The roots
ripped from the ground.
Human beings
melted away.
 



One Slice of Toast
 
Drinking water
or drinking tea,
just eight ounces
an hour before
the procedure.
 
I could have clear
soup or clear juice.
One slice of toast
an hour before
 
the procedure.
Nothing else, just
one of four clear
liquids and that
one slice of toast
with no butter.
 
Perhaps this should
be my meal at
least once a week.
I would lose weight.
I could cheat by
eating one soft
or hard-boiled eggs.
A cracker with
no salt at all.



The Last Night



It was the last night
 
I would drive her home.
Even the car was sad.
 
I drove home afterward.
 
I loved for the last time.
I went to sleep for years.
 
I stopped believing in everything.
 
I slept on and on
 
dreaming of the next life.
 
 

     Moon Braille on The Broken Museum Roadside Piece
    

                 Hands of crippled starfish and space wheat, 

                 hands of spinstressed starfish

                The lego windmill spins in morphia stars

                gold occult gears, purple noir.
                                          
                The somnolent sweatsocks, time dilation

                 and alloy eyes green leper moons.

            This misshapen Exhibit road sign with crooked arms,
 
                bark arms wittled by the spun fluxes 

                 cinder eyes of willow moons....
  
                 gold occult gears, purple halo
         
                 of colloidal cell slime in the bending 

                 scimitar sickle moons 

                for miles-- notes of Creeping Muzak,

                 (organ grinder's b-flat) 

        Crippled Starfish, hands of wet wheat space meat

                 (three--2--in DS)
 
          the star spun in gold straw, the gold foil crochet
                                       
          darned by the silk divan's royal hypnotist 

        and dilatory tar fudge.

        Hands of crippled starfish, hands of space wheat. 

John Thomas Allen is a 38 year old poet who loves metered and unmetered, experimental and “traditional” poetry.  He would like to attend a psychosocial club in which William Hope Hodgson and H.P. Lovecraft were read to the Velvet Underground’s first album while artist Banks Violette constructed one of his somethings.