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At the edge of the salt marsh in Jamaica Bay, Brooklynberries dangle from slender boughs, black in twilight, sweet and seedy, staining the tips of your fingers with ruby juice. Green apple snails crowd the soil, their translucent bodies leaking fluid. And fireflies leak their greenish photons. Tall sheaves of grass block out the city lights, and the plum-colored bowl of the sky fills up with stars. Feeling my way through the dark, I can barely pick out the dim trail, when rises up from its bed of clouds the full solstice moon.
This afternoon, the fairgrounds at Astroland: A. and I pitched up into the sky, tossed like salad, over and over again. A carny standing by the side of the ride, nonchalantly spraying us with a garden hose. The wheel turning away from itself, the sprawl of the wave, the on-coming water. The widest bluest Coney Island sky swimming into view, then the sun's brilliant bursting against which I closed my eyes and down we flew with the ground and the onlookers growing bigger by the second and arrested suddenly as we swung upwards yet again, flinging water at the sky. But at the Aquarium four walrus cows raised their blubbery heads, waggled their fat whiskers, yawned at me, tumbled all over each other in the tank-water, flipped over onto their backs, swimming through the slowly percolating light, in the glass and blue prison we built for them because we love them so, love these soft animals, love and hate and hurt them. So that sunburned and bugstung, typing these words in the dark, I want to protect everything, imprison it all, take it and keep it forever, take it and kill it and take it and heal it and I suppose that's what it is to be a person, with this burning crawling out from my skin.
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