Prima Materia Clara Dregalla

Table of Contents 1 Planets Untethered...........................................................................................................................4 Chrysopoiea.....................................................................................................................................5 Red King | White Queen..................................................................................................................6 Haunted............................................................................................................................................7 Names..............................................................................................................................................8 The Dysphoria of Salt......................................................................................................................9 Ouroboros......................................................................................................................................10 Chimera..........................................................................................................................................11 Something......................................................................................................................................12 The Homunculus............................................................................................................................13 2 | The Elements Letter to Otis Barton and William Beebe, Conquerors of Both Deep­Sea Terrors and the Fragility of Their Own Human Forms, or: Ode to the Bathysphere..............................................15 The Dance of Jupiter and Aether...................................................................................................16 Hudson...........................................................................................................................................17 ∆.....................................................................................................................................................18 On Air............................................................................................................................................19

1

Planets Untethered The blue glass mandala hangs above the altar like a curious disk, a wandering proplyd that got too close. It remembers the death and the birth of thousands of stars; it remembers cyclical mutations; it remembers eternity in fractals, neatly layered to keep them organized. It remembers the course of so many lives, order and discipline liquify. Realities overlap and converge. Orbits melt like hot wax and planets throw themselves into office buildings, apartment complexes. Nicholas Flamel sleeps in the church basement. Sometimes I make him sandwiches. In exchange, he tells me stories of his travels and the hovering apocalypse. Sometimes it is 2015, sometimes it is 1498, or 1983, or it is 1340 and he is a lost child. I ask him why he hasn't been back to Paris, but he tells me that the only Paris he ever knew withered away years ago, and now, the city might as well be the moon.

Chrysopoeia It started as a slight numbness in my fingertips­­ nothing at all. Curiosity, at most­­ I pressed pins to my thumbs. Nothing. I woke the next day with hands heavy and gold as a painted prince. Useless ornaments, unable to gesture or hold a fork. You couldn’t watch the jeweler with his pliers, but by the time my arms ended in gold­capped wrists all my debts were paid. The situation wasn’t ideal, but I bought a new computer, and we had tickets to Paris. But it hasn’t stopped. My legs went to my parents. My arms­­ to my brother. I asked you what you wanted, now that my body might be sold, bit by bit, to buy anything at all. You yelled at doctors to fix this, fix this, please, but so far, there have been no remedies for this glittering anomaly. Varied precious organs will be divided amongst my family. Might as well. You do not want it, but to you I promise my priceless liver and the empty house.

Red King | White Queen The wedding was over­­ the men stumbled, drunk, to their cars, and the women carried their stilettos in thin hands and tip­toed across the parking lot. The women thought of the white veil and the marble church and pitied the young quicksilver girl who caught the bouquet, who still thought it charming when her boyfriend reached for her with brimstone hands. The bulbous moon emits a slow wheeze of poison, enough to contort Isaac Newton, hold his letter­writing hand. The moon has never been a mirror or a wife, has never revealed the demons who revel on the smoldering sun, never married those demons with their fiery claws. The red king and the white queen had spoken the ancient, unbreakable vows, the words Nature wrote for them. Their script was written in a language that none of the guests understood, and many, when they saw the bride move with gravity, approved of her obedience. The guests watched her but never saw her, and wrote in their books that she was hardly there, nothing more than a silver womb. But if the moon has ever been pregnant she did not carry screaming, sulphuric fetuses. She was bloated with the primordial night that swallows cold stars, and a gaseous poison that drove her suitors to madness.

Haunted after “Tethered” by Amy Cutler I feel your hands overlap mine, pushing heavily into the hot water. Pots and pans rise like polished stones and the house becomes a cemetery. It’s been like this for weeks. You whistle on the edge of the kettle, you drum on the old, clanking radiator, you climb to the top of the dogwood and scrape the dirty windowpanes. When I move, I feel your dress brush my knees. Your hair is getting tangled around my neck, braids hanging like the remains of old tire swings that were too exhausted to hold us. I visited your grave under the Hudson, but you didn’t float to Heaven like I’d hoped­ Instead, you filled the entire river, drowning frogs and scouring rocks into knives. We were all afraid to swim for days, the current sure to bash us against daggers we couldn’t see well enough to dodge, and carry our remains all the way to Albany. Everyone else thought you were the mad spiral of green water, but I knew you­ I knew you to be the moss clinging, desperate, to heavy rocks studded with trilobites, young and slimy, panicked. Maybe I dived, maybe I fell, but my dress billowed out in the current, tangling around muddy sticks and water snakes. Tethered to the bottom, I was mummified in algae, heavy and alive. You fill the cracks between the floorboards, you scare the raccoons out from beneath the porch. You’re terrified of emptiness, terrified of abandoned woodpeckers’ nests

and the void between atoms. You could get lost in the spaces between your fingers, so you grow like a vine. I try to pick up a dirty plate but our parallel hands are too clumsy and it shatters, adding more pebbles to the monstrous cairn that is swallowing our sad, grey house.

Names Call it gravity, call it God’s will, call it a mystery­­ just call it something. Give it a name. Nameless things wander away­­ Nameless things gets lost­­ Nameless things don’t know that they are real, and can’t keep your car keys from floating to the ceiling. If a force does not have a name, it cannot tether your kitchen table to the floor, or your knives into the block. Nameless things throw tantrums, throw dishes at the ceiling and pound on the walls until you need a word to describe your poltergeist. How many ghosts do you pass on a trip to the post office? How many times has Pluto sung you to sleep with the quiet hum of a magnet? How many memories have made you trip on the stairs? The forgotten gods have dreamed your fingerprints, and each color of your hair. They sleep for days, and wake with no memory of the mud­creatures in their heads. They knit scarves, they eat midnight snacks, they break their wrists, and never know that they are real.

The Dysphoria of Salt My hands are excavated ruins, dead remains of a dead sea. Broken fingers reach for miles and miles, an endless, briny cathedral, white and crystalline. You will never touch me, can never touch me without slicing your soft palms on my towers and spires. We met at a family reunion, at the Wieliczka Mines. They introduced me: three times removed, keeps growing back. Nobody could remember my name, as many times as I’ve whispered it. You cut sandwiches into triangles with an athame you stole from a distant uncle, the kind used by surgeons and alchemists, smeared with mustard and slivers of corned beef. The kind of knife used to harvest my halite bones, flayed from the useless flesh.

Ouroboros 1 The Earth, in its orbit, knows only how to move in circles. The night eats the day, and the day eats the night, again and again and again. So far, we haven’t found a single way out. They have always said: a child begotten of chaos shall beget chaos. It is written, it has always been written, on parchment, on my skin. The cosmic stenographer takes its pen to my flesh burns me with constellations, that I might be easily recognizable in the tumult of the next 70 years. The planets know where I will go and why. 2 We always make the same mistakes. I always offer to cook breakfast even though I burn the eggs every single time. I grab my ankle, bring my foot into my mouth, and start to chew.

Chimera December­­ we can’t afford the heater, and your fingers are blue. You lie under the window, skinny elbows and knees scraping the floor when you unwind yourself to stare at me when I open the door. You are of two minds. Your lion head takes your food and keeps you sick. Your goat head shies away from my hands, eyes wide in senseless panic. And when your two heads are sleeping your snake tail strikes at your human belly and fills it with venom. You vomit in the bathtub and collapse on the linoleum. They have given you so many compounds, so many roasted elements, dissolved salts, incantations. But the radiator still doesn’t work, and you are still writhing yourself into knots, pulling at your elastic tendons with teeth like polished ivory. How long can this twisted cycle persist before you are eaten alive?

Something There must be some enlightenment– I search like a moth underground. For endless winter months, all I do is crush geodes. I tear apart my own body, this weak host, I rummage through layer of muscle looking for it, whatever it is– do omens appear more easily to others? My throat is tired. I don’t want to sing anymore, I want to navigate winding, noxious mines. I want to find all the missing pieces, the lost dust motes, the little floating clues. I make an endless labyrinth my home– I stay there for so many lightless, frozen nights that the old calendars are useless. I lose feeling in my fingers and toes, crawling clumsily over slimy rocks. The endless tunnel took my sight.

The Homunculus Eleven months later, I went to the barn with a knife and coaxed the bloated mare to lie still. Afterwards, I sat next to the plain green bucket, wiped my hands on an old rag and listened to the creature scream. It pounded its tiny, translucent fists against the plastic, squirmed like an eel and never stopped screaming. It might’ve been a sickly infant, mundane enough, until I poured the jar of blood over its head and it stilled, nostrils wide to catch the hearty smell of copper, then began to drink. It grew to the size of a small child, with the proportions of a man. It looked like me, almost, could’ve been a nephew or a son. At first, I thought maybe I should bury it, destroy my creation. But I could never convince myself to do it, and before long its infant babbling turned to real words. Simple words, but powerful. I threw my revolver in the river on the day he called me father.

2 | The Elements

Letter to Otis Barton and William Beebe, Conquerors of Both Deep­Sea Terrors and the Fragility of Their Own Human Forms, or: Ode to The Bathysphere Atlas Dregalla Dear Otis Barton and William Beebe, Tell me about the color blue, the mesmerising blue of a world you did not evolve for, an inverted world that does not accept you as logical, or possible, a world that would never have guessed you could exist. Can you feel the Earth’s heartbeat 3,028 feet below sea level? Can you feel the ancient pulse of drowned deities, songs that can only be sung underwater to the tune of bioluminesce? What does it feel like to be swallowed by the ocean, that vast Leviathan, our monstrous, ancient mother? What does it feel like to be so close to her strange offspring and know that they are your distant cousins? Tell me what it’s like to leave the ocean, dragged to the surface like a confused creature caught in a net. Tell me what it’s like to tell the others what you saw, two men possessed of otherworldly visions, mad dream­images. Tell me what it’s like to try to share the complex ecosystem sheltered in your brain.

The Dance of Jupiter and Aether Your hand on my shoulder, mine on your waist, we spin in circles, my ring system twirling like the hem of a dress. Your hand, pure like quartz and invisible, never strays from the curve of my shoulder. Our vortical waltz is effortless and never­ending; we step with weightless shoes, balanced on the fluctuating black waves painted with stars. I didn’t learn the steps; we just knew. You make me, a giant, feel more elegant than a meteor. To show your devotion you carry light from the stars, carry light millions of miles in your subtle hands and illuminate my atmosphere. Even when I cannot see you, I know by my perfect, endless orbit that we never stop dancing and I am never forgotten.

Hudson ن طين ولقد خلقنا اإلنسان من ساللة م “And certainly did We create man from an extract of clay” Quran, Al­Mu’minun, 23.12

He was buried in the soft flesh of the Earth and slept for many years. His bones became rock, and his heart was powered by the deep underground hum. His hands became the riverbank, and we danced on his arms. We ate feasts of mud that set heavy in our bellies and tied us to the land. We cut our feet on green glass shards and left our blood on current­smooth rocks. We can never die when the almighty Earth still remembers.

∆ We performed an impressive transmutation: misery into money. We tamed mechanical monsters, their mouths full of needles and thread. There are innumerable dangers when the doors are locked, the fire escape is rusted, and the beasts don’t behave. Sometimes, a girl lost a finger. Sometimes, a hand. Sometimes her body turned to charcoal, or a ten­storey fall ended in a broken neck. Out of the fire rose, phoenix­like, safety codes But not before we were swallowed by ravenous tetrahedrons, sacrificed to the new gods.

On Air There are men in suits huddled around a radio to hear my broadcast. They recognize my voice, reaching through the air for miles. reaching men I will never meet, in places I will never go. Their lives depend on me and my ethereal ciphers. My voice is heard worldwide and I can hear my sisters chanting. We are an international chorus. We herald the new reality on encrypted radio waves. We speak the modern language, the language of chaos and secrecy. We are the invisible beacon, a scrambled song for the world, carried by new technology and the ancient atmosphere. Sometimes I tune my bedside radio to the right station and fall asleep to the lullaby of the weightless wires.