CANTO 13
Seismologists in the Black Forest Earth-listening
Station analyze the new murmurs. In the Crucible,
Soula looks down at her own dancing body shine in-
to strobe lights then get engulfed in dark and smoke.
‘God lets in the destroyer,’ Victor says. He twists
wire around the chicken’s legs. Then he lets it fall
to where it spins, wings beating at the cement floor.
Ryan fixes the hooks to the eyes of Di’s PVC dress.
Isla star-jumps every hour before her standing desk.
Radiation-winds flare through the Pillars of Creation.
Volatile compounds dissolve into his taste pores. Leo
sucks meat off the Turkey wings. Mark’s on a video call,
with a ceiling fan behind his head. Bo says, ‘like a halo.’
Chromium crystalises into a vein in the rockface.
‘Renounce creation and you’ll see the Creator’s face
only,’ Maya recalls Hakim say as she walks out across
the frozen Loch Morlich. The new families must move
down the disinfection tunnel. In the Yemeni restaurant,
Sidi Baki pushes a sugar cube down the table-length
and explains, ‘I do not push it. My finger’s pushed. The
cube’s pushed.’ Then his sweaty hand flat and cool on
the boy’s cheek, ‘You must be in this world, a stranger.’
Fifteen navy seals hold one another adrift in Tijuana
where the sewerage flows out to sea. Penny lowers
herself into cellulose, inserts the wand of the vaginal
rejuvenation machine, which releases a radiofrequency
to heat her tissues. Her husband’s asleep in the white
noise. His brain is flushed with cerebral-spinal fluid.
Their therapist says that the children should not see
them have sex, ‘kids always think that it is murder.’
Broderick’s cello bow sticks then slides into an A sharp.
Paige takes her cactus on a photosynthesis walk when
George calls over the fence, ‘don’t be shy, poppet,
come sit in my lap.’ Conner pushes another skinned
alligator into the grinder. Its remains percolate to drain
free fat and recover lipids for renewable biofuel. Chemical
engineers test the barrels for cloud point and viscosity.
Moses expands the Peninsula west with topsoil-covered
garbage. Buoyant in the gyre, Maggie’s old suitcase floats
through chemical sludge and knocks into a Bangkok Sunny
Residence twin coil mattress. She bites her nails. Jacques
announces, ‘it is a 2.5 on Moh’s Scale of Hardness.’
The new nurse checks the iron lung’s negative pressure.
‘Eddie says the first Mass Extinction in the Cambrian
Explosion was because the mouth got invented,’ Philip
rolls over, props himself on an elbow, ‘why do you feel
the need to tell me these things?’ Singularity sells its stocks.
A cow wades down the aisle of the flooded St Nicholas church.
CANTO 21
Alia tells Ajay to put the washing machine on
its self-clean setting. Having stood looking at
a jar of pickled herrings, Jens still can’t recall why
he’s there. He walks back over the pantry thresh-
hold and only then remembers salt, volcanic salt.
The dam breaks in the ghost city and the streets
flood. A team of neurosurgeons insert images in-
to the blind man’s mind: white pulsating lights.
Yu drinks his bottled milk, while he watches a car-
toon created to test sublimated perception. ‘All of
the children here,’ Carbonneau writes to his wife,
‘fear that the moon follows them.’ Usher walks
under the big wooden heads of the old gods
that line the Peabody gallery when Dante leans
over him, asks ‘what do you want?’ Mpho fetches
the knotted walking stick, begins to beat his uncle’s
corpse with it. ‘To keep things clean is the fourth
of our precepts,’ Bulent says. Looking around
her room: glass, table, closet, Heba thinks, ‘I want
it.’ ‘But I really want it,’ Fritz is trying to convince
the cannibal. ‘You must go through with it. I replied
to your ad.’ But the crying man says his name’s Kasper.
And it’s over. They watch a Tatort episode together,
Borowski in der Unterwelt before Kasper cuts the zip-ties
and Fritz stands up from the plastic chair and walks
out into the Tuesday evening. A light mist, no rain yet.
‘Like being inside what is inside of us,’ Inkozi thinks.
He lays the ring-necked parrot in a glass respirator.
Atlas says that when he grows up, he would like to be
a pencil sharpener. In isle four, Marguerite is not
wearing underwear underneath her sarong. She picks
up a pineapple juice and places it on the conveyor belt.
‘The breathmaster will arrive for the rebirthing only
at six,’ Venus replies ‘she’s entered a higher frequency,’
‘perhaps nearing physical immortality consciousness.’
An orangutan swings across its enclosure to a pram,
pushes its head against glass to look at the baby.