“Lazarus Species”

You don’t even need to be born again in order to be born against this riddled wall, each bayonet in love with your bare, stigmatic neck. Strange, the worst part is the waiting to survive. Stranger, let’s wait for the cave to act out its name, invite the sun in for the final rendezvous. Oh to be you. Remember when you lived in a century still afeared of wild boars? Now they march on Athens once again to remind us how frail our own endangerments. It’s a shame. I know. You pay someone to puncture you. The decades whir. Lost is the TV show you watch until there’s no season left but the one caressing your window. It’s overcast. It’s overkill. Time to draw the curtains & play dead. Once I was on a plane— all ocean, blinding, down below— a bald man seatbelted beside me. He was high in every sense, said, “I lived my father alone to leave his life” & offered me a hundred-dollar bill. “Here, this is my business card. Please stay in touch. Please wear a toga to my funeral.” Bad enough to find yourself in a book of vanished things, reports of vessels gulped down by listless seas, whole farms smuggled up into an Oklahoma sky. Now to be born again & still without one ounce of faith in the durability of anything but silk. I took the bill & bought myself a used priest’s robe which I sometimes don when I feel most prone to survival & lament. I, too, have not been seen in years, so many years, even the sycamores presumed me dead & the boars began to dream of meats far more exotic than my own. Extinction is said to be an event, but I can tell you nothing is more uneventful—you find your family, your whole phyla & future, buried in some encyclopedia & glean how small the risk of eternity, how great the risk of not being reached for. & under your entry, you find a man discovered your decline & so became famous by the standards of his day. “There was no reasonable doubt, the last individual had expired.” So the search for you grows exhaustive until it dies down & no one watches the embers but some canceled god, retired, forgetting his own mellifluous names. I search for my life as well, you know, some passing evidence besides the noise, which drifts about me, so much exhaust inquiring, “Is this grief the inexactitude we’d hoped for?”

*

“The Peasant’s Orgasm”

Three clear orbs fall across the blue edge of my vision. Frail neural fables the retinae chase after, I want to say, but can’t quite catch. Meaning, I fail to follow the orbs’ trajectory (so often my own thinking too) until these odd geometries exit the visual field. I asked my husband’s coworker once, out of the blue, over a business dinner, what his consciousness felt like to him. His thoughts. I mean, I said, is it colors ribboned with speech or some other tumble of sensations equally hard to articulate? (Those aren’t the words I used exactly, but you catch my meaning. I mean, my drift.) He was so delighted to be assigned the impossible—to describe the clouds of qualia crowding his brain case— that he never resumed his discussion of loss leaders, which in their way have an operatic ring, though one that perishes quickly in the corporate lingo his tongue was freighted with. I got the sense my asking him about his private self—I mean, interiority— its ineffable and peculiar quality, led him ultimately from pleasure

to rage, though, which he soon directed toward my husband. My husband, who lovingly calls this man “Hole.” I can’t confirm the causal chain, but out of his reveries, his healthy reverence for his own mind, Hole— who donned a hand-knit carmine cap—leapt at my husband’s proverbial throat, quite out of the blue, near yelling in a rather upscale Italian joint in DUMBO, under the distended shadow of that huge foreshortened bridge, You know so much about language, but you don’t know, not yet anyway, the language of Design. The implication being that Hole knew the language of Design, that Mars and Saturn and Jupiter were just characters in a larger alphabet my husband (also, I) could never read. I’m of course exaggerating, but the exaggeration feels true, the way the northern lights do even though they’re pure distortion. A silence then settled briefly over the table, affecting the quality of precipitation —I mean, snow—when it can be said to sublimate, while Hole’s anger dissolved into the din of diners—wine-drenched laughs, the delicate symphony of forks touching plates, low murmurs suggestive of privacy and futility, which reminds me

a slaughtered cow hung high to dripdripdrip, and yet— without preparation and wholly beyond the reach of appetence, with its untold motivational force akin to that of pain and the orgasm—devoured by the eye before the mind can even hunger for it. Somehow the conversation resumed while I was blipped out (toggling between scenes of chilly butcheries and subway cars, rib cages of various life forms dangling from metal rods), and the men were now discussing matters of taste, which seemed more appropriate to me than accusation, although every discourse on taste is also a way of tasting the other’s system of scrutiny. Fonts fell under scrutiny. The sacredness of some, the profanity of others, and how fonts could be paired like certain meats are to fine wines. I wanted to know the fate of Garamond, which I like best, for the almost “world” that closes its utterance. My husband favors Futura, and I forget Hole’s preference, though if I had to guess I’d go with Helvetica. It was only the first course, and I wanted to reach under the table and do something obscene, instigate, with a strategic touch, a timeless sculptural desire in my husband, the way I used to do to summon him, quite out of the blue, into back-alley sex acts, but my fingers felt bled of all strategy. I mean, intent. And I started to smell the tang of blackberries as they shift from fruiting to hoarding carbohydrates in their roots, and I saw the far-off fields I grew up in overwrite empire and dinner and the urban longing for what can no longer be retrieved in its midst—the texture of clay-rich dirt under my nails, all of it crushingly sun-warmed and unlanguaged. Taste the grapes whose insides would be forced into rich flavors of oblivion sommeliers might describe as “notes of loam and asparagus”…swished and swirled in a concurrent new-world Italianate scene, though interred under a rich layer of presence, the grapes pressed, in a future now passed, by someone who will have been in possession of the requisite milliondollar press capable of translating fruit into pleasure, if not addiction and civility, whole Kalapuyan regions compressed into lines curling over menus in New York. (To sell possibility must be enough, those who designed me taught me. To grow the grapes, even if you have no means of crushing them, is a living. Every peasant I’ve ever been or known knows this truth.) Distraction more than seduction being my metier, I asked them both, feeling I might fortify their strained bond, if either one of them were going to order the rabbit because, if not, I would have to order it myself. But this is wrong. The memory is out of order. Long before the yelling and the lustful soil came the rabbit. Before the rabbit, or long after it had been eaten by Hole, I described, wholly off-topic, a course I wanted to teach, called Wrong Science, in which my students and I would digest untruths that had entered this world in a diction of certitude and with all the ineluctable fervor of revelation. We would take turns looking through the lead tube of an early telescope, watching the sun orbit our infancy, suspecting a distillation of all evil to be crouched under our feet instead of the lavatic rituals and shifting plates the future, now the past, would finally acknowledge. You could include a section on vision, Hole suggested, and talk about mantis shrimp, how they see all these colors we can’t, colors we used to assume didn’t exist. But how can we assume the absence of something whose presence we can’t even begin to imagine? My husband answered, nostalgia for the Garden or the future, and then edited himself: future nostalgia. And long before that, the longing for someone to ask, but not with words, what is your thinking? And what does it feel like to hold its happening inside you? In the middle distance imperceptible to language? And why did you lie as a child when asked if you saw ghosts, going so far as to describe them as perfect circles drifting through inner space, by which you meant, the sky? Someone, over dessert, dark chocolate torte or maybe it was buttered artichoke, changed the subject to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, the gaudy shades of its presiding architecture—picture the desert dabbed with reds and golds and toxic-looking blues, the towering implausibly pigmented likenesses of gods who levied taxes and slew their serpent brothers. I grew excited. Hole lifted his wine glass to his mouth. And it was red. My husband was trying to chew and swallow his cocktail’s greenish garnish, a leathery lime slice dusted in orange pepper, and this made me fall in love with him all over again, his curiosity that etiquette can never conquer. His incorruptible appetite for what may or may not be digestible. All to say, while the men replenished, I tried to describe a moment I’d never lived in, when slaughter came to be replaced—however nominally—by artistic representation, as though the image had always been annihilation’s aptest understudy, just waiting in the celestial wings, and the buried pharaohs finally learned, deeply as computers lately do, that meat carved with a stylus into a wall kept far from worldly sight was far more tender and delicious than meat whose rot inevitably offered a not wholly satisfying rhyme to their own. Digestion is also a form of decay, my husband noted somewhere along the line. And a movement in architecture, Hole added. That’s concerned with adaptation to shifting conditions. I noted the care and strategy with which the tongues were often carved, hanging from the cows’ mouths so the dead would not mistake for ornament their perennial sustenance. The Greek influence is so strong there, Hole might have said. You can see it best in Alexandria. So I hear. All those archives burning in fevered minds. History lost in flames we can no longer read or warm our hands by. Of course, all of that’s likely fiction. The burning, that is. A conquer so sudden and luminous it couldn’t even be seen until it was over. Now they’re saying it was numerous fires spread out over time. The conversation veered to Plato then, as Socrates always knew it would, as he paced the hemlock deeper into his dilating veins while my future mouth watered at the thought. I might’ve been that rare symposiast who was also a woman, I ventured, uncertain what shapes really related to what whirred like alien weather behind my eyes. It’s true, my husband verified. She’s a harpist—and former bartender. She would have been allowed. I could’ve poured the wine and plucked the strings, I said. I could have accompanied you. So music transcends category, Hole said excitedly. I mean, gender. As in music can pay your passage to forbidden places. Parties. Underworlds. Lives beyond life. I used to want to live forever until I realized eternity would mean losing everything anyway, the slow decay of the wonderful, time digesting mystery and misery like the same stale piece of cake, all of joy and its aching origins and taxons turning to dust in the grasp of your ancient and unmurderable mind. Space dust, my husband might have said. Space as dust. Dust as mote or motive, I said. Yes. It would be like witnessing your essence— I mean, your whole soul—consumed by what…all the distances inside it coming to constitute it. Or something…At the table next to ours a woman was discussing monetizing her personality. Or maybe it was her lifestyle. So many likes, she said, on that skydiving post. Air thrumming in her ears, confiding such elusive velocities. I want to say it was something like three hundred. More. A peasant skydiving in an alternate century, growing so literate in distance and its breathtaking closure that kings down on Earth began to swoon, their gilded pleasure eclipsed by a would-be swallow’s. I want to say I’m remembering correctly, that my husband did in fact order the hare. Or maybe it was the coniglio. That the same flesh passed over the two men’s tongues though tasted of different animals because the tongues were divergent as were their fields of blushing buds and words. As for me, I forget the taste of that night, and the more I reach for it, the less existent it becomes. So I look up

the orbs. It turns out they’re a sign of detachment, the vitreous humor lifting… “a sign,” the page I’m reading says, “of aging.” So I look up at the orbs. As they fall—I mean, drift— they lighten the bit of blue they pass over. And lose dimension. Frail triad of contact lenses descending through space at the pace of snow through the lower atmosphere. But I’ve seen these things for as long as I can remember.

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*From *Lazarus Species by Devon Walker-Figueroa. Copyright © 2025. Published by Milkweed Editions. All rights reserved.