“Verily I say unto you [,] today [,] you shall be with me in heaven”

And The Neocortex Sings

Each cell has a decision to make. Each copy
relates to language. “Translation” refers to both
the after-echo of transcription and the movement
in space.   

One letter changes augur to auger.

i. a susurrus of voices; rat song

You must detour, take another road to get
to the road you need, but even knowing
the positions of lake and near towns, this panoramic
memory, this transposed diaspora,
you cannot be sure. You are to follow T,
until 23 or 73, but either will get
you where you are going,
eventually. This road is not the road, but it
could be – these trees could be the trees, but not
the trees you remember.

The language of proteins is 20-lettered; the gyri continues
to fold back on itself. All things will be decoded. 

ii. a thousands flock of starlings, common grackles, blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds

The snow-darkened cliffs hold heat
so flakes become drops and the borrowed Honda
drives cut-away highway, cut-away anthracite, cut
away days to home, the place newly called home, luck
less drive and the snow clabbers, leavening
the highway lanes driverless, 80 to 81, thickening
north, across state lines until outside Ithaca
the last begins to move, fishtailing,
and you realize you are driving
a rear-wheel-drive car, wholly unprepared.

iii. when it is over, the not-pain is a house of cards, onion skin and leaf rib and you move as little
as possible, to not disturb it

The mother is driving
to freedom and the daughter is riding
along but during the claustrophobic
window-tight journey they start
talking
and they both story tell a secret
that is no secret.
The gerund provides too easy an out.
They arrive at freedom but
only because that is where the car stops.

There is a sequence
of letters that denotes the end
of things; like punctuation, like a period. If you know

what to look for, it is as easy as reading scriptum continuum. Even
the invisible commas rise from the page, claiming space.

C. KUBASTA is the author the chapbooks, A Lovely Box and &s, and a full-length collection, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX, 2015). Her next book, Of Covenants, is forthcoming from Whitepoint Press in 2017. She is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and serves as Assistant Poetry editor with Brain Mill Press. She thinks poetry, like humor, porn, & horror, should be a body genre. Find her at www.ckubasta.com