Ari Moline
Pump Rabbits
Oyster Octinoxate looks so beautiful. Crying into her hands at the pump station. The red sky paints her fur meltpink. Pickled black streetlight on her paws. Little paws hold her little head and her little ears. She is in the little car and behind her, the pure white limestone mountain stops and starts. Begins and ends the space between the red and the white.
Oyster is not driving. She is waiting. Someone is inside. Oh oh oh. She heaves, mealy, oil-bound. Out of her eye she sees the pump rabbits. Oyster knows they are all dry. Grey velvet of their ears crumbling, already. Their mouths limping.
The pump rabbits wish to press their mouths to the steaming metal hole in the car. They want to fill it with themselves. Lick its rim. They want to empty their powerful rosy urine into the gas tank. Their urine also their blood, their heartbeats, fluorescent liquefied alveoli, hydrocarbons as alive as combustion. But they are listless in the dry red coming. Like it has already happened, she heaves.
And him?
Pumpjack up and pumpjack down. Eating the last crumbs of the earth.
She remembers him looming over her, kit-cawing. Till the coral whitened like his privatest wrinkle. She remembers cold. Cold is distant. He was near and the mountain was too. A choice between them. Holiness long since evaporated. Clay transformed her throat. Ozone crawled her skin.
So Oyster got into the car next to him. So she went with him. So she chose in the way water striders used to.
But the sky went too. The sky was always going to go. An always not inevitable. The always of the extractors, the slick reins of distant greed.
Cold of the bell of the pump station door.
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Molting
The molting began by sticking to the rock. Torso twisted, one leg forward, ready to be followed by the next, but shocked—stuck in place by his own compulsion. Behind him, mountains measured themselves out.
His carapace was beautiful and temporary. His abdomen was black and white stripes giving way to each other without patience. Over his six legs, a starfield of black reflected the riverlight to gems and melted him into it.
He wasn’t light. His feet were stuck to the rock like a woman taking her stilettos to her next destination using her feet. He tried to move, he used too many calories. So it would be here, then, above the greening cast of lilypad and the current folding over itself.
Was he afraid? It was the wrong question. His muscles pulsated against the exoskeleton. They strained, pulled, tensed with the translucence. A body yearning against itself. He began to detach by wet until his feet, legs, abdomen were sedated by slickness and it was less like moving than being gripped in reverse.
First he had to push his head out, through the eyeballs. He met himself in his past life to finish the unfinished. He saw a wood bridge placed directly on a log. A woman getting off on the idea of someone snaking a drain. Width. “I wanted you to be someone else but you are all you.” Angels as bats, slanting more familiar to his current place.
He was soft on the rock. Anything could take him with the pressure of a gaze. He resisted being a specimen, ferociously, and was washed in shame. Not even the coarse suggestion of his own wing was enough to pull him toward the sun.
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Excerpt from “Deer Book”
My guts were also the labyrinth, their hands as they snaked down my throat and up my anus the ultimate embrace.
They moved slowly and methodically like my practiced walking and snipping.
The hand in my mouth gently circled my lips, the one on my asshole each tiny ridge, one by one.
One hand probed my parchment inner cheeks, the other the soft vellum of my hole.
Then, at the same time, both rotated deeper, rectum and throat, throat and rectum.
Both released wetness as unconsciously as from an artesian well.
They walked the slow glimmering catwalk along the spiral staircase until they met in the middle of me, in my large intestine.
There they came to join, to create stained-glass windows of strawberry shame. The pressure of the invisible hole. Did you need the hollow thing to find the solid me?
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Excerpt from “Deer Book”
I found myself written into a meticulously cataloged book of deer behavior. The smell of wet grass with a cloven print on it. The smell of dry grass print. Mud.
The sensation of deerskin absorbing mosquito saliva. Coldgreen hairs in leaf static around thin ivory lattice of near-nose skin beginning to prickle with precognition of pain as “itch” thrusting snout to bark.
Deer relief, deer respite from the thrumming of life. Shadow leading to leaps.
Taxonomy of shadows: shadows of large birds stirring deerheart due to long animal fear of fawnself, but no external flinch; a flick of ear at twig snapping CLUH FLCH in moment of analyzing quadruped bodyweight—slight and unpaced, a sign of boldness of non-hunting.
The numinous truth that approaching a predator requires belying intent and to come toward the deer with all weight means—sinew trust.
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Ari Moline is a poet, linguist, endangered language curriculum designer, and perfumer based in so-called Queens, NY. They are interested in meaning's unfixity as a mucking-toward collective liberation.