Jackson Watson

[open on the plains. Enter Simone Wail, an animal-woman with little round glasses]




1.



Just now by the river I met God’s strangest creation. It seemed to me that she was             floating in
or bolted to the divine. I said to her

                            My name’s Simone and once I was human too

and asked         What happened to you

she said             God shot through me like a bullet
                             and left a heifer shaped hole

I told her             There is a time for every human
                             beyond which his soul is not a virgin,
                             but when it happens he has to consent

I asked                Did you consent

she said              I was pinned. Immobile
                             my soul was fixed to the center
                             of all that’s made, stars
                             in my eyes from the pain

And she paused and she looked in the water.

she said             This river is my father
                            He is troubled, muddy, wondering
                            where on earth his daughter’s gone—

And she let out one cow sob.
She drank from him then and ate the grass round his banks,
kissed the dirt where it grew, the dirt where she grew too.




[remains]




2.



While she ate and drank I told my tale.

I said         I was a philosopher or mystic afflicted
                   by affliction. I labored and I prayed
                   at a clanking press, hands bent
                   in attempts to understand the clamps
                   of factory work. I wanted to be for God
                   what a pencil is for me
                   when I feel its point pressed hard and blind
                   against a child’s writing table, graphite scratching
                   into shadow. God’s fist quickened
                   its grip on me & then
                   I was not I nor in my body
                   I was here by this mythic river
                   more beefy than I’d ever been
                   with half my badsoul burnt and blackened,
                   clean
                   charred off. My ‘I’ disappeared entirely
                   to make a space for meat and god.




[remains]




3.



She was still drinking when I finished. Where her father flowed
she followed, and I followed too.

I told her          It is an honor to be afflicted
                          consensually by God. And if
                          you’re ready for it, divinity’s volcanic brand
                          can sear God’s name on your soul—
                          nowadays you say what... nom,
                          nomen, onoma? The hollow
                          scar is always his symbol

she said          No—no—it’s not a name
                         Dysphoria’s the god
                         in the body, unbearable
                         in my flesh—beside myself
                         my thoughts all wander
                         rattle and drag nomadic
                         they hang around me like a cloud
                         of flies—and each thought bites
                         that body of mine

Distraught she sped her pace up and then she stopped
by a little pool, a place where her father paused
to make a mirrorlike surface. She looked and saw her face
and from it two huge horns, and she hurled
her lunch and her father’s water, she hurled
herself and fled herself and wanted I saw
to hurt herself her self
demolished by shock—




[remains]




4.



I followed her still while she fled.

I said                 God made a being which says I
                           and cannot possibly love him. Grace
                           erases this being, rubbing
                           the I away with the other end
                           of his pencil, to make a hole,
                           a little O
                           God enters the emptied being
                           This—listen!—this is what I’ve christened
                           “decreation”—stop fleeing!

But she didn’t want to listen.
I felt I had missed something.
What had happened to the girl?

she said            I felt
                           he was thunder and I
                           a monarch’s butterfly, his nails
                           iron through my wings

She cried. Tears of shame dripped down her snout and
I handed her a pamphlet about God’s love. In the dust
she trampled it, and then silence. In the dust
she hooved an I. Beside it she wrote o.

I thought I ought leave her alone.




[exit Simone Wail]

Jackson Watson is a writer from Georgia. They live in Providence now.