Myopia
::::
Your spirit animal is a rubber mask
Your hidden face is a song composed
Of the silence of unrung doorbells
Or of rung doorbells but not yours
Don’t pick up the phone
While alone inside your spirit animal doing
The dance of your hidden face
Come out come out wherever
You are we’re all sort of shaped like toys
Pushing away curtains seems extra sexual
::::
Most anyone can learn
some martial arts on YouTube
or spend an afternoon watching army
ants march. Most of us never meant
to fall in line. Overly parallel
objects attract us. Even idle
we’re all sort of weapon-shaped
pushing away curtains, we could be
in a sexy commercial for
an ecological disaster.
Lots of us have trouble seeing
distances. See how, while some
of us were not yet born, others were already
beautiful mutants, or already over.
::::
Book of an oozing keyhole.
Book of very soft pleasing shapes
then injuries. Book of mongoose-
mutates-into-snake. Book of crotch
and kidney and keyholes behind
curtains. So many books
of keyholes and curtains and
not even one book of keys.
Book in which the artist wrote “I don’t
know a lot about what I want to know.”
::::
Music
you
were
making
while
you
weren’t
you
while
making.
Were
you
music?
::::
Glasses pushed down on our noses
in book after book of facts
about war between pornographic
doodles. I mean tens of thousands
of lumpy undercover treats or threats
and the irony sort of calcifies
and the fact we get it doesn’t free us.
My magnifying glass and your magnifying
glass start separate, petulant flames.
Guns, gagas, and ghosts: we’re all
sort of shaped like votes.
::::
hand
cupping
his
threatened
face
left
eye
covered
eye
left
face
threatened
his
cupping
hand
::::
It’s the day Elvis
died again, and
it feels like we
all lost our glasses.
It feels like this
guy’s looking at this
gal with his whole
mouth. We’re museum-
goers. We’ve altered
our vision. We have
taken turns being tired
of kneeling. Does that
part of her body
really seem like
a pocket? Do men
really worry women
have an eyeball
down there behind
the curtains? Quit
pointing that thing
at everybody.
::::
My mom and your mom were
hanging out clothes inside The Book
of Grimace and Bone. Slacks
and twin sheet sets hanging
like curtains through which
our mothers were obscured. What color
was the blood? Red. R-E-D. Book of
whistles and self-serious men.
Men without “n” is just Me.
Are me not men? Me are learning
to love our mother parts.
Every bodily word is tinged
with war noise, and overly
parallel items upset us.
::::
Lots
of
us
have
trouble
seeing
distances
seeing
trouble
have
us
::::
It is perhaps not possible to get
all our weird feelings about
religion out of us. The bulging
parts of our dogma so intestinal, so
crustacean-esque. Don’t be ashamed!
Let’s carry a glad handshake
in our palms. Let’s want
to grow some sexy horns with halos.
Let’s both and neither, neighbor.
The Prayer Book of Territories
and The Prayer Book of Terrorists
are the same book. Is the same book.
Recites a flashlight under covers.
Overly parallel items obsess us.
(This poem is an ekphrastic response to Mark Mothersbaugh’s Myopia exhibit at MIA.) 
Paula Cisewski’s third poetry collection, The Threatened Everything, will be released in late summer 2016 through Burnside Review Books, and her first book of lyric prose, Misplaced Sinister, appeared in 2015 through Red Bird Chapbooks. She is also the author of Ghost Fargo (selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), and three poetry chapbooks. She teaches, both academically and privately, and curates artful literary events around the Twin Cities.
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