The Brain Is Still Active Seven Minutes After Death: Vesica Piscis
Annie Christain
“It’s a shame about Ray. In the stone, under the dust, his name is still engraved. Some things need to go away. It’s a shame about Ray.” The Lemonheads
I supported you with a signed mileage check, a personal check of $2.82, and/or a shooter marble. Torn and badly reconstructed cardboard number 8.
Misadventure.
Yellow candle used in the tracing of a hunched shadow silhouette.
Coiled bra. White powder in cotton swabs. Ties of all sizes. Twist lock needle. Infected insects dropped from planes. Used match. Polaroid of a blonde woman leaning over wrought iron bed. Withered roses. Mail stamped “opened and inspected by the USPS” sent to a loft you didn’t know about in Los Angeles. Glass of Cointreau. Photograph of infected flea vile. Acid blotter image of a red-headed woman clutching Conan El Bárbaro’s thigh.
The light-eaters kept me busy, away from you.[1]
I left you a fanny pack full of tanning bed goggles and plastic sword picks.
Ruger P89 and Glock 17.
Magenta blanket.
Kool cigarettes black tank top with a homemade breast pocket sewn on.
A flipbook made by my sponsor child Viraj:
A baby bluewinged leafbird falls from the sky with his claws pointing skyward and drops into a tin collapsible cup. The cup turns metallic green with a yellow rim, collapses, and gets picked up by a street vendor. He fakes tossing it up three times and then releases the disc into the sky where it splits into two intersecting metal rings with each center touching the other’s perimeter. The almond eye in the middle shoots out a beam of light that births an adult leafbird when the vendor aims the light at a cage, its new home.
(I wasn’t there when you were born, but I was there when the zygote became two cells.)
The crystals in the leafbird’s wings trap light and emit rich blues and greens when we view them with our weak eyes, eyes that capture light too.
We are light receptacles more than anything else.
It’s told through officiant collars, pointed arches,
the open mouth pointing up below where two bubbles touch.
Cover yourself in magenta since it has no wavelength of light.
Avoid repetitive patterns.
Learn from the cell that elongates for a split,
but then exits the cell cycle when growth signals are cut off.[2]
Make it stop going on like this forever.
When particles are made to collide, a God particle may emerge,
but we only know what it is by how it decays.
I needed to live my entire life before I could tell you.[3]
[1] “Yaldabaoth [Demiurge] said to the authorities [archons] with him, Come, let us create a human being after the image of god and with a likeness to ourselves, so that this human image may give us light.” The Apocryphon of John, Nag Hammadi Library
[2] “A new study suggests that cells preparing to divide can reverse this process and return to a resting state, challenging long-held beliefs about cell division.” “NIH study offers insights into how cells reverse their decision to divide,” National Institute of Health, July 5, 2023, https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-offers-insights-into-how-cells-reverse-their-decision-divide
[3] Raymond Lee Christain 9/23/1945 – 5/30/2020
This poem is part of a collection of pieces that will be published on the blog through April and May 2025 leading to the release of Bombay Gin Literary Journal Issue #49, in the strangler fig.
