THE SISTERS IN THE DREAM OF A GIANT

With their nervous and digestive systems a fibrous tangle, giants dream in kaleidoscopic conjurations, the slightest alimentary roiling cascading into anamorphic displays. So they never knew at any given moment what shape they might take. Once, they manifested as chimeras, their wings slick and fleshy, their talons gore-stained, their eyes mute. Another time, they seemed to be some kind of sponge, gorging and disgorging on the seafloor. And even when they manifested as something closer to human, who knows what mutations might occur? Their eyes might retreat into their faces like hermit crabs clinking into their shells, their mouths migrate to their bellies and speak in an elaborate rhythm of belches and hiccups. But now, and quite suddenly, they had precipitated out of their shapes as a lurching, tentacled fog and into sisters again, and so they took each other’s hands, stepped into a meadow just now unfolding before them in greening grasses and the sun-jealous neon of blooms. Even as they frolicked, they knew they were merely the perturbations of a brain fumigated by the vapors of bowels, the huffing smoke of the crunched bones and simmering blood of gnashed peasants boiling in a gut. And still they frolicked, frolicked and sang. They picked a flower, and then they picked another.

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THE SISTERS AS CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY

They fed pig iron into forges, poured ore into molds, melted and minted their gold. They shrugged at the sweat of the beaters, dabbed sweat from their philtrums with silk, blinked and breathed as the chuffs of coal-black smoke seemed to give shape to their capital's invisible rise. They were surprised at how good it felt to be evil, to love the love of money. How benign they seemed because they smiled, had lovely families. In bespoke suits, they posed for portraits that would hang in the future halls of their philanthropy. At breakfast, in their verandas, luxuriating in the life of a dream that dreamed them, they thought how fantastic it was to have buoyed oneself up from nothing with nothing but the helping hand of wealth.

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I wrote these poems for my daughters. Or, that's what I tell myself. I was reading Calvino, I think. Every poet wants an audience (at least this poet does). Finding myself exhausted by the process of submissions and rejections, I wanted to write without the expectation or desire of having to publish or be otherwise public to imagine that audience. So I turned my daughters into my audience, and I wrote for them. I wrote these poems, and I wrote others. My daughters like them, but mostly don't care. They have other things to do. So having held them for some time, I decided to put them out into the world as if to say, "look, I wrote these for you. Look how real they are. Look."