Katia Matychak

Sun     Abandon     Desert      Memory      Clay
Salt       Oasis       Detachment          Sand     PSTD

_________: Something that heats your bones and shifts all of your cells around. Something that draws the moisture out of you and leaves fossils. This pulls you from 1st person recollection but leaves you subject to everything else. Layers of this tell a story to someone who dares to excavate it. 

Will it be you? 

Will it be you? 

Will it be you?

_________: Somewhere, a tire melts a little, every time it slaps the pavement and is ripped from the road over and over again at 110 miles per hour. The bird has to leap at some point, but would you say it learning how to walk was a waste of time? Pull the leaves back and you’ll see more dead leaves. Every time something happens, it becomes more and more real and it gets closer to cementing its place somewhere in my body that does the remembering. My brain hasn’t been good at that in a while.

_________: Water tells a story, but please note that different water tells different stories. See coconut water. See the ocean. See our blood. It’s everywhere and nowhere, it holds a city of carbon that grows and waits for those who need it. Proof that the desert does show mercy, which makes me ask, should it be grateful for its circumstances? That the desert made it grow? That time took so much away, altered that lump sum of devastation, and alleviated doubt through a slow blooming of a summer forest? What is the ground’s obligation to all the empty space? Is the moon the mediator? What about the distance between you and your reflection in the water?

_________: What happens when our empty valence meets its match? I know, I felt it. It was a click. Here, _________ is life. Life wouldn’t exist without it, and neither would electricity in a heart beat or a thought. I love that I am made of Death Valley. This is where everything starts– oceans moved to make this possible. He completed my octet, and I his, each the metal and nonmetal. If the oceans can move, why did I think I couldn’t get better?

_________: Something I know I’m supposed to have, or something they tell me I came with. There are layers of shields, like spine to succulent. If you want to get through me, you’re gonna have to get through my short-term. Watch me make a language out of methyl groups and my body will read it later with coffee and a couple of days later. I learned about biology, just to end up using it to heal. I learned chemistry, just to recognize where I came from. I don’t need to remember the specifics after seeing what I’ve built. That’s the thing about miracles, right? Something from nothing in the blink of an eye?

_________: It persists, but it can change. I can get better like a stylus records history on it– hardened to preserve the way I am this time. Relief has a weird way of growing like palm trees and new strategies after old ones stop photosynthesizing. While there is separation between striations, many separations make up the whole mountain. It is important to not be afraid of the next striation. In this whole desert, full of what I need, I count my gravel blessings. Look at those mountains in the distance– so many good things are on their way to me, I just have to walk toward them.

_________: We need it to love the dark. There are these everywhere. Night comes, but the day always follows. In grad school, I used to test the connection of protein shape to the conductance of electricity. I didn’t need a thesis to know that if you dance, you’ll have current. Believe me when I say that the desert pulses. It has always been calling. High noon in the desert feels good when you know it’s all going to be okay.

_________: I’ve written so much about this already– the desert gets cold at night, and everything shivers, but then everything still grows. You know how we have floating ribs? Ribs that don’t connect to the sternum? And we hope to god they don’t dislocate? See Aloe vera or agave. They have one point of connection but do they say the ground has _________ed them? No, they grew without restriction.

_________: A mix of bones, fossils, and other organic matter. There needs to be dead things for new things to grow from. In my case, I grow out of myself– my own carcass. When I was in the desert and I heard the Joshua trees creak under the wind, I remembered that sound from when my chest split open and I peeled out of myself. Does the tarantula recognize the same sound? And both of our former forms await their granulations? 

_________: Leave it to the scientist to talk like they are the expert on something I saw once. Does it count if I saw it twice before from a plane? If I went back the next day? Do you need a degree in something you know is part of you? Your meninges? Your marrow? I’m sure this came up in one of my cadaver labs. The horizon and sunset too. With skin pulled back, I saw freshwater ponds under carpal ligaments. A diaphragm separation between mountain and sky and hypodermis and abdominals. Look at that blazing sun and tell me that’s not a surgical light.