The air smelled like the flavor of metal.

Brake fluid burning but clean. Something so far off

as to befamiliar. “I want to believe” but I can’t afford

to eatin airports. The ad implies there is an edge to

the universe. It arrived when I was eight. Moved

through the melted sagebrush and pine needles, the air

overperfumed but without body. Out of the corner

of my eye, the cliffs are alive. From a certain angle, I was

abducted in the lot behind a hypermarket. Jacket pockets

stuffed with stolen supplements to heal my kidneys, to raise my

T, to let me sleep, to inflate the folds in my brain until it

is a smooth pink balloon in a thick bone cradle. I imagine

bending and pulling apart the body to maximize

strength. I was in the angle of incidence watching

polyethylene creep into the bloodstream. Please believe me.

In the middle distance I heard the soft painless ping of

money leaving my account. Vast supply-chain networks,

18-wheelers, cardboardboxes, vacuum-packed vegetables,

smart-tvs, and back-end software tracking every consumer

good imaginable, spill out into interstitial wilderness

neither public nor private, islands of the

natural world in the sea of pavement. How the fuck does

something move that speed without even a whisper? The air smelled

like brake fluid if brake fluid was made from whatever is

inside a thermometer. Heat if it was visible. Strength is

built througha series of repeated destructions. Out of the

corner of my eye everything is alive and abducted. I drink a

beer and proteinshake on a plot of land named only in contracts

between multinational corporations and global banking

institutions.At some pointI leftthe forest. I swore

I would never put ‘the body’ in a poem but it came

back at an angle. You know? Out of the corner, my

eye,the rational is not a technique for discovering the world,

but insteada spell that makes the world in its

image. On mars there is a literal maze- system of deep

steep-walled valleys called “Noctis Labyrinthus.” Labyrinth of

the Night.Like photos of the skin taken under immense

magnification. You know what I am saying out the

corner of my eye. Can hear it in the second hour of the

night. Microtears in a state of being. A knock on

the door. Power lines cutting through a meadow. You

know. Wildflowers growing between the lanes of a

major thruway. A tuning fork. But what about the

money? I want to gently press my debit card against

every possible reader. Out the corner of my eyethe air

smells like the wind in the Night Labyrinth. And I am drinking

right. Must be the brake lights of some car through the

trees, but the spell of the rational

world begins its collapse. In order to recompose the body

reality becomes more and more strange. Not a return to

something premodern, but a new strangeness born from the ruins

of the rational. I can’t afford to be. Here, from a certain angle,

like the wind smells. Out of the corner of my eye: The One

Who Nods and Watches. The air here is the odor of

the flavor of metal. I drew them. Small and Gray. Smooth

and Sexless. I will admit I am in love with what

cannot be proven. “I want to leave” the Night Labyrinth,

but it is impossible to be stolen away to

someplace you already are —

lifting from concentric circles of burnt earth.