Blue Dot
by Alison Braid
My phone takes me across town. I, nothing but the water-blue dot.
Effortless, how the blue dot becomes my virtual body;
I recognize myself in its glow, and follow, feet lecturing the sidewalk.
I think of how the blanched garlic clove slips out of its skin. And the bowl
fills up with them, pearl white and blue in veins. But in the sink
their paper wrappers crinkle, the all of them wanting remembrance, sight.
When the blue dot falters and its cone of leading light disappears, the dot
grows larger, pulses, blooming with its discontent. What I mean is the signal
is scrambled and I am lost. A sudden and joyous fragment, paused
in the middle of a leaf-green street. Maybe I am most alive here—here
where the algorithm disappoints and Google has recommended
the wrong shirtsleeves, complete in a colour that will only wash me out.
It is and isn't a shock to find the body is no longer a perfect shape
on the flat map of the city. To find oak trees springing up from the earth in vertical lines,
hydrangeas the size of two anatomically correct hearts held up by one strong stem.
Then to find the body is not blue jeans, though it is a mistake I often make,
choosing not to look closely at whatever is closest to me. I return to the hidden
skeleton of my body slowly, as if reentering a dream. The sun is hot
in my eyes. Wind disrupts the neatness of my hair. Buses pull over but I am not
getting on. Doors open, close. I wave the buses off, drivers showing their teeth.
I show my own. My body on a bus stop bench is a place of high drama, a blip
in the system, not doing what it's meant to. I sit with hands on my thighs and below,
or within, are two hollow bones, cascading with marrow, blood,
two valleys where something—cold, blue stream—runs through. Imagine that,
the wild of my body, loosed and tumbling. I kick a pebble into the street.
Overhead, the buzz of the trolleybus cables is the contented buzz of bees
beating their air-thin wings. Restored to its good health,
my phone tells me drones are expelled from the nest. Sent away, they stay away.
The hive continues without them. And the drones—where do they go?
A beekeeper on the east coast says the bodies of drones are found dead in her grass.
They are born into cells that look like bullets and have no fathers, she writes.
I can feel the sadness of her story in my body if I want to. Sadness in the body
is a basket of wet shelled peas, bells with no answer, dark rooms with darkening
windows. But my body is living and dying, apart from the bees, a fine machine
I don't yet know all the parts to. The sun filters down, a simple pattern playing
on my skin. I don't confuse it for a part of me. In my hand, the phone stirs and sings out.
* "My body on a bus stop bench is a place of high drama" takes its inspiration from Dorothea Lasky's line, "The I of a poem is a place of high drama," from Animal.