I am Thinking About the Movie Con Air

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I am thinking about the movie Con Air and my love

for Nicholas Cage, which is profound and focused

on the abundance of his hair, the way it trickles and recedes

to the middle of his scalp, chorusing down his back

with an unevenness that mirrors the body’s swollen

inadequacies, one of my breasts

whistling with milk while the other sleeps

flat against my chest, the asymmetrical

splendor a speaker swelling with fuzz and odd

time signatures, like half of my body

restored to its original form. I never met Nicholas Cage

but watched Con Air so many times I can conjure

the chiaroscuro dribble of his voice, blue smoke

lapping the edge of an extinguished star,

and imagine he, too, knows how to disguise

the body into something less fragile,

the tired meat of his heart striated

into a thousand directions like a smoldering compass

as when I gave birth the midwives praised my composure,

said their last patient clawed the bed like a raccoon,

and I wished instead to have given birth like a squid

shooting an ombre cage of ink and ovum

out of her orifice, ragged and deranged

with hormones, because didn’t I hold my daughter

and wish to be as feral as a raccoon

who knows love is the blunt metronome

of rummaging through trash, who doesn’t

think but throws her body into the labor of it?

In the last scene Nicholas Cage grips the pink bunny

he bought from commissary,

ripped-up and dripping with fuel,

and hands it to his daughter anyway

and I will watch it over again

to see him stand there bruised and lit

with the one good thing he has;

my left breast emptied while the other

floods with music,

soothing the vowel-starred tongue.