My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,

Ray was a friend of a friend and we had never really met. He sent such good letters. Pages of typewritten henpeck, I felt honored by the effort and wheedled the old green Smith-Corona out of my grandmother.

Ray lived in Pennsylvania and owned a goat. I wondered whether we had ever breathed a common molecule of air or swallowed a common drop of water, cycled and traveled across the country to where the other one lived. Years later a professor would ask me if I knew the odds on whether I had ever breathed an air molecule that had cycled through Caesar's lungs. He said there were no odds, that it was certain, mathematically, I must have. I was not impressed I was disappointed. It wasn't so unusual after all, we had shared nothing rare. I tried to look at it in a more holistic light, the "we are all one" thing but I am by nature miserly and jealous and I didn't want to share with everyone, I wanted to pick and choose.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust	I must have three heads	The fire in the sky, the fire in your hand, the sad songs without bodies, surrounding us like ghosts	A Letter from the Powers of the Universe Concerning Love and Other Such Things
My memories are spoken in the poetry of recoil, my sperm is oddly bullet-shaped	Why it's good to be on top of Kmart hill	Of course we had it tough	The Ballad of a Tongueless Girl
Once upon a time there was an ocean but now there is a mountain range.	Blue blood	we had shared nothing rare	First the music, then the fire
Rorschach	the fierce urgency of now	we must look at the entire picture	the art of unseeing
The music in my head is too loud to think about anything but you	It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there	Leshy	Synthetic blood substitute
The world is warm and likes having us in it	Smith-Corona	Makeup for the Evil Overlords