City of Desire

after Calvino The men in the bathhouses repeat the scriptures. They say the City of Desire can be reached in two ways: by whale belly or by hand, feeling for cracks along the cave wall. Both ways require darkness. The location of the cave’s entrance is long forgotten. Each day men dive into the sea expecting water, choking on jellyfish tentacles. A man is a steamboat with a throbbing boiler— all iron, all harpoon. A girl carries his past in the crevices between her teeth. Her tongue unfurls, a skiff in the laughing wind. She stashes the night’s loose stars in her pockets and steers a new course through the archipelago of rotting backs. The ruins of men do not interest her. Follow the whale into its cave and we all become hunters. She lowers the men’s bibles like anchors to the sea bottom and swallows a fistful of stars. The whale surfaces. Her baleen parts like a curtain.