Patricia Lockwood's “Old Green America Says I Grew a Law Last Night”

They are indigenous in me, says Old green America.

The law says go west, and pick a plot of land, and build

an 8x10 house under shade of my law, and live there,

          and the title of the land will stream into your fingers.

The country is still so new, the states must draw themselves

every morning, all real and future and possible states

draw themselves over the land. "This country is infested

with states," say the settlers, "they crawl on their bellies

through the mud, have learned to look like their surroundings,

eat other states and their own young. They suffer like spiders

from ingrown silk; their backs are marked with one white star."


          We were counterfeiters before and have paper left over,

          so we turn all our eyes to the west. The law never grew

          a dimension mark and Old green America never said "feet,"

          so we draw plans for 8x10 inch houses. We'll paint them

          miniature white, and pose with one boot on the roof,

                                 and wait for our land to come rolling in;


yet somehow our plans are never finished, a new west wall

always wants to be added, each window wants a confetti bush.

We draw deeper and deeper into the house, the house grows

over with flourishes. Before too long we add people: inside

the people drink miniature water while miniature sunshine

          pours through the glass and fractions of seconds tick by.

Inside the people are dots, they eat fictional inches added

to fish, they stumble outside every morning and haul small

reflections up from their wells. All pigs there are in-pig

which is to say pregnant, and their trapdoor spiders fall

through themselves. The wife soothes the cow as it makes

a copy, and skims cream-colored stationery off her milk.

When she wants a flock of chickens, her children all outline

their hands, and a flock of chickens appears. When she wants

          to kill one, she sets it loose

                                 and it runs itself to death

          on the family piano: it plays high to low and low to high

          and then races up and past the keyboard and keeps

                      playing for a moment in the air—even shapes

           of chickens don't know when they're dead.


It's the year of smallest statehood, the people lie down

on the floor to sleep, the states sneak in through any crack

and draw faithfully around them while they dream, draw

North on one and South on the other, and then the states

crawl into their mouths and draw where they will wake up

                                   tomorrow, and stand with one state

                                                                      in each foot of you,

laughing, and North wakes and sees that South has been bitten,

           and she bends down and sucks the green boundary out.





All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.