My cousin Eliot pedaled his bike over the stars and landed in London 'emailed me saying that Modernism was walking the streets in stilettos.
It was 4:01 in the morning and the tower clock was drunk, humming and swaying just as Eliot was trashed off his knickers.
Orca whales flipped somersaults over the lamp of the sickle moon and Eliot kicked off his shoes, dug his feet in the river.
The rippling sun began to tear and yawn a quintet of silver spears, infinitely up, pointing towards the constellations circa 1927.

I was neither there nor here when I read his email, but felt glued like some nato goo on a branch stemming out from Elizabethan temporality [but then...that might've been yesterday?].
No ... I wasn't glue. I was some sort of cell membrane in some garbage dumpster in some cosmopolitan city [maybe Lyon; or Barcelona] searching for an embryo to be born out of.
And the smell of sewers was disgusting.
Scrawny cats were prancing around like mothballs drenched in pee, looking for abandoned guitars to crawl into. Rats scurried after one another in single files along corners of wet pavement allies, up along the pipes behind kitchen stoves; as they've always done.

I realized how minute I was when I was straddling the spine of this one bleached rat. He'd run this way, that way, with a squiggly tail behind his body.
He followed a gleaming line between cobblestones that led all the way to a cargo ship. Hefty men in bearded shadows yelled and rattled their tonsils as loudly as they could: 'Aaall abooard!'
So aboard we went, and beneath the floorboards we hid.

We were blessed with barrels of fish in the basement; otherwise, an anorexic rat he would've become and a death row membrane I would've been. It was dark but we managed. There were cracks in the wood.
And thank god we could see the sea, the horizontal wave that wrapped around the entire world for days ... and days.
... until that evening that dark turned to dusk and the ship landed in Mexico.
The bleached rat darted off the deck with a leap to shore. He ran so fast and scurried to the nearest tree trunk, where, we hid under roots tangled over our laps.
More coarse than the pale hands in Europe; and we waited.

He pondered. I watched.

His thoughts spoke ... 'Here! Here my sons will be born. Yes! and my sons' sons, until one son will come along, whom King Cornelius Rat IV predicted would find the right woman; her name will be Margaret.'
And he did. And he would! nibble on her toe just as she was born that year in 1950 in a back room slum of Mexico city.
And so it was true; the bloodline of Modernism would continue.

I clenched my fists on the back of his white spine. Leapt from one son to the next, year after year.
Margaret became my mother, of course; gave birth to me in 1977, past the wire that bound the super power -America the beautiful.
The cousin rat that I was, finally had found a niche to call his own, my very own embryo, and became a baby.
That baby became a boy and that boy never stopped growing, until one day he felt like running away. Just as puberty started to comb him.

Aprons and pirouettes, the boy became a man somewhere (not home; somewhere else), dancing dancing dancing all the time. Dancing all over the world and back again. In all the finest theaters: Lincoln; Sadler's; ovations at the Opera de Paris. Even above the holy lake somewhere in Israel. Around the sickle moon and back again. Dancing and running like cousin rats in the allies of poetry.

-then Poof! In a matter of a moment, a second.
Just like that. He stopped.
Stopped dancing.

I sat staring at an email and turned my head from right to left.
What did he want? What did cousin Eliot. want from me?

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