all night i hear those bugs in my bathroom, their knifecut drone digging bites into the drywall, so that when i wake up the next morning i’ll find the sink scurried away to the opposite side. invisible architecture, we say, the world now an inscrutable stranger. outside, there are more planes than any other kind of star–- the black night a white screen, a broken field to dust off our shoe dirt. even those grooves and slants are make-believe. recently, i've started to mistake the windows for cliffs, their sleek frames for the line on the horizon, as if the world had amputated itself on the sill. you know, we tread this unexplainable darkness, fingertips bandaged and unseeing; we have but a voice to believe other voices exist. and so my hands are nothing but hands that sleep at the bend of my thigh, idle around my clavicle, press over the bones of my ankles, tug at the tips of my ears. on new years, my family doesn’t pronounce me a model when we speak on the phone. when they look at my hair, they want to gauge how much time and effort i poured into it. you know, these are hands that cradle strands like gastropod shells, slip water down in sprays. they keep still as they wait, listen to my head when it whines from the wet strain. these are hands that fold laundry and lettuce, shred lip skin like paper, render angels askew. mine is a garden, or so i hope, tended to in fractures, long faults sliced open by tiny incisions of needle that will soon sew them back up. or so i hope. i hope to live in these chasms; to have sighing fingertips; to name the exact stitches that have closed these slits. to recognize the left rear of my head by texture and my bad poems by their hopeless splendor. i tire of seamless specters. i miss when you could still see the skeleton.
Discussion about this post
No posts