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by John Amen |
Trying to Remember I am descending the ladder, passing through scabs, into a room where my breath lives. There are things here with eyes I cannot look into, my mother's brown teeth, the way she holds up a handful of my hair as if it were a trophy; her late night visits, her entrance, approach; and then, always, the projector breaking down. I have passed through tollbooths, wrestled lions as thunder went fetal; and still, that thing in my chest that closes like a hand squeezing a ball, yanks me back to this room to stare into a darkness that doesn't flinch. I hear my own footsteps on the cobblestone, the tightrope of my sternum. I grovel on white floor, in pools of ammonia, collecting loose strands of hair, tracing string on a doorknob down to the bloody tooth. Later, like a near-death survivor trying to recall the voice of God, I twist the knob on the microscope, searching for welts on my crotch, red spots on my head, but they are not there. They are never fucking there. In the fretted brow of a greenhouse-morning, I find myself wondering, again, Were they ever there? Well, were they? What Do I Desire? And then I am swallowing gravel again, lips sewn together with dental floss. I apologize to you, my dancer, my moonlight in a world of fluorescence. I could not bring you enough fire, and so brought silence that parched the soil, sucked the water from the willow's roots. Even now shadows descend, an ax falls through cobwebs, my tongue freezes like a slab of meat in an ice chest. Birthdays pass like paper in wind. I choke down hunger as if it were medicine, frozen by the light switch preparing for darkness. Am I child or a man, marching these endless corridors, walls lined with the scowling faces of my elders; toward dawn, Hollywood's mythic door; to find what I desire, as if I would be able to recognize it, or understand what it has to say.
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