The novel I should be writing instead of this poem
includes a protagonist with a mysterious scar slashed
across his scrotum as well as numerous references
to tax fraud, bruised fruits, and last names. A year-
in-the-life type of tale. In a pivotal September scene,
he asks his father whether anything matters more than
madness though the reader will know already his father’s
mumble outweighs his smile. Amid the susurrations
of his father’s tongue: a flashback to when the father crushed
his son’s five-year-old fingers in the rising car window.
The boy wanders from light source to light source:
fluorescent moons, lanterns, candles, burnt-out bulbs
hanging on grocery store ceilings, and the various deep purples
of a beloved’s bedroom. I’m still working out how he’ll talk
to lovers, but his legs will shake, bare but for goosebumps
rising around his knee. The novel, pending my tolerance
for the ethereal, might include one dream sequence in which
the protagonist imagines himself pulled apart, limb
from limb, by faceless villains using a medieval rack.
In the first paragraph, the boy presses a guitar back
in its cloth case. By the end of the year, the reader will
see what symbolizes great human suffering and what
remains of their ordinary selves: a car, variegated
teeth, door-to-door knife salesman, military
recruiters, guacamole, broken backs.
Cover Art by Rebecca Pyle
