Shelled
{}
The boy locked
in my chest
is six inches tall.
I don’t know
his name or how
he got there.
One day I came to,
and there he was:
asparagus legs,
round walnut head,
slim torso like a nail
file, his vegetable legs
tucked against the grate
of his paper-thin chest,
its brillolike hatches
grinding bits of thigh.
His toothpick arms
press points against
my heart. They threaten
to drain me of my blood,
to make this atrium drip.
||
{}
I tell the boy inside my chest about the things
I like. I mention long bus trips, books of poems,
the way hotel rooms are sterile and clean and smell
kind of strange, certain people who don’t press you
but who still respect what you have to say. Also, I mention
I like the last globs of fruit that you gnaw off the pits
of stone fruits. I like the face of the cat, I tell him, and also
the sensation of removing a thick film of lint from the screen
in the laundry machine, even though I also like to pretend
that it annoys me when other tenants neglect to do this
after they use the machine. I like the feeling I get,
I assure him, when he stretches out his stalky vegetable
legs and plays tap dance on my stomach, or when his walnut
head gets lodged inside the bottom of the well that is my throat.
I like the way I can feel him vibrate when I tell him about
the things I like. I can feel him listening. There are other
things I like: happening upon the unexpected scent
of a bonfire, a good joke, the way my back feels
after a long day, the people I trust—the people
who have tattooed their fidelity across their middles—
the people who have thick black lines that form a square
across their bellies. I like the feeling of missing those people
when they’re not very close to me. I tell him about
how the internet makes it easier to keep in touch
with people who are no longer physically close to you.
This confuses him. He says he cannot talk to anybody
except the person he’s inside of.
||
{}
Some days the boy in my chest is light
as the smoke from a blown-out tea light,
as sticky as the amber lines of sugar
left strewn across the lip
of a coffee mug.
Other days,
the boy inside my chest is as heavy
and hard as a geode stuffed inside a sock
and slung across the shoulder
of a boy who sild a hammer
in the loop
of his jeans. The boy in my chest
is quiet.
He thinks before he speaks. When he speaks,
his walnut head claps open and shut
with each syllable that requires
my stuck-up shrunken heart
to beat.
||
{}
He wants to know more about the things I like,
so we go to a comedy show, the boy inside my chest
and I. Not that he’d have a choice, if I was going anyway,
but this was his idea. We fall into a pattern. I laugh
two beats ahead of the punchline, and he laughs
two beats behind it. I’m not sure if he hears the jokes,
or if instead, he simply feels the way my lungs expand
and contract in rapid succession, and since they shove his body
shove shove shove shove shove shove shove shove shove,
he responds by gliding his slim self up and down in rapid succession.
It is like a call and response, and the punchline is in the middle.
The effect has become distressing to our comedian.
He noticed that I would laugh before the appropriate moment
(how rude, in its own right), and that I’d then proceed
to rock my shoulders back and forth when everybody else
sighed the heavy breath that follows behind belly laughs.
The comedian glares at me, and I point inside my chest.
I shake my head. The comedian doesn’t know about the boy
inside my chest. “Hey man,” he says. “You enjoying
the show, buddy? Or are you just about to Linda Blair
all over my fucking set?” I do not laugh at this punchline
in advance, or even at the appropriate moment, but
two beats later, my shoulders rock swiftly back and forth.
||
{}
The boy inside my chest is tired of the wet
pressure that squeezes the nut of his head
until it is ready to crack beneath the constant
humming of my muscles. His stalky legs and
spindly arms feel little pressure, but sometimes
they bruise beneath the force of my
stretching. He is in want of hollow places.
I go to sleep. He shoulders his narrow
build into the place between my third and fourth
ribs. His head is the bump that forms
my third nipple. From the moment I dress,
I place my hand over his head. Crack
wise, little boy, and I’ll push you back inside.
||
{}
The boy inside my ribs is silent, but
ever present.
I talk to my boss and he is sticking out in the folds of my shirt. Be good, now.
I hold my partner and he is in my chest pressed against her.
Everywhere I go: Here is your change.
Did you steal something?
What’s that beneath your shirt?
Oh, don’t mind that.
That’s just the walnut head of the boy who lives inside my chest.
Who could say that? Like a bone out of place. Most people don’t draw
attention.
To spook him, I read the Bible.
He asks, if you take me out, will I make a woman?
I explain, no, that was just for the first woman.
He asks if he might already be a woman.
I apologize. I’d never considered that before.
||
{}
The small person inside my ribs has been silent for several days now, and it almost feels as if my third and fourth ribs have fused together and swallowed up the person in one large rib. It is painful, but I go about my business anyway, albeit a little bit more slowly and with more frequent breaks. I’ve been getting winded too easily as I climb the two flights of stairs at the end of the train line on my morning commute. I feel a growing fizzle beneath my left pectoral where the person’s walnut head forms what appears from the outside to be a third nipple, and I worry about the day when my skin will begin to fizzle, because what then? What happens then? What if the skin over my mega-rib fizzles like a burning static and disintegrates before the person who was hitherto lodged between my limbs emerges anew?
||
{}
Third Day in Bed
The small person
who has become
the fizzle of my
fused-together ribs
is swelling and
shrinking at a
disconcerting rate.
I’ve spent all day in bed.
Fourth Day in Bed
This same small person
continues their swelling and
breathing. The skin above them
glows hotly pink, and it burns
each second it’s exposed to sun.
Fifth Day in Bed
Above the megarib, all
that was skin is now bone,
a webby ossified screen
ensconces the little one.
A tiny cry falls out.
Sixth Day in Bed
I lift my head,
and the gooey
little person
stumbles stickily
down my belly
and now lies
panting deeply
on my sheet.
||
{}
This little person
who was born from my chest
cannot speak, it seems, in air.
Nevertheless, they like
to watch and observe the goings-on
of me, C,
and the cat. I worry too much.
I go to work. Now
there’s a hole inside my chest.
Well how
do you explain a thing like that?
I don’t think you can.
Now I’m alone at work
but about as scared as ever.
It would have been selfish
to keep the little person
inside of my body
just to be accompanied
by their movements
in all of my fear and joy. So I teach.
I point up and say
“sky.” The little person extends
a toothpick arm and hops in joy.
They clap their
walnut head. It strikes open
and shut. They do a little
hop. “SKY!” I exclaim
again to the person. They raise both toothpick arms
and hop.
Again they clap
their walnut shell
open and shut.
||
{}
I’ve begun to worry
that this little person
made of vegetables,
a nail file, toothpicks,
and a walnut noggin
doesn’t want to eat.
Every night we set
the table. C sits off
to my right, the cat
is across from me, and
the little person sits
to my left. The cat
and the little person
don’t eat, but they like
the company. C asks,
“Do you know this
person’s name?” I shrug
my shoulders. The little
person claps their nut
head. We all nod. We
have agreed not to eat
asparagus in front of
them.
||
{}
For two weeks, I haven’t seen the little person who came from inside my chest, and who has since presumably joined us out here in the world. I go about my day. I go to the bar and order a drink. I place my hand, as I often do, over my chest. It’s a little bit to the left of my sternum. Oh say can you see, but I can’t. There’s a pain behind my right eye, a dull throb, and the vision in that eye is a little blurry. People talk to me. I place my hand over my chest again. Oh say can you see? I can’t ask anybody if they’ve found this little person, because who would believe me? I could try to spin it: They’re very short and have stalky legs, a slim middle, spindly arms, a large bumpy head. That still sounds crazy. I look everywhere. I’m sitting at the bar with my hand over my chest, sweating a little, and it’s hard to see so well, but then here’s a buzz on my phone. It’s a Facebook notification. A friend request. I see the picture: a split-open walnut shell on top of a nail file, and two little toothpicks pointed jubilantly toward the sky. The location says Denver. Well how about that? Their name just says Rib.
||
{}
Would Rib have stayed
if I’d have been a better teacher?
Hard to think that’s the case.
But maybe. C says Rib was destined
for b i g g e r t h i n g s .
Who could keep those
joyful toothpick arms
to himself?
How selfish that would be. Is Rib being
good? Are they laughing at the appropriate
moments of jokes?
Look at me. I don’t.
Hard to think that Rib is a bad presence.
But maybe? I don’t know.
I feel responsible
and somewhat lonely.
C says that’s OK. Let’s go for a walk.
So we do. After a while
the tall grass of the prairie path
looks less and less like Rib’s legs.
Instead it’s just grass. And how nice
is that?
||
Matthew DeMarco lives in Chicago. His work has appeared on Poets.org and in Columbia Poetry Review, Ghost City Review, Landfill, Jet Fuel Review, and elsewhere. Poems that he wrote with Faizan Syed have appeared in Dogbird as well as in They Said, an anthology of collaborative writing from Black Lawrence Press. He tweets sporadically from @M_DeMarco_Words.