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| HOME ARCHIVE [Previous entry: "Two poems by Will Roane"][Next entry: "Two poems and excerpts from "Anyjar, the incredible conception" by Jaimie Gusman"] | |
| excerpt from "Book of Hunger" by Chris Nelson | |
09/22/2010 from Book of Hunger Trapped in a crawlspace too small, ceiling and floor against your skull, and the distance to the little square of light where everything you never were. No, it is not enough, the glimpse of him and no-- You reach for the boy's bright head because he is not you (shadow of earth cast across sky) or because he is you or the error of believing The light came from far to show you the way you are caught. Is it the habit, the hunger, the home? The flash of the hammer head after the world has been too much here? No one can see you, and only you will have to live with what you're about to do. When it is done, you will return, and you will be recognized as who you were. Girls walk safely to school and safely home. Each carries a thin catalog of wants. Your name, not on those lists. Somewhere a surface splits. Did you think it would just go away, the world? Did you think you could forgive it all? Here, the room as you left it. Here, the pain and how brightly. You carry your self to the balcony and look about. Six little stars way out of reach. The moon, visible if not for the roof. On the black grass there is no one. But isn't this when the bones of a face are felt beneath your thumbs? Beneath skin's hint of blush: gears, smaller than babies' teeth, biting a tiny exit in the sky? If the heart weren't a weapon, you'd go out to touch it all. You curl into a ball small enough to fit inside a boy's mouth, but you are still unable to stop being you. You turn to the book you so love, the book you will not open for fear of finishing. Light, as if seen from inside a body. Light filtered through the skin you are becoming. With each wanting, bright fishes swim deeper, further away. The girl unties her blouse but this is not about revelation. Night is not the darkness, but darkness wins again: first the cheers, then the praise, then the charms of gold to be encased in glass and dust, to keep you rewinding to the scene in which her hair falls in front of her eyes. A token: the station: the blue room: the larval apple: a hand to hold, to wed, to gnaw. You take a hammer to someone's sternum, then her face, then his beautiful face, then your own face, until all is distortion and mangle. This is the dream in which you begin to feel. You don't know why you do it, which makes you do it more, as if in doing and redoing, the opening of a door. You wipe the sleep dust from her eyes. He wipes the sleep lust from your thighs. She says, "In the dream I crawled..." He says, "If only this weren't a dream..." She says, "There is a dream called providence..." You put your mouth against the vent to make the secret known. She puts her voice inside your heart: "Thank you for showing me that I am here." She is smooth beneath you. Inside you, he is smooth. You wake to wonder who you'll be today, and the mirror doesn't help, and the closet won't supply a sufficiency of veils. A moth is trapped between the window panes. You want to retrieve it, but you want so many things. Then you are older, and you know why. --from which you feed and of which you breathe and to which all prayers are directed-- Wasn't it the world? But you have this: an herb garden and a small wire fence to keep the rabbits from the mint. And there are many of him, many variations of his backhand strike. One eye that cries. One that looks past you. Are you you at the cusp of night? Even yoked oxen might halt at a trembling daisy despite the inevitable lash, and doesn't it feel so right, the solid handle of the whip? -------------- Christopher Nelson is a master's candidate and Jacob Javits Fellow at the University of Arizona. In 2009 his chapbook Blue House, selected by Mary Jo Bang for the New American Poets Series, was published by the Poetry Society of America. His interviews with poets can be read at http://nelsonpoetry.blogspot.com.
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