An artifice, I lack
body armor. This is not new news.
Consider how even the dinner table can be
disassembled, taken to pieces and divested of meaning. An
effigy, I envy everything, like hand-me down wood,
fringed with two families of fingerprints,
granules of sugar dust. The
history of an object makes the object
itself, says the victim. Memory, like
jūjutsu, should be a gentle skill. What
kills me isn’t the fact but how I store it in my
ligaments. Becoming, what my mother calls, a
monolith of pain. Doctors and lovers
note my buried aches, their unmoving
oaken charm. The victim
prays and my knees begin to
quiver. Once this was a punchline and not a
resurrection. Like memory,
survivors continue to
tremble even in death.
Underneath the showerhead, I learn as the
victim, to outlive myself. To no longer
whimper, wound, or wonder the what-if.
Exonerated by none, I shed the self where I am
young and wine naked,
zealous. Made of pure shelled bone.