A bit of pus on my upper lip. A word made of hands. The birds did not stop talking all night. These are the scratches on my knuckles, marking my palms. No one ever promised me a garden of Susans, a trash heap or a red cabin. When I was six: that American pick-up of baling wire and forgotten bolts, how we could see the road racing underneath the broken floor. Stones shot up, bits of glass. Our loosely tied sneakers above all that dust and ruin. Hysterically, we loved it, my little family of bruises, the hound that fell through but then got up again, licking his shoulder in the rearview.
I dog-ear books just to see how the creases will lie. Upright, almost upright, left. I’m lying right now. This is not about the first time you left me or the third. We were swimming in the backyard during a thunderstorm. I forgot to say “Marco” one too many times. The water was warm. I gagged. I couldn’t see my hands or the tiled lip at the edge of the pool. You were warning me about something and I didn’t like your tone, so I closed my eyes. Eventually, every horizon gets sucked into a faulty drain. My chin bled for a week after that. I kept forgetting and touching it, so it started again, like a slap—almost a joke.
I tuck pins under my fingernails, then pull them out with my teeth. In this way, I train myself to feel the pain of the underverse: all its trembling stars, all the children missing teeth, all the mothers missing tongues. Sometimes He lets me scratch the velvet between his ears where all the stripes converge. One day we will all be ladybugs, He purrs. Again, I say. He lets me lay my head in his mouth, feel the hot slime of rotting meat, all the hooves of decay, all the skulls worn butterfly-wing-thin. Alpha. Omega. What the fuck ever. I still desire the heart-shaped balloons, all the chrome and glitter, those trick birthday candles that blow out for minutes, then burn again.
Christine hamm
has a PhD in American Poetics, and recently edited the anthology, Like a Fat Gold Watch: Meditations on Sylvia Plath and Living. She teaches English at Seton Hall. Christine's poetry has been published in Orbis, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly, BODY, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, and has received numerous scholarships.