Detainment; and: Detainment
- Detainment; and: Detainment
Detainment
Tear down this firewall. Openattachments: a friend's poem, full of birdsand trees, afraid of wordinessthen astringency; an illegally distributed song;spreadsheets of debts, your recurringpayments. Save, save the video of his hanging.Of their 7/7/07 beachside wedding.
Turn off the machines. Gather,scatter your belongings—you're escortedfrom the National Museumto a cramped, swiffered cell. Your sketch,from memory, of an amphora's paintedcattle, those cows outsidein the courtyard, this piped-in voice, it's all 0s and 1s. [End Page 8]
Detainment
In the undisclosed desert facility, theystrapped me to a steel table and told me torecite the poem that would save the world.
(I arrived there in a windowless,automated van driven inside the hollowmountain—
through the forest they chased me to exhaustion.)
They polished metal tools I’d never seen before.
To break me down, at first one ofthem kept tapping on my nose andwhispering lyrics, access codes, rapidsequences of Greek letters and Englishsurnames.
One tried to interface with my brain,
injecting a sort of horned electrode intoWernicke’s, then Broca’s. My larynx inspasm. My hands were hooves, thennightingale beaks, the fluorescent tubesabove me were my white bones.
I chanted baby names during sensations ofdrowning, overwhelming nausea. Back and forthfrom ice-cold water, mock burials. They crownedme with electrified laurels.
They touched me, laughing.
They touched me and I sang and for what?
[End Page 10]
Greg Wrenn's first book of poems, Centaur, won the Brittingham Prize and will be published this spring by the University of Wisconsin Press. His work has appeared in New England Review, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.
